coupling off over time: good or bad? necessary or not?

i touched on this the other day, but my friend, miriam, made a really good point in a conversation we had last week.

her point was that as people get older, they tend to couple off. this thends to shift the locus of their decision-making. people go from prioritizing their friends and community to prioritizing their romantic relationship. 

now, for her i think the emphasis was on the increasing importance of maintaining strong friendships in the face of diminishing connection with people who were previously close friends. for me, though, the shift from outward to inward focus on relationships is where her insight takes me…

now, as a single person, my gut reaction is against this transition. i can’t even remember how many people i once considered good friends that i literally never see anymore. well, except for when they post pictures of them and their spouse and their children on instagram.

if i take a step back, though, two things come up for me. first, is the shift from outward to inward necessary? i think not. i think the patriarchal model of nuclear household that we have in the west makes this so. the goal of buying a residence and living there with just you, your spouse, and your kids, makes the inward focus for a relationship seem natural. but i don’t think it is. in fact, i think it’s really destructive, mostly because it’s not resilient. people of past times raised their families in robust, interconnected communities. extended famiiles lived near each and also local community was much more important (because travel and moving far from home wasn’t really a thing like it is now). i could go on…

the second is, whether or not the shift is necessary, is it bad? i think so. one of the major pitfalls i see people falling into literally all the time is expecting their primary romantic interest to be their all. it’s a secretly insidious trend, in my opinion. as our society modernizes, we search for more and more from our primary partners. we want physical, mental, emotional, friend, family, and career support all from the same person. what’s crazy is that we don’t even hold our friends to those standards. we know that some friends meet some types of needs for us and other friends meet other needs. so we put all this expectation into our primary relationship which can have all sorts of negative consequences. codependence is one of them, but also when things go bad or wrong in that relationship, we have almost no resilience because all the energy has been going into one place.

i’m convinced that this is a piece of why modern dating is so bad. i’m also convinced that this is a part of why divorces are so ugly. it’s not just ending a relationship, it’s ending like 8 relationships simultaneously and it’s even harder because strongly-bound couples under-invest in the other relationships in their lives that could help them weather the turmoil of a breakup.

the paradoxical role of failure in self-driven change

a friend of mine had this insight during our last productivity coaching session:

“the feeling of failure undermines progress, but failure itself is part of the process.” - miriam mack

failure is a tricky thing. many people these days are talking about failure. some of them discuss how failing is an important part of entrepreneurship. others talk about failing small and failing fast as a way to learn. in the case of productivity work, failure plays somewhat of a paradoxical role.

on one hand, failure is a part of the process. any self-driven learning is going to include some failure. i mean, i guess it’s possible that someone wanting to change their life could start and be perfect at it. but i’ve yet to see that happen. so far, my experience is that failure happens because change is hard. the trick is to keep at it. over time, the new practice or habit will stick and eventually it will become more natural than not to do it. that’s where the long-term changes come from.

on the other hand, the feeling of failure is detrimental. it undermines progress. it sets of chemical reactions in your brain that make you want to give up. this reaction is so powerful that self-help experts all over will explain how and why to set yourself up for success. i tell people all the time that done is better than perfect and to set rewards for yourself that encourage your success.

so failure is both a part of the process of change and it’s important to acknowledge that it will happen. it’s also important to minimize the feeling of failure because it undermines your drive to keep trying.

this is tricky thing, but it seems possible to work through the paradox. i’ve done it myself and i see and support other to people do it all the time (my friend, erin, for example…).

relationship capacity: friends, family, and the transition as we couple off

last week ross and i had a really interesting conversation about relationships that are important in our lives.

ross puts a really high priority on spending time with his family. i won’t go into the details because that’s their business, but he spends a lot of time with them. from my perspective, he spends time with them individually and collectively, pretty much every week. it helps that they live nearby.

i, on the other hand, i spend a similar amount of energy into my friends, especially my inner friend circle. depending on our schedules, i have 3-5 friends who i try to spend a significant chunk of time with (60-90 minutes at least) every other week. those relationships are really important to me for many reasons, but that’s not what this post is about. my family also lives over 1,400 miles away.

the conversation ross and i had was that, like in many other ways, we’re opposites. the time and energy he spends with his family i spend with my close friends. maybe it’s a capacity thing: we both have a maximum amount of relational capacity and we just utilize it in different relationship spheres.

the plot thickened when i had a conversation with my friend miriam about her perception of relationships as people age. basically, her point was that intimate friendships become increasingly important as more and more friends couple off and settle down.

that’s when i thought that maybe the coupling off stage is when people transition from friends taking up their primary relationship capacity to family taking it up. in ross’ words “when you ask a friend to get drinks, ‘sure’ turns into ‘lemme ask the boss [spouse].’”

in some ways, this isn’t new or surprising. it’s definitely not bad (necessarily). i guess i’m curious about if the transition is inevitable… and what does it mean for those folks (of whom there are more and more of these days) who want to stay single for a long time? are they destined to have fewer close friends over time?

hope: radical, daring, dangerous

in the mary karr episode of on being, one part that stuck with me (among many others) was about hope.

karr mentioned that in a world that is as crazy as ours, it’s much more radical, much more daring, much more dangerous way to have hope than to not. i touched on this a little bit in a post i wrote yesterday, but it really comes down to this: your worldview shapes your actions. if your worldview is pessimistic, you behave in the world in a negative way. if your world view is hopeful, you act accordingly.

this, of course, doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to hopeful people and good things won’t happen to pessimistic people. but, as i learned from a study cited in resilience, ways of being and thinking can be contagious and the spread of emotions can be modeled in similar ways to tracking disease spread. so then, regardless of which way you’re being, even your smallest actions can have a positive impact on your community over time, thereby creating a positive feedback loop of your intentions. when other people notice and experience your hopefulness, it can impact their ways of thinking and being, bringing about more positive actions, etc.

now, the reason to be pessimistic, obviously, is to minimize disappointment when things don’t well. it’s much easier to avoid the pain of loss when you expected things to go poorly in the first place. however, in karr’s language, the tricky thing about having hope is that it creates both lower lows and higher highs. the disappointment when things go poorly will be very real. but on the other hand, opening yourself up to the possibility of things going really well creates such benefits sometimes that it can be worth it to experience the pain.

i’ve thought for a long time that living a full life and living a safe life are somewhat opposites. the greater your emotional range, the happier and sadder you can be. and that’s actually a good thing. staying close to the mid-line seems boring.

on the value of a working hypothesis

two recent episodes of on being have discussed working hypotheses (heuristics) and they both made me realize the value in knowing how to use them.  

it first came up in the leonard mlodinow episode. he said that, from a scientific standpoint, the value isn’t in that it’s right. in fact, most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. the value is that the hypothesis allows you to test assumptions. in the end, the hypothesis will likely be discarded or upgraded, but the truths learned remain.

then in the mary karr episode, karr explained how she challenges atheists to pray everyday. she believes that their lives would get better (assuming they were praying genuinely) just because they would be thinking concretely about what they want to happen to them. just like mlodinow, the value is in the thinking and learning that happens regardless of whether God responds in some directly attributable way.

for me, this connects to why it feels better to me to live with hope and work towards justice. even if hope is just a working hypothesis, the value i gain from living with hope is real. and, i know plenty of people who live life with no hope and the damage it does to them and those around them is palpable.

and to take it just a tiny step further, now that I’ve read (in the book resilience) about how much of an impact thinking can have on the brain, i think a strong enough working hypothesis could have neurological impacts in some pretty profound ways.