Two years ago, considering my personal brand was a helpful method for understanding who I want to be and become. As I begin a new chapter of active collaboration with others, I reflect again on who I want to be when I’m interacting with folks.
Tag: Relationships
art as an opportunity for connection
“To be honest, I don’t really remember the show, but I do remember that I held hands with my date!”
I think this might be how most people perceive art, most of the time—as an opportunity for connecting with others. Perhaps we can embrace the humility of letting our art be merely an occasion for people to cherish a person they love or get closer to someone new. Perhaps this is more than enough.
Thank you to Connie, Matt, and Anna for inspiring this post.
loneliness
If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry. — Anton Chekhov
how we talk about love
Many romance stories—from Hollywood rom-coms, Disney princess tales, and American romance novels to Japanese shoujo manga and Korean dramas—celebrate the idea that finding your life partner is a magical and effortless experience. When you meet your partner, you’ll love them at first sight. Your partner will immediately understand you and your needs, even though you have never communicated those needs before. Your partner will match you in every imaginable way and do everything for you that they can. And you will never feel lonely, ever again.
The reality, we learn, is not so rosy. It turns out that many of us take time to fall in love. It turns out that most people aren’t mind-readers, and even though your partner might be great at interpreting your body language or know your history and personality well enough that they often have a good guess for what you’re thinking, it’s just not reasonable to expect that they’ll always know your every wish. It also turns out that most people have lives of their own, and even though your partner might be there for you most of the time, they can’t always resolve your needs for you. In fact, sometimes, they might choose not to resolve your needs for you, even if they can. And sometimes, that doesn’t make them a bad or mean partner—it just makes them a person who sets boundaries and has needs of their own. It also turns out that if you are prone to feeling lonely, you will probably still feel lonely, time and again.
your needs are your own
I once walked into a management coaching session the morning after my then-partner and I had a fight. Unable to focus on work, I blubbered about the situation: essentially, my partner and I had been talking over the phone about a different upsetting issue (that I can no longer remember), and in the midst of this conversation filled with sad and negative emotions, he told me that he needed to sleep and couldn’t keep talking.
It really wasn’t an unreasonable request on his part. At the time, I lived on the west coast and he lived on the east coast, so he was actually already staying up very late to comfort me, even though he had to wake up very early for work the next day. But it still hurt me a lot that even though he knew I was hurting, he wanted to sleep more than he wanted to be with me. I felt abandoned. I felt that if he loved me more, he would stay awake and be with me. I was supposedly in a healthy relationship with the person I love, and yet I felt so alone.
It sounds like you had a need for companionship that he wasn’t able to fulfill, my coach said. It sounds like he decided to take care of his own needs, and he didn’t continue tending to yours.
I feel like if he loves me, he should put my needs before his own, I said. I know that I’m being hypocritical, because I should have put his need to sleep before my own need for companionship. But I was really hurting.
From what you’ve told me about him before, it sounds like he often does put your needs before his own, my coach said. Let me ask you: do you want him to be there for you because he wants to, or because he feels like he has to?
I feel like he should always want to be there for me because he loves me.
And yet it seems like he loves you, and he wanted to be there for you, and he needed sleep, and he decided to sleep. He tells you this, and you ask him if he would please stay up with you, and he says he’s sorry, but no, he won’t. So let’s say, at that point, you angrily demand that he stay up with you. How do you think he would feel?
Silence.
I don’t think you want him to resent you. It’s good that you communicate your needs to him, but if he can’t resolve your needs, you need to remember that your needs are your own, and that it isn’t his responsibility to resolve them. You can go to him, and he will often be happy to be there for you—to comfort you, distract you, cheer you up. But sometimes he will say no, and you will need to find another way to deal with your feelings.
people who are not our partner
There are many ways that we can feel better with self-care. But if our need is for companionship, we turn to people who are not our partner for emotional support. That’s healthy and a good thing in many cases. But it’s also probably how most emotional affairs begin—when one partner feels like they can no longer depend on the other for emotional support, and instead turns to someone else.
feeling seen
Years later. You hear a piece of music, or see a performance, or behold a work of art—that moves you deeply, to your core, that twists you up inside. What did you think? you ask your partner tentatively.
I thought it was okay, they say. Casually. As if you hadn’t just had your soul ripped out of you.
And you stare at this person you love, and you feel like there is this huge part of your inner core that they can’t see, and you wonder why they love you, and if those are the reasons for which you want to be loved.
love without boundaries
We’re taught by stories that love without boundaries is beautiful. The man who gives up everything to be with the woman he loves. The parent who sacrifices everything to support their child. The soldier who jumps on the grenade to save his comrades. And truly, it is beautiful when people care deeply. I find deep caring to be one of the most beautiful things in the world.
But it’s certainly not “healthy.”
But the beauty of love isn’t in dramatic gestures, they say. Love is beautiful in the everyday. And it’s not wrong that there is a beauty to love in the everyday. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of giving life to the stories of love in the everyday, because I think it isn’t done enough, and I think we (read: I) develop unrealistic expectations about relationships as a result. But the fact that love is beautiful in the everyday doesn’t actually prevent love from being beautiful in unhealthy, unrealistic dramatic gestures. We (read: I) still love The Notebook, not just in spite of its romantic extravagance, but also because of it.
And so there’s this tension between the beauty of deep, self-sacrificing caring—of love without boundaries—and the healthiness of taking care of ourselves.
what we want
So what does it mean, for two people to come together as partners? Are we just two separate humans who decide to experience life together because we like to fulfill each other’s needs, participate in each other’s experiences, and make joint decisions on our collective happiness? I think that’s a healthy definition—that although relationships serve merely as a salve for the loneliness of existence, the beauty of the salve is worth celebrating.
And yet, I feel like something is missing from that view of love. Perhaps it’s the unhealthy and unrealistic beauty of dramatic stories, and perhaps we shouldn’t want that—and we don’t want it, but we also do. Or perhaps it’s this sense that no matter whom we choose as our partner, we still won’t escape being alone.
modern stories of love
There’s a new crop of stories emerging that try to center on more realistic views of romance and relationships. Examples include Alain de Botton’s novel The Course of Love, John Bowe’s collection of anecdotes Us: Americans Talk About Love, The New York Times’ Modern Love column, Sue Johnson’s couples therapy book Hold Me Tight, and Esther Perel’s couples therapy podcast Where Should We Begin?. All of these works have their flaws, and it’s no surprise that only the first of the five is a work of fiction; the rest rely on the fact that the stories are real in order to engage their audience.
An alternative to telling realistic stories is using hyperbolized humor to reveal the underlying problems with idealized romance. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does so with aplomb, and even Disney has begun to caricature its own romanticized world with Frozen’s “Love is an Open Door.” The heightened emotional nature of song and dance that audiences love might not suit a low-drama, high-realism story, but it can suit an obviously exaggerated situation. By redirecting those heightened emotions for satiric occasions rather than realistic ones, humor could play a fascinating role in influencing us to examine our unhealthy assumptions about love.
frameworks
I love how good frameworks clarify confusing ideas. Although applying frameworks too rigidly can be harmful, I have found that a flexible and moderate approach to frameworks has added nuance and depth to the way I perceive the world.
Here are a few of my favorite frameworks.
Frameworks for Empathy
5 Love Languages
The 5 Love Languages framework was my first introduction to the power of frameworks in clarifying confusing relationship dynamics. It turns out that different people need different things to feel loved, and different people have different ways of expressing their love – so if we want to give and receive love, we need to be aware of the different “languages” that our loved ones may be using when they give and receive.
Graphic Source: Odyssey
9 Enneagram Personality Types
Like the 5 Love Languages, the Enneagram personality types give us a concrete way to think about how people are different. The Enneagram is especially helpful for understanding how other people may be fundamentally driven by different things.
Graphic Source: Integrative Enneagram
Four Career Foci
This is a framework that one of my managers once discussed with me, and I haven’t been able to find online. The core premise is this: different individuals may be primarily motivated by company (winning and being successful), people (helping people around you grow and develop), society (making the world a better place), or growth (learning or getting promoted). It’s helpful to know what motivates the people you are working with.
Four Tendencies
This is the newest framework I’ve latched onto. It’s a way of thinking of how people are motivated, with a specific focus on how people respond to outer expectations and how people respond to inner expectations.
Frameworks for effectiveness
Important vs. Urgent
The classic prioritization matrix.
Graphic Source: The Book of the Future
Likelihood of Success vs. Impact
A twist on prioritization that looks more closely at expected value (rather than immediacy).
Honesty vs. Kindness
When we are honest to others, we are sometimes brutal. When we are kind to others, we are sometimes not actually helping the other party. It’s okay for honesty to hurt, and it’s okay for kindness to be received – but there are ways to deliver honesty from a place that comes from love and care rather than meanness, and there are ways to be kind yet direct.
Difficult Conversations
Difficult conversations are often actually made of three separate conversations: What Happened? How do I feel? And what does this say about me? I’ve found that I’m usually least aware of this last conversation, of how what’s happening makes me feel about who I am. When I can’t figure out why something is bothering me, the identity question is often at the root.
Graphic Source: Deepak Babu
Thank you to Catherine, whose art post inspired me to look into the four tendencies framework, which in turn drove me to write this post.
sulking, and the course of love
“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worth of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”
— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
What I love about this book: it talks about the right problems. In a world filled with happily-ever-after fairytales and stereotyped black-and-white good-or-bad relationships, de Botton chooses to grapple with what it means for two real and imperfect people to be in a real and imperfect relationship. He describes the individuals’ feelings and the relationship problems in a way that resonates with relationship experiences as they might actually happen, rather than in some idealized form.
What I don’t love about this book: it sometimes shows wrong or oversimplified behaviors. I worry that people will treat this book as a guide for how to respond in their own relationships, and there were at least three problematic behaviors that bothered me.
- Effective communication is oversimplified. While it’s great for a person to apologize if he thinks he has done something wrong, the author seems to imply that an apology is sufficient to heal a relationship after a fight, when it doesn’t actually solve what actually caused the fight. I wish there had been a follow-up scene to the apology, in which the two people discussed what happened and why, demonstrated strong listening skills, brainstormed potential solutions, and then tried to make real changes in their behavior for each other.
- Honesty is not valued as highly as I think it should be. Even by the end of the book, one character chooses to “not hurt his partner’s feelings” and hide his affair from his partner forever, rather than tell the truth about his affair. I find this appalling. I’ll write another post about honesty in relationships sometime, but one of the reasons I think honesty is so important in relationships is that by being honest, you give your partner the agency to act based on the information you have, and by lying you are robbing them of that agency. That seems wrong.
- Polygamy and jealousy are oversimplified. The author seems, through one of the characters, to claim one authoritative view on jealousy and affairs: that affairs are only bad in that they hurt your partner, but that this is sufficiently damning to put affairs off limits. This is certainly a valid way to view sex outside of marriage, but it’s only one perspective, and in a healthy relationship, I think the two parties should talk about their views rather than assume how the other person would feel. Two people could certainly commit to a monogamous relationship, or they could mutually commit to allowing certain kinds of sex outside of marriage. Two people could agree that they would feel jealous and unhappy about it happening, or they could agree that they will aim to be happy that their partner is living their fullest and happiest life, even if it involves sex with someone else (see compersion: opposite of jealousy). In my view, the discussion and shared commitment is critical, and I’m disappointed that the book didn’t give it appropriate weight.
the relationship ratchet
A ratchet is a mechanism that allows for motion in one direction only. (Here’s a video that demonstrates how this works.)
Why is it so difficult to dial back an already deep relationship?
- When we want to deepen a relationship, we make ourselves vulnerable, because we will hurt if we learn that we care more about someone than they care about us. We celebrate conquering this fear. We accept that love requires a leap of faith. We believe it’s healthy to build our rejection stamina.
- When we want to dial back a relationship, we make them vulnerable, because they may hurt if they learn that we care less about them than they care about us. We denounce people who take advantage of other people’s vulnerabilities as manipulative and mean.
Naturally, there’s the anguish of breaking up with a significant other, as well as the pain of severing ties with one’s family. When it comes to friendships, however, we’re seldom explicit about dialing them back – perhaps because the commitment we make to each other as friends is often less well-defined.
Instead, we let our friendships peter out, dwindle away. We tell ourselves that we do this because it might be less painful to the other party if the change is gradual. Realistically, that’s often true, but alas – it’s usually least true when it matters most.
Thank you to Albert for inspiring this post.
prompting interesting conversations
Inspired by The 36 Questions That Lead to Love and Table Topics, we created cards to inspire conversations at our own apartment.
- where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is happiness. Discuss
Thank you to Jennifer for gifting the blank cards that inspired this project.
the future: skills for success
tarnishing the golden rule
The duty of lovers is to tarnish the golden rule.
Nearly every religion and ethical tradition contains a concept of the golden rule or law of reciprocity that we must 1 For me, this is not enough:
Stage 0. I exist
Stage 1: Other people exist, and are different from me
When we first realize that other people exist and may have conflicting emotions, we see the other-ness of their emotions. I want to play with the teddy bear alone; John also wants to play with the teddy bear; John and I are in conflict; I want to keep the teddy bear to myself.
Stage 2. Other people are like me
Over time (and, often, multiple times), we realize that other people often react similarly to how we would respond if we were in their position. It makes sense that John wants to play with the teddy bear, because I also want to play with the teddy bear; if I were John, I’d want me to share the teddy bear in some way.
This is the golden rule stage
Stage 3. Other people are only sometimes like me
We are not all the same person e uphold different values, we are motivated by different interests, we have different past histories, we react differently. You like talking with her every day, even though she would rather see you just once a week. You don’t mind when he goes on friend dates, but your 1:1 dinners with others spark his jealousy.
With our closest relationships, our “duty” is to continually learn how a person is unique and different from ourselves in order to treat them with love. Tarnish the golden rule
Empathy is a natural skill for some, and an intentionally-developed skill for most. Some ideas and frameworks that have powerfully affected how I perceive empathy:
- The Fundamental Attribution Error. We underestimate how important other people’s circumstances are when we evaluate their behavior, and we overemphasize how important our own circumstances are when we look at our own behavior.
- The Five Love Languages. Different people need different things to feel loved, and different people have different ways of expressing their love.
- Four career foci. Different individuals may be primarily motivated by company (winning and being successful), people (helping people around you grow and develop), society (making the world a better place), or growth (learning or getting promoted).
- Difficult Conversations. In complex situations, people often have different perceptions of what’s happening. This is compounded by how people feel and how they think the conversation reflects on their identity. If you approach a conversation with your foremost goal being to listen and understand, you will often learn valuable information that will help you act constructively and spare you significant pain and misunderstsanding.
Thank you to Isaac for sharing the quote that inspired this post.