The best thing you can do for a relationship is be curious. Passion is overrated.
I've known couples who are wild about each other and constantly want to touch and look and feel and have sex. That’s exciting. They're attracted, they're head over heels, they’re lustful.
And I've also known couples who ask each other a lot of questions. Meaningful questions. Questions that show that they’re paying attention and that they want to know more about each other. Even if they’ve been together for years.
Generally the second one leads directly to the first.
But the first one alone does not imply the second one at all. In fact the first one alone tends to undermine the second one. Because attraction overtakes the whole relationship, but attraction is not a good foundation for a relationship. It’s like trying to bake chocolate chip cookies with no eggs.
Attraction is a great way to get each other’s attention. It’s a great way to get into the kitchen. But once you’re in the kitchen, you have to do something other than sit around talking about how hot you both are.
Think about how many relationships you saw in high school, usually among the particularly developed teens. They each thought the other was hot. Irresistible. Socially impressive. And their relationships usually lasted about as long as the sex stayed exciting (or the status stayed enticing), because that was the only ingredient in the relationship. They were often just trophies or conquests to each other.
The danger of “passionate” relationships is that they might end up like that.
The best way to have good sex is to be working on things other than sex. Sex is not just an input into a good relationship — great sex is also an output. If you’re not having great sex, it’s probably because you’re not doing the things that produce great sex. Things like turning each other on. Spiritually. In emotion and lifestyle.
And that goes for anything else about your partner that you’re “passionate” about. You can be passionate about someone’s free spirit or someone’s glowing personality or how ambitious someone is — but that is no indicator at all whether you actually have a healthy relationship. These traits are sometimes more like toys that you want to play with.
The best way to have a relationship across time is to be curious about your partner. To want to know and see them for who they are and what they like in life. To nurture their ambitions, to help them get more of what they want out of life, to make them feel seen. And yes, even men want to be seen. That’s not a feminine trait; men just don’t like to talk about it.
If you’re lucky, this is partially involuntary. You just happen to find someone who’s very interesting to you, in numerous ways, just by being who they are. But some people’s relationships require more conscious effort than others to be interested — and to stay interested across time. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s supposed to require some work. Even the things in life you are most excited about still require grunt work. For instance if you don't like repetitive tasks and checklists, you're not going to like being a nurse. And if you don't like doing boring things for someone else, you're not going to like being in a relationship.
The cool thing is, the more interested you are, the more you practice the skill of being interested, the more fun your relationship becomes anyway. Even the stuff that was once boring.
Another way of thinking about it is, if you want to have a great relationship, try making your partner as happy as possible all of the time. Don't just lust after them, but be seriously engaged with everything going on in their life. Be the one force in their life that brings out the best possible version of them. The Michelangelo phenomenon suggests that the best possible version of someone is inside just waiting to be incrementally woken up — the same way Michelangelo said that a beautiful sculpture was already there within the marble, waiting to be sculpted out.
A gourmet few of us ever get to have such a relationship. Most human beings get into a relationship, experience give-or-take a year of “passion,” and then get the worst thing two people can get: comfortable.
Comfort is a good thing in the sense of security and stability. The absence of jealousy and violence and carnage.
But comfort can also mean complacency. It means you stop asking your partner questions. It means you stop trying to make them better, and you stop trying to be better for them. It means you stop being interested in them. And I can't think of a better way to ruin a relationship than to not be interested in it.
It sounds like common sense when you put it that way. But we miss it. All the time.
How many times have we all heard that communication is the key? Seven million. I have seen repeatedly in my life that when couples are struggling, one of the best things they can do is set aside an hour each night just to talk. Just to speak, and to listen, as an actual activity. The reason this works is because it creates interest in the relationship, from both sides. You put down your phones, you turn off the television, and you just communicate with each other.
Relationships are not carnival rides. You don’t just get on them and sit down. They’re more like works of art. And good art is about blood and sweat and vision. Even if it starts with “passion.”
We are told from a young age to find what we’re passionate about. You can be anything you want… just find what you’re passionate about. First of all, that’s easier said than done. For most people, passion is like a butterfly that never quite lands in your net. And we think there's something wrong with us, because we never catch it. We never quite get it — this magical thing that people are always saying we should have.
But that can also be an unsustainable foundation for a career, just like with a relationship. Think about what most people visualize, when they think of “passion.” They think of the excitement of “being” something. The excitement of having a certain life. They think, “I’m passionate about law because I want to be a lawyer. There’s nothing I want to be more.”
But that’s just identifying yourself with a particular career. That passion will only last as long as being that thing still excites you. Which might not be forever. It might not even be a year.
What you should look for instead is curiosity. “I’m passionate about law because it’s interesting to me” is a much more realistic (and sustainable) statement. “I want to be a lawyer because I’m curious about how the law evolves through practice” is a much better foundation for a career than “I want to be a lawyer.”
What makes an excellent handyman isn’t an infatuation with drywall or screws — it's a genuine interest in fixing things and figuring out how things work. That might sound like passion, but it’s shaped more like curiosity. It's the same with any profession or anything else in life.
For a lot of people, once they land in the career they wanted all along, they end up feeling empty. Because they weren’t actually curious about the career or its subject matter or its processes — they didn’t want to do all the ugly, tedious, unglorious things that go along with the career. They just wanted to be it. Now that they are it, they realize it sounds boring as hell.
If something sounds exciting, you should ask yourself why. And if the reason is anything other than because you want to keep discovering new things about it, you should be suspicious of your own excitement.
You shouldn’t go into a career for identity, money, or status the same way you shouldn’t go into a relationship for sex.
But as with a relationship: identity, money, and status can follow from being genuinely interested in the career — because you’ll be great at it. There’s a difference. The difference is what comes first.
Curiosity should always come first.
Drink some water and date somebody hot and interesting.
JDR
“I think I understand passion. Love is something else.” - Paul Theroux
You’ve put a vague feeling I’ve had about relationships for a while perfectly into words. Thank you Justin.
thought provoking as always Justin. Gonna challenge you a bit on this one tho...
i dont fully agree "passion" is always so ephemeral. Two ppl being physically passionate for each other is mostly transient because interests in physique are mostly short-lived. The object of the passion or curiosity matters more than the subtle difference between the two words. One can be passionate or curiosity about the mind, the character, the life of another person or about a legal career, because these are all matters with depth. It is difficult for one to stay passionate or curious physically towards another much like one can't be passionate or curious about Rock Paper Scissors, there's just not enough to it after the initial excitements.
i guess im saying, curiosity is great, passion doesn't suck so badly. Still somewhat inter-changeable to me, but both are necessary for a relationship or career in the long run.