Fun to Love

Some people are

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

Expectations are just resentments waiting to happen

I knew a woman whose husband would throw dinner in the trash if it wasn’t good enough. I mean he would stand up from the table, walk to the trash can, dump his plate, and tell her to try again.

And of course he also verbally and emotionally abused her for being such an apparently horrible wife and such a letdown. Because that’s the kind of person who throws dinner in the trash.

So she spent 20 years of her life finicking over dinner, trying to get it just right, trying to make exactly what he wanted every day of

the week, and crying herself to sleep because nothing she ever did was good enough. She tried for decades to make this man happy. And eventually, she realized the simple truth: that there was no making this man “happy.” You'll never be able to make a person with high expectations happy. Either you'll disappoint them, or you'll give them what they felt owed in the first place.

So he was either going to be disappointed and abusive, or he was going to arrive at baseline and say “this is acceptable.” He never went above baseline. Only below.

Eventually, she fell out of love with him.

This shocked him, of course. After all, he was the perfect husband. He went to church, taught his children the Bible, brought home money, and made decisions. What else could you possibly want from me, he asked. I’m perfect. I’m the perfect husband. You are lucky to have me.

And what I wanted to ask this guy was, well how could she love you? How could she continue to love you, when loving you is so profoundly not fun?

I remember on the TV show Pawn Stars, business owner Rick Harrison had a rule: “We never buy boats. They’re holes in the water that you throw money into.” In Rick’s experience, boats never increased in value in proportion to how much cash you spent fixing them up. In other words, you don’t invest in boats, because they don’t go up in value. You can only spend on them.

Some people are like that. They’re black holes that you dump time and effort into, and no matter what you do they’ll never become happier or better.

One of the biggest causes of divorce, and the reason that a couple of my relationships have ended, is that some people just aren’t any fun to love. They’re all expectation, no gratitude. Why be grateful, they’ll ask. This is what you owed me anyway. This is the price of being with me.

This is a level of entitlement that can only come with religion or narcissism.

So what often happens in families like this one, and what happened in this family, is that one person ends up spending their life just trying not to fight. Just trying to keep the other from being disappointed. Maybe tonight we can all play a board game. Maybe tonight we don’t have to argue. Maybe tonight he will be respectful to me in front of the kids.

If someone is unwilling to express gratitude, the chances it’s fun to love them are pretty low. Same thing with apologies: if someone is unwilling to apologize, ever, it makes a cooperative relationship with them just about impossible. You can’t have a loving relationship with someone who thinks they’re perfect.

Sometimes, people need to witness their own love and their own effort filling you up. Making you better and happier than you were. They need that, for their own sake. Is that selfish? Of course it is. Because human beings do indeed have selves, and they need to feel that those selves are valued. Otherwise they stop trying. Otherwise they give up. On the relationship, and maybe even on life.

The only relationship that should be all give and no take is a parent’s relationship with his or her child. You don’t need reciprocation in that relationship — because it is your job, by virtue of being the parent, to simply provide and teach and protect endlessly. Without any thanks.

However, even then, children that are raised well reciprocate anyway. They show gratitude and do unexpected nice things for their parents. Because even a child can become wise enough to know his parents have needs too. Even a child can become wise enough to appreciate.

Another person who’s not fun to love is the sufferer of perpetual hardship. The guy who comes home from work every day and acts like he had the hardest day that anyone ever had in the history of the world. He kicks his feet up, exhales dramatically, and insists that he “just needs to relax.” And then his wife immediately knows “well, he’s certainly not going to be playful tonight. Or grateful, or even happy at all. Great. My night’s shot.” Do this to somebody for 20 years and watch them slowly give up on their life.

A tempting response to this kind of person, this perpetual sufferer, is, my god, are you really this unhappy? I’m not even sure I believe you. And if you are, if you really hate your job this much, do something about it.

People who act like their lives are inordinately hard are really difficult to love. Not only because thinking one’s life is unusually hard is a mark of self-indulgent weakness (everyone’s life is hard). But because, again, you’re always just trying to pull them back up to baseline. Just keeping them from being destructively miserable is where all your effort goes.

This is similar to the relationship tactic known as “weaponized incompetence.” A person strategically deploys incompetence (“I don’t know how to do that and I can’t learn”) so they don’t have to try. Or in this case they deploy misery and self-pity, as a doctor’s note to excuse them from participating in the relationship today. So the relationship is left up to one person. Dishes, communication, vulnerability, effort itself — all fall on one person.

So what’s the opposite of that? A sense of humor. Laughing at how hard your life is and enjoying it anyway. You need a partner with a sense of humor. If you don’t get lucky enough to have a partner with a sense of humor, your life is going to feel very long and very lonely.

Finding a great relationship is partially luck

Speaking of luck, here's a very unfair, very unfortunate thing about life. You have to be lucky to meet a great partner. Most people are not that lucky.

The good news is, you can increase your surface area for luck. You can increase the ways by which luck can strike you.

The same way that outsized business success comes largely from whom you know or what places you’re in at the right time, love is both a skill issue and a luck issue. It’s not much use having a soul mate if you never happen to exchange phone numbers with them. Or if you do, but then you aren’t in the mental and emotional state to take advantage of it. If you don't have the routines in place to nurture it.

The truth is, most people, by definition, are average. And the average person is somewhat fun to love, but not very. Probably not always. Because the average person has an expectations problem — because it's very hard not to. The average person is not in the long-term self-improvement game, and doesn’t understand things like being endlessly grateful or endlessly playful. The average person doesn’t have a great sense of humor about hardship.

And the average person is probably not going to have a blast loving you, because they haven’t trained themselves to make it a blast. Some people are born with this trait; for most of us, it requires training.

I’m 34 years old now. I’ve had people ask me, “why aren’t you married? Why don’t you just pick one? I mean, look at you, you’re x-looking, you’re well spoken, you play y amount of musical instruments, you’re doing this thing and that thing, you’re doing all the things, and you’ve got your shit together. You could have your pick of the litter. Why aren’t you married?”

And I don’t have a better answer than, because I haven’t met her yet. She hasn’t appeared in my life yet. Whoever is the woman who will have a blast loving me does not seem to be one of the people I know.

That’s the best answer I can come up with. And it’s the same for a lot of women I know. It doesn’t matter that she’s great with money or ambitious or incredibly loving or this or that. That does not make great men spontaneously appear in her life. She still has to get lucky and meet one.

But, as with business, there are things you can do to tilt the odds in your favor. You can make your product (you) fun to engage with. So that people will stick around longer and you’ll have better chances of growing the thing. Sure you have to meet the right person first, but when you do you’ll be ready.

Being happy is a set of skills, and so is making someone else happy

Something I’ve found that makes me luckier in all relationships, not just romantic ones, is being ridiculously grateful. Almost obnoxiously grateful.

I don’t know if I got this from someone else, or if I started doing it on my own. But years ago, I started taking gratitude for meals very seriously. I will never, not ever, let someone cook me a meal without thanking them. It’s, like, rule number 2 in my life after don’t do drugs anymore.

A lot of people have expressed surprise, almost concern, for how many times I thank them for a home-cooked meal. I will tell them 4 times how delicious it is. And then I’ll ask them which spices they used on the fish, and what gave them the idea. Now of course this also comes in handy because I’m a curious person and want to learn how to cook better. But my real motive behind this is to show that I’m paying attention. I am dead serious about gratitude.

There have been periods in my life, for years at a time, and there may be extended periods in the future, when I don’t have someone to cook me a meal. I spent probably 8 years of my life eating out of the microwave (I’m in recovery now). So this is a real, serious luxury. Nobody owes me a meal. I want people to know how much I appreciate the love that goes into cooking for others. Partially so they’ll keep doing it for me, and partially because I just want to be fun to love. I want people to have a good time doing cool things for me.

Another thing I learned from someone else (I forget who) is to take a photo of yourself enjoying a gift someone gave you, and send them the photo. Whether it’s the concert they bought you tickets to, the horse they bred for you, or that really nice stainless steel spatula that you’re just going to make burgers with. This makes the gift giver happy they gave you a gift. It makes it fun for them.

Same thing with physical affection, or quiet time, or helping me with something.

I want to get the small things right, so they can keep going right. You give me a wife who giggles and dances, I will ask you what it takes to keep her that way. Because if there’s anything in life better than a woman who giggles and dances, I haven’t found it yet.

In a great relationship, two and two are five. Because both people have fun working on it.

In a bad relationship, two and two are three. The math never adds up to anything other than “fine, we can not fight tonight. Because you weren’t a complete piece of shit today.”

I can tell you which relationship I want. And I can tell you which relationship I want to offer to someone else. You’re never going to have the perfect relationship, but you can certainly do a lot better than not fun.

Drink some water.

JR

“We cannot really love anyone with with whom we never laugh.” - Agnes Repplier

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Thanks to Melissa from The Devil You Know for editing a draft of this.