What I'm looking for in my marriage

the ideal of this guy

Often, I hear polyamorous friends criticize unreflective monogamy. From a monogamous perspective, I agree with them! By default, people in our society are bad at committed relationships. The cultural instruction here is typically shoddy, so the average monogamous relationship is not particularly satisfying.

And by the way, I include my past self in the population of the ignorant; I would describe most of my previous relationships as unintelligently done, at least on my end.

Consciously pursued monogamy is a completely different style of relationship than the thing most of us blunder into. Doing it right is challenging, complex, and utterly beautiful. I also don’t know another reliable way for people to become grownups, outside of extreme options like running an orphanage or something. People often cite child-rearing as the area where maturation happens, and I believe this often occurs, but I have also seen many people reproduce and fail to come to grips with themselves.

There’s no one list that could capture the entirety of intentionally pursued monogamy as I see it. But I think this is a decent list of the elements I attempt to prioritize in my marriage, which I see as the most important project of my life. The list should be understood as what I strive for with Cate, not what I am claiming we achieve with perfection continuously.

Relationship as crucible that allows both people to confront their central insecurities and grow through them together

This is the good stuff. I hold it as self-evident that we all have a few core insecurities and vulnerabilities that are the building blocks of our personalities, which also serve as our greatest limitations. We’re talking about unseen reality-defining beliefs like, “people will only love me if I’m impressive,” or “I can’t be content unless I get everything I want.” Deep partnership has a funny way of bringing these up, such that the good of the relationship will eventually require facing them. For example, adapting to my wife’s independence got me to really feel and let go of some of my elementary neediness. This kind of growing up is heart-rending, a personal death we get to live through. We’ll only seek it if we have no other practical choice, but you get liberation back in exchange. This is why it can be so good that monogamy blocks the exits.

Goal of relationship is to create a space for both people to have full range of emotions and be cared for, not to manage each other into having nice feelings all the time

Oh, weird. The emotions that I might think are shameful, my partner treasures as signs of life from distant regions of my interior. Weird that this is exactly the way I feel about hers, too. It is healing in a real sense to encounter this truth over and over again. This is why unstable relationships suck so much, because it’s an education in the reverse perspective — they convince you that your emotions are burdens to be strategically offloaded, rather than gifts to be shared.

Early in the marriage, I was in a messy spot professionally, and my anxiety about this came up one day. I don’t like exposing my anxiety to people, I like covering it up with a quick fix. Cate told me it was fine to feel anxious, and said: “giving someone slack and support so they can find out who they are is one of the really exciting things about partnership.” My mind relaxed so much in that one second.

Openness about sexuality and ongoing care in giving everyone what they actually want in that department

When we think of vulnerability, we so often think of negative emotions. But pleasure is vulnerable too. It’s dangerous to let someone see you in full animal abandon with your chosen bliss. And think of how heartbreaking it would be to declare exactly what you want and be denied it, or told that it’s perverse. This is why it’s important to state your true desires, besides the fact that it leads to good sex. Relationships don’t deepen unless you give people the power to hurt you terribly. Meanwhile, I think people underestimate just how much better at sex you can get if you try, and what the benefits are like if two people are committed to working on it together with detailed mutual feedback, within the context of a secure relationship.

Both partners taking accountability for having an outside support network (no attempt to make each other everything)

I can’t do better than Kurt Vonnegut on this subject:

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”

Both partners taking accountability for their reactions, you understand how to soothe yourself when triggered rather than taking it out on each other

As far as I can tell, these two truths must operate in tension:

1. My wife doesn’t want to trigger me or cause another intense emotional reaction. She will sculpt her actions so as to minimize this, to the extent she can while remaining a full person.

2. However, if I’m letting her be a full person, I will have reactions to the way she doesn’t always meet my wants, and I can’t blame her for that. It is not her job to cause the exact configuration of feelings I would most like.

It’s not like I never have blaming voices in my head when I’m stressed in my relationship. But I know that they will yield to a more complex perspective if I go for a walk, or lift something heavy recreationally.

Ongoing see-saw balance is struck between togetherness and separation, don’t smother and don’t abandon

Here is the cosmic joke about attachment stress — the feelings of “partner too close, must make space,” or “partner too far, afraid they will abandon.” If you completely nullify these reactions, there is no excitement, none of the friction or distance that keeps people interesting. You have destroyed the natural cycle of intimacy. So there have to be moments of longing and distance, and also moments of overexposure. They must be interpreted as course correction signals within a larger understanding that this alternation is, in some sense, the relationship. This is true fractally within hours, days, weeks.

Conflict is a non-problem, an expected occurrence that is handled ASAP skillfully

In the absolutely ideal case, conflict is a chance to understand my wife’s diverging preferences, and to come up with better solutions for meeting all of our needs. The ideal case doesn’t always happen, sometimes a spat is just a spat. But mostly our “fights,” which are infrequent, look like slightly intense conversations, and I think that’s about right. Zero conflict doesn’t seem like the ideal; those relationships are, I notice, often sexually cool, even antiseptic. Anyway, I fell in love with my wife because of the wildness of her differences — the goal of the relationship is not to sand all of that difference down to nothing. This is still the best book on conflict I know, which I recommend to everyone.

Both partners try to give 100%, accept that there are imbalances, keep scorekeeping to a minimum

It’s shockingly difficult to see everything your partner does on their side to keep the marriage going. You can’t know how much they’ve adjusted their conversational style to make you comfortable, or what they’ve moved in their heart to make room for you. There’s no collected list of all the little considerations they’ve extended — a bit of tidying here, a bit of extra appreciation there. So, try hard, assuming they are also. Aim to satisfy especially their wants you do not understand. And if your partner isn’t doing the thing that makes you happy, request it specifically, don’t assume your feelings of deprivation are on account of their not caring.

Self-disclosure is very frank but not completely uninhibited or thoughtless

I find it important to be authentic. And yet no relationship, I think, would survive the unfiltered disclosure of everything running through my head. That’s not a problem because I have no idea who is responsible for that preposterous deluge. Certainly not my “authentic self.”

Literally every one of these points, I got wrong in my earliest relationships. Like, if you boiled down my earlier protocol, it would be along the lines of:

• The point of relationships is to conceal my insecurity

• The goal of the relationship is me having nice emotions all the time

• Disclose my sexual wants to the degree that you feel your partner won’t be offended by them, and take sexual feedback personally

• My partner should be able to handle everything, disappear into the relationship

• If I’m triggered, it’s your fault

• We should be together all the time (but also avoiding real intimacy all the time)

• If I explain why I’m right carefully enough we won’t have arguments

• Assume I have sacrificed more as a defense against my disowned shame around dependence

• Just say whatever

If this is how you operate, all I’ll say is that it’s incalculably better the other way.

Photo by Mark Estefanos.