Relationship questions
Feb. 17th, 2011 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livTwo friends have posed really interesting questions about relationships in the last few weeks. Since it took a bit of thought to compose answers, I thought I might as well make a new post rather than long rambly comments to old discussions. Obviously if you object to relationship noodling, especially with religious bits, please feel free to skip this post!
I hesitated to talk about my idea of a happy relationship, because my longest relationship so far has been three years, and it's been pretty easy, we haven't really weathered any serious difficulties. But hey, what's a blog good for if not blathering about my somewhat unsupported opinions?! Certainly this relationship is making me happy at the moment; I rather hope I wouldn't continue with it if that weren't the case. So what is it about the relationship that makes it happy rather than otherwise?
I think the basic thing is that we are partners. We have common goals, including promoting eachother's interests and making eachother happy. (I am toying with putting something like that into the statement we will use to declare that we are married.) And we trust eachother to be working for those common goals. If it seems like the other is doing something harmful or says something that could be interpreted as insulting, we start from the assumption that it's a misunderstanding or mistake. We assume good faith, in other words, and that assumption has turned out to be justified in every instance so far we've put it to the test. Of course, the more times trust is validated the less of a risk it seems on future occasions where trust is needed.
Partly as a result of this, and partly because we have similar backgrounds and compatible styles, we have very good communication. Even potential misunderstandings are fairly rare, I'd say. We both tend to be pretty direct, and pretty self-aware, so we err on the side of bluntness rather than on the side of saying things with hidden agendas and subtext. I don't think that direct style is necessarily better, it's just that it helps if you both have a similar approach. To take a trivial example, if I ask "does this outfit look ok?", it means I actually want to know, not "I'm feeling unappreciated, please compliment me". And if I were feeling unappreciated, I hope I would notice that and say so, rather than blaming my low mood on external factors.
Neither of us expects the other to be perfect, though. We both feel able to admit to things we don't feel proud of, and the other will neither brush it off as not mattering because obviously my love is a wonderful person, nor be judgemental and make the one who's at fault feel even worse. This seems to help a lot with actually dealing with or fixing issues, rather than avoiding thinking about them because of feeling ashamed.
The other happy thing is that we just really enjoy eachother's company. We enjoy many of the same activities and take part in the same social groups, and where our interests diverge we still want to know because of being interested in eachother. I think it really helps that we have loads of friends in common, and tend to get on well with eachother's friends that we've met through the relationship. I think this is the converse of what some people mean when they worry about "marrying out"; although we're not part of the same religion, we're very much part of the same community, and that makes the relationship a lot smoother, because our friends default to supportive without even realizing it, and we don't ever have to choose between partner and friends. We pretty much talk about everything; I remember when I was a kid I used to roll my eyes at how my parents would have endless detailed discussions about the most trivial things, and now I find myself doing exactly the same.
So, ok, that's a happy romantic relationship. I'm pretty sure it's not the only possible shape one can be, it's just what happens to work for us.
I don't know that I have anything so grand as a "philosophy" of relationships, but let's have a go. To start with, in the modern world and in my sort of social circles, people don't generally get married because they have to. It's perfectly possible to survive materially and financially without a spouse, and indeed it's possible, if hard work, to raise children on your own. So a lot of the protections which societies have built in to marriage aren't really applicable any more. For example, I don't need stigma and restrictions against divorce, because I wouldn't be destitute if I were to break up withjack. So like most things in our individualist, materially comfortable world, marriage is an ongoing, constantly renewed choice rather than an unavoidable commitment.
One of the things that I'm thinking about a lot is how to know when to push through a bad patch in this sort of context. I mean, ideally, I think people should stay married or in a relationship as long as the relationship is making them happier than being apart would. But the question in my mind is how to tell a temporary problem which can be resolved, from something that is only going to get worse so that the best solution is to end the relationship. I do prefer this model over externally enforced commitment, but that doesn't make it easy. (This discussion atjack's place is also relevant here, but a relationship can be challenged by other things than discovering that there's somebody else you love more than your primary partner.) In as far as this constitutes a philosophy, I think it's about putting a high value on the effort and time that has already gone in to a relationship, and having that commitment be something that's worth preserving. Not an infinite value, because that would be the sunk cost fallacy in spades, but a high enough value to override things like a temporary emotional state.
How Judaism informs this is a tricky question, particularly because I am not at the moment in a place where I'm adhering to Jewish teaching about sexuality and relationships. (I should emphasize that this is not because I'm bi, I think it's perfectly possible to have same-sex relationships in a way that is compatible with my understanding of Judaism.) No, it's the fact that I'm engaged to someone who isn't Jewish, and that I accept sex outside the context of committed, exclusive relationships, and I am basically acting as if oblivious to my menstrual cycles. These things are of course all interconnected; for example, I feel it would not make sense to impose menstrual purity restrictions on someone who isn't bound by Jewish law at all. And the Jewish ideal of sacred marriage isn't attainable for me in this relationship, so I don't see much point in trying for minor aspects of that ideal.
That doesn't mean that Judaism is irrelevant to my relationship, though. For one thing it informs who I am and how I think so deeply that it can't really be irrelevant. And also it very much informs my relationships with other human beings, of which romantic relationships are clearly a subset. One can argue about the interpretation the commandment tojack literally as myself yet, but I'm certainly a lot nearer to that ideal in my approach to him and other close friends than I would be with people I don't have a strong connection to. Judaism compels me to recognize him as a morally important being fully capable of joy and pain; in religious language I would say "made in the image of God", but I tend to avoid such language when referring to atheists.
I learned a little bit of Mussar from Joanna, and one of the things I liked about this philosophy is that it's very clear that the purpose of life is to help other people to bear their spiritual burdens, and that you have more obligation to do so when you have more capacity to do so. I know a lot of people want moral philosophies to be absolutely consistent, and wrestle with the problem of valuing starving children in distant countries somehow lower than family and intimate friends. The Mussar system, as I understood it from Joanna's entry-level explanations, presents something that is morally consistent rather than logically so, and much better matches my real experience of how the world works. This means that by planning to get married tojack, I'm taking on a very deep commitment to him. I'm creating an opportunity to make a real, profound and hopefully positive difference in his life, to share in his burdens in Mussar language. I seem to have the ability to make jack happier, in a way that wouldn't be possible for most people I know, even if I put equal amounts of effort into furthering their goals.
I'm also a Buberian at heart, albeit not a particularly knowledgeable one. That means that my idea of God is about "relational space", that humans can connect with the Divine via really meaningful interactions with other human beings in their fullest essence. In as far as it's possible for humans to have any connection to God at all, of course. Buber is very clear that you can't expect your whole marriage to be an "I-Thou" relationship, that kind of true connection can only ever be fleeting, and most of the time you have your own agenda, you're thinking about practical things and only aware of the other person in connection to yourself. But that's the ideal that I'm aiming for. And having a whole lifetime to get to know another person seems like a reasonably good first step on that journey.
I hesitated to talk about my idea of a happy relationship, because my longest relationship so far has been three years, and it's been pretty easy, we haven't really weathered any serious difficulties. But hey, what's a blog good for if not blathering about my somewhat unsupported opinions?! Certainly this relationship is making me happy at the moment; I rather hope I wouldn't continue with it if that weren't the case. So what is it about the relationship that makes it happy rather than otherwise?
I think the basic thing is that we are partners. We have common goals, including promoting eachother's interests and making eachother happy. (I am toying with putting something like that into the statement we will use to declare that we are married.) And we trust eachother to be working for those common goals. If it seems like the other is doing something harmful or says something that could be interpreted as insulting, we start from the assumption that it's a misunderstanding or mistake. We assume good faith, in other words, and that assumption has turned out to be justified in every instance so far we've put it to the test. Of course, the more times trust is validated the less of a risk it seems on future occasions where trust is needed.
Partly as a result of this, and partly because we have similar backgrounds and compatible styles, we have very good communication. Even potential misunderstandings are fairly rare, I'd say. We both tend to be pretty direct, and pretty self-aware, so we err on the side of bluntness rather than on the side of saying things with hidden agendas and subtext. I don't think that direct style is necessarily better, it's just that it helps if you both have a similar approach. To take a trivial example, if I ask "does this outfit look ok?", it means I actually want to know, not "I'm feeling unappreciated, please compliment me". And if I were feeling unappreciated, I hope I would notice that and say so, rather than blaming my low mood on external factors.
Neither of us expects the other to be perfect, though. We both feel able to admit to things we don't feel proud of, and the other will neither brush it off as not mattering because obviously my love is a wonderful person, nor be judgemental and make the one who's at fault feel even worse. This seems to help a lot with actually dealing with or fixing issues, rather than avoiding thinking about them because of feeling ashamed.
The other happy thing is that we just really enjoy eachother's company. We enjoy many of the same activities and take part in the same social groups, and where our interests diverge we still want to know because of being interested in eachother. I think it really helps that we have loads of friends in common, and tend to get on well with eachother's friends that we've met through the relationship. I think this is the converse of what some people mean when they worry about "marrying out"; although we're not part of the same religion, we're very much part of the same community, and that makes the relationship a lot smoother, because our friends default to supportive without even realizing it, and we don't ever have to choose between partner and friends. We pretty much talk about everything; I remember when I was a kid I used to roll my eyes at how my parents would have endless detailed discussions about the most trivial things, and now I find myself doing exactly the same.
So, ok, that's a happy romantic relationship. I'm pretty sure it's not the only possible shape one can be, it's just what happens to work for us.
I don't know that I have anything so grand as a "philosophy" of relationships, but let's have a go. To start with, in the modern world and in my sort of social circles, people don't generally get married because they have to. It's perfectly possible to survive materially and financially without a spouse, and indeed it's possible, if hard work, to raise children on your own. So a lot of the protections which societies have built in to marriage aren't really applicable any more. For example, I don't need stigma and restrictions against divorce, because I wouldn't be destitute if I were to break up with
jack. So like most things in our individualist, materially comfortable world, marriage is an ongoing, constantly renewed choice rather than an unavoidable commitment. One of the things that I'm thinking about a lot is how to know when to push through a bad patch in this sort of context. I mean, ideally, I think people should stay married or in a relationship as long as the relationship is making them happier than being apart would. But the question in my mind is how to tell a temporary problem which can be resolved, from something that is only going to get worse so that the best solution is to end the relationship. I do prefer this model over externally enforced commitment, but that doesn't make it easy. (This discussion at
jack's place is also relevant here, but a relationship can be challenged by other things than discovering that there's somebody else you love more than your primary partner.) In as far as this constitutes a philosophy, I think it's about putting a high value on the effort and time that has already gone in to a relationship, and having that commitment be something that's worth preserving. Not an infinite value, because that would be the sunk cost fallacy in spades, but a high enough value to override things like a temporary emotional state. How Judaism informs this is a tricky question, particularly because I am not at the moment in a place where I'm adhering to Jewish teaching about sexuality and relationships. (I should emphasize that this is not because I'm bi, I think it's perfectly possible to have same-sex relationships in a way that is compatible with my understanding of Judaism.) No, it's the fact that I'm engaged to someone who isn't Jewish, and that I accept sex outside the context of committed, exclusive relationships, and I am basically acting as if oblivious to my menstrual cycles. These things are of course all interconnected; for example, I feel it would not make sense to impose menstrual purity restrictions on someone who isn't bound by Jewish law at all. And the Jewish ideal of sacred marriage isn't attainable for me in this relationship, so I don't see much point in trying for minor aspects of that ideal.
That doesn't mean that Judaism is irrelevant to my relationship, though. For one thing it informs who I am and how I think so deeply that it can't really be irrelevant. And also it very much informs my relationships with other human beings, of which romantic relationships are clearly a subset. One can argue about the interpretation the commandment to
love your neighbour as yourself, but it very definitely applies to partners. I don't think I love
jack literally as myself yet, but I'm certainly a lot nearer to that ideal in my approach to him and other close friends than I would be with people I don't have a strong connection to. Judaism compels me to recognize him as a morally important being fully capable of joy and pain; in religious language I would say "made in the image of God", but I tend to avoid such language when referring to atheists. I learned a little bit of Mussar from Joanna, and one of the things I liked about this philosophy is that it's very clear that the purpose of life is to help other people to bear their spiritual burdens, and that you have more obligation to do so when you have more capacity to do so. I know a lot of people want moral philosophies to be absolutely consistent, and wrestle with the problem of valuing starving children in distant countries somehow lower than family and intimate friends. The Mussar system, as I understood it from Joanna's entry-level explanations, presents something that is morally consistent rather than logically so, and much better matches my real experience of how the world works. This means that by planning to get married to
jack, I'm taking on a very deep commitment to him. I'm creating an opportunity to make a real, profound and hopefully positive difference in his life, to share in his burdens in Mussar language. I seem to have the ability to make jack happier, in a way that wouldn't be possible for most people I know, even if I put equal amounts of effort into furthering their goals.I'm also a Buberian at heart, albeit not a particularly knowledgeable one. That means that my idea of God is about "relational space", that humans can connect with the Divine via really meaningful interactions with other human beings in their fullest essence. In as far as it's possible for humans to have any connection to God at all, of course. Buber is very clear that you can't expect your whole marriage to be an "I-Thou" relationship, that kind of true connection can only ever be fleeting, and most of the time you have your own agenda, you're thinking about practical things and only aware of the other person in connection to yourself. But that's the ideal that I'm aiming for. And having a whole lifetime to get to know another person seems like a reasonably good first step on that journey.
