Romantic relationships are life or death. Make no mistake. They are either life, or they are death. Being single forever, being in an uncooperative marriage, or living as a sexual creature in a sexless partnership — these are options that are not good for most human beings. They are things you would wish upon your enemies.
For most of us, our marriage is the most urgent relationship we will ever have. Because it’s the only one that takes care of our needs once we’re adults. Or, is supposed to.
And, when our needs are cared for, we’re better parents.
Furthermore, our relationships are also the primary example, for our children, of what their adult lives could or should look like. Keeping a healthy marriage is utterly the foundation of a good home.
This essay is my attempt to speak some urgency and commitment back into our relationships, and to provide some nuance around what a relationship is.
“Marriage is work.”
Yes, but also no.
Older people, giving advice to younger people, will often say “relationships are work.” Sometimes they’ll say it sagely, and it sounds like very practical and even encouraging advice. I can hear love in their voice, and it makes me imagine their relationships with a fond curiosity.
Other people will say it strongly, even acidically. “Let me tell you, young man… relationships are work.” And all I hear from those people is that they’re taking out their bitterness on me, for being so naïve as to think that relationships can be easy. Or good.
I always pay attention to how strong someone’s emotions are when they say “relationships are work.” Because those who say it with the strongest emotion generally have marriages I wouldn’t want anyway.
No thanks, I’ll go talk to the happy couple. The couple that still makes subtle sex jokes out loud. Because clearly they’re doing something you’re not doing.
I’ve never really found it gross to hear aunts and uncles, parents, or older couples talk about sex out loud. I want to know that the people around me are happy. Both for their own sake, and so that I can pay more attention to what they’re up to and learn from it.
So when people say that relationships are work, how right they are depends entirely on who’s talking and what they’re trying to say. Here is some nuance:
It should consistently be work. But it shouldn’t consistently tire or bore you.
You should wake up in the morning and say to yourself “I have to work on this thing.” You should not wake up in the morning and say to yourself “Great, I have to work on this thing.”
You do have to sacrifice yourself. You do not have to get rid of the best parts of yourself.
You do have to compromise your values. You do not have to compromise your most important values.
You do have to give things you’re not in the mood to give. You don’t have to give them to someone who’s unworthy of them.
It is about respecting the other person. It is not about giving away your self-respect.
It is about finding someone who, simply being himself or herself, makes you happy. It is not about finding someone you can “tolerate.”
It is about communicating when you don’t want to. It is not about communicating with someone you don’t even want to communicate with.
If any of the second sentences are true in your relationship, you’re either with the wrong person or you have some serious work to do on yourself.
In fact, we all have some serious work to do on ourselves, all of the time. Let’s go ahead and take that as a given.
Adoption
Relationships are built on the feeling of love, sure, but to leave it at that is amazingly childish. To marry for nothing more than emotional love and then have a happy ending is a fairy tale that few of us get to participate in.
Relationships are also built on the promise to give a shit across time. Long past the honeymoon phase or the tingle of infatuation.
Loving — the feeling of wanting someone as your own — is easy. Falling in love can happen in 20 seconds. Some men are so starved for positive attention that they’ll fall in love with the first woman who gives them a compliment. (I’m sure the same is true for some women, but I doubt their reaction is as strong. Because we men are hopeless, shameless creatures.)
But “falling in love” is a temporary feel-good phenomenon. A phenomenon whose sole purpose is to make you have children. Marriage is a structure for dealing with the consequences.
Falling in love is not the same as making the decision to love once those nice feelings wane. Love, past the honeymoon phase, is a routine of actions that are designed to care for the other person. Doing selfless things is easy when you’re infatuated with someone for the first six months. Because you’re still trying to impress, woo, and win them. After that it takes willingness, long-term vision, and good routines. After that love is a verb, not a feeling.
And if you perform the verb adequately, you get to keep the feeling too. What an unbelievably lucky thing.
As my friend Joan Erakit wrote recently, wedding vows are much more than sacred words spoken for cultural theater. They’re a commitment to care for somebody always. Through better and worse, until death. A promise to give a shit across time. Including when it’s an absolute joy, and including when it absolutely sucks. To care for the other person, almost as a parent cares for a child.
How can two adults care for each other as children? And why would they?
Well, who’s the last person you knew who hit the age of 18 and never needed to be coddled or held or reassured again? Never needed to be looked out for and protected again? Never needed to be yelled at again?
We’re all adults, sure. But inside we’re all still children with very basic needs. And a basic need to know someone notices and cares about those needs. I couldn’t imagine having a wife who never wanted to be held or told it’s going to be okay. Likewise, I couldn’t imagine having a wife who wouldn’t hold my head on her chest from time to time and tell me I’m a good man. Because I need that, too.
In their very essence, these are child-coddling behaviors. And they’re some of the most important and beautiful interactions you can have with a partner, and in life as a whole. Well past the age of needing to look and seem adult.
They signify the desire of two people to keep each other strong and encourage each other. To look out for each other when no one else in the world will, or wants to, and when they cannot care for themselves. That’s what being a partner is. And it also happens to be what being a parent is.
And that’s why I like the word “adopt” for partners. When you take a partner into your life, you’re adopting that person entirely as your own being to care for. You’re adopting their past, present, and future. It doesn’t matter if they’re 18 or 65 — they are yours to care for.
Survival
One of the things I’ve been studying this year is the history of money. Which has led me to the study of the earliest forms of human survival. And one of the things I’ve learned is that, before “money,” there was no barter system. That’s largely a myth. Because barter requires both people to have a thing that can be traded directly and immediately. And, for things like seasonal crops, fresh meat, and carpentry, that simply wasn’t possible.
What there were instead were long-term give-and-take arrangements. You just loosely traded promises and favors, and trusted that the recipients would do the same later. You shared leftover meat from a kill willingly, confident that the other person would give you something for your family later. Maybe a pair of shoes or a crude tool or some food of his own, when he had a little extra.
The relationships in your life (your hunting party, your family, your tribe) were simply built on mutually necessary helpfulness. Mutually, necessary, helpfulness. Each of those three words is absolutely essential to the meaning of the phrase. And to what your relationships with other people were.
Life was not a single-player game back then, the way it is now.
Today we have the luxury of not taking care of our relationships because prosperity and organized society have allowed us to simply care for ourselves. Which doesn’t require long-term cooperation with anybody. It only requires a job. We have been spoiled into near incapability of giving a shit across time. It’s not impossible, it’s just a lot harder.
Before civilization, if you weren’t good at playing long-term cooperative multiplayer games, you (and those who relied on you) would suffer serious consequences. If you did not hunt and cooperate together, none of you caught a large animal and nobody ate.
And if you weren’t participating and being useful, your family or tribe might hold an intervention on you. But not the kind of intervention where they sit in a circle and read letters about how you’re hurting their feelings and they’re worried about you. The kind of intervention where you get struck in the head repeatedly or screamed at until you admit that you were risking everyone’s lives by being so lazy and selfish.
Because you were.
Your family, your tribe, was completely and unequivocally at the mercy of your willing participation. Your mutual helpfulness. If you, even as a young boy or girl, didn’t take care of your own family, they died. This kind of mutual necessity, this community give-and-take, is a picture John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath paints. It’s an account of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, when even the children are profoundly relied upon. The Joad family didn’t have the luxury of not having good relationships. It wasn’t an option.
Now here’s the problem. I don’t believe that there is any less urgency now than there’s ever been. And I don’t see romantic relationships as being any different than a struggle to stay fed and survive.
When I see a broken home, an unhappy couple, a sexless marriage… there could be all kinds of reasons for that. But what it usually boils down to is that one or both of the partners does not genuinely believe in the relationship or its urgency.
They either don’t see it as mutual, don’t see it as necessary, or don’t see it as helpful.
And I suppose that’s also why modern parents hit their kids less — it’s not just because “we’re too civilized for that now,” although that’s part of it. It’s because you hit someone when something is urgent. You hit a child, or scream at him, when his disobedience has dire consequences. In the 21st century, it really isn’t all that urgent that your kids cooperate with you. If they talk back to you and sit around watching TV all day, the family isn’t going to starve.
And with our partners, we don’t really see it as all that urgent anymore because divorce lingers ever in our back pockets. When the option to leave is so accessible (awful, but accessible), the sense of urgency, the sense of mutual necessity, evaporates.
But as far as I can tell, the stakes are not any lower now than they were back then. Although we are safe and organized on a level that those early humans couldn’t imagine, our relationships are no less crucial to our survival. They are still, at the end of the day, all we have.
You may not get eaten by lions if your family doesn’t cooperate with you now, but you will most assuredly be eaten alive by your own emotions.
You may not get left out in the rain or struck by lightning if your husband or wife doesn’t want to sleep with you… maybe you’ll just live in a loveless home.
You may not starve to death. Maybe you’ll just live without the touch and affection of the one person who’s supposed to give them to you.
I guess my question is, what’s the difference?
—
Drink some water and give the love you signed up to give.
JDR
“If you want a worthy partner, be worthy of a worthy partner.” - Charlie Munger
Also check out my favorite Square Man piece I’ve ever written: Looking Through Your Partner’s Phone.
Man amazing post. Bravo. This hit me hard and is my favorite piece of yours. Thank you for this. You impacted my life today.