How to make the most out of your relationship (but a complete lack of insight about what to do when dating)
Somewhat unsurprisingly, some of my conversations about mentorship shift into discussions about life hacks, and personal improvement. Stack-ranked, the most important personal improvement discussions center around relationships.
There are a specific set of questions that pop up around relationships, all starting with the phrase “How do I . . .?”
- Improve my relationship?
- Determine when I move in with someone?
- Fix things when we seem to be bored with each other?
- Talk to my partner when we disagree?
As some of you know I don’t like explaining frameworks more than three times, I thought I would codify some approaches to the questions above.
This is not prescriptive, and your mileage may vary. For clarity and transparency, I have straight-up made mistakes.
Additionally, this isn’t about dating (that is for you to figure out, also, I am historically bad at dating.) It is about how to work towards an even greater relationship or improve your relationship to make it better.
This is, as one might say, heteronormative, for further transparency.
Rhetorical questions for your considerations
How often do you have hard conversations in your relationships?
Hard conversations involves empathetic active listening, and it includes topics like “we need to talk about . . .”
- the shared chores in the house
- our shared household finances (harder if that conversation is really about a non-working partner needing to go to paid employment to support the household)
- who cooks and who cleans up
- what I perceive to be emotional affairs on your part
- your family and their involvement in our lives
- where we live in the world because a | I don’t like this city/town or b| I have a great job offer in another city/town
Talking about hard topics requires a frame so that one party doesn’t feel that the other is trying to win, or to mentally beat them down. It also requires a type of listening (active listening to understand rather than to reply).
Most importantly, conversations about hard topics requires employing a growth mindset in your personal life (and it is a complement to having a growth mindset at work.) The latter is a requirement for mentees.
The former is valuable for you and your partner’s sanity.
The short-cuts for having a growth mindset in your relationship:
- can you take feedback
- grapple with it and know it deeply, and then
- change your behavior with this new information so that you can be a better partner?
It goes without saying, though I am saying it here, that if your partner does not have a growth mindset, hard conversations will be for naught and you should probably find another partner. If your partner lacks this approach at the inception of the relationship, you can have that hard conversation as one of your first, and see if that seed turns into a tree.
I have the basics of hard conversations, what’s next?
With those questions answered, resolved, or in active, but muted debate, you can graduate to nuanced questions. Discussing these deepens the relationship and creates a more material shared understanding, the flour of any great relationship, to torture a baking metaphor and offend my gluten-sensitive readers.
How often do you talk directly about ambiguity in your relationships?
This is less about one of you being vague and shady, two descriptors you should avoid in life, and more about what happens when you can’t fully articulate needs or positions in the topics you are discussing? Ambiguity is fine, but you have to develop language that makes it clear that you can’t resolve a discussion right now because your thoughts aren’t fully formed or you haven’t thought about it (I call it ‘hard topic homework’) enough beforehand.
How often do you talk about how you want to be loved or cared for?
This is an unusual but necessary topic: “hey, can we talk about how I love you and how you love me?” doesn’t just roll off of the tongue. Your partner may even scrinch their nose. British partners may say “what are you on about?”
Forge ahead, intrepid relationship-developer! This question is so important to understand and evolve over time! How you want to be loved should be explicit and discussed. When it is not, or when you don’t understand your partner’s needs, you can skip the rest of this and start reading this piece.
How to approach hard conversations with your partner
- As we covered earlier, you can apply a growth mindset to your relationship.
- You can discuss how you discuss hard conversations with eachother. Sample ground rules include not interrupting, and showing empathy for what was said directly before you are trying to convey your own point to advance the discussion. Be explicit about your ground rules.
- Please try to listen to understand, rather than to respond. This takes practice.
What makes for great relationships?
1 The first tenet of a great relationship
Shared interests and what that entails
For some, being “best friends” is a facile heuristic that covers and expands upon shared interests. If that works for you, run with it.
I would suggest that shared interests looks more like a Venn diagram that has 51% overlap. The circles are things you are interested in and things your partner finds interesting. You are never going to be 100% coincident, and I find couples that are (coincident) to be boring. “We both like skiing and baking!” Booo!
Curiosity about your partner is one way to understand their interests. You can also just observe them. If your choice-yield on movie night results in a steady diet of superhero films, and you would rather watch early, pre-New Gods Ava Duvernay, then there is some small work to do on shared interests.
Shared interests should get discussed every day, and here is a frame to use when considering the levels of engagement using different lenses.
- The what: everyday.
Literally, you can ask “what did you do today?” every single day. - The how: sometimes.
You should frequently ask how the person did what they did every once in a while. “How did you handle that strategy meeting that you found so boring?” - The subtext: as often as you can remember.
When discussing the what, you can show empathy and get to know your partner better by asking them about the subtext of what they did. “How do you think about managing underperformers? What are your suggestions for turning them around? Do you take it personally when someone you manage underperforms?”
You can also inject intentional whimsy into your curiosity and shared experiences using what I call sometimes surprises and adventures. Wim Wenders captured this cinematically in an eight-minute plus single shot entitled “I knew these two people” with Harry Dean Stanton and Natasha Kinski. (Don’t tie your partner to a bed, for clarity!)
I want to revisit that these conversations, even just about one’s day, or over shared interests, should have elements of empathy, compromise and ambiguity acceptance. I would ask you to embrace these elements if you want to have healthy partner conversations. We will touch upon these themes in section three, below, which could have also have been titled: “How to argue safely.”
2The second tenet of a great relationship
Attraction and what that entails
There is the physical, yes. But attraction in this case is a superset of s/he is fine.
Directly, these are some of the questions you can ask of yourself, as you develop your relationship with your partner:
- Everyday | Do you look forward to seeing them?
- When traveling or in the gaps for long-distance relationships| Do you miss them when you are away?
A brief story: I have a friend who dated long-term, monogamously. He then was married. In the marriage, he professed feelings of unease about the long-term nature of the relationship.
In my time knowing him, he had never fully committed to loving his partner fully. I asked him to try to love his wife fully, with all of his heart. You may say, “uh, that seems silly.” But a lot of men, in particular, hold back a piece of their heart, and don’t love fully, so that they can tell themselves “I told you so,” when and if things end. Specifically, so that they can say “I knew it wasn’t going to work out, which is why I didn’t love her fully.”
This is a form of self-sabotage. By being married or in a long-term relationship, you have already made the choice to attempt to love fully. Don’t mess it up by half-assing the choice! (I have made this mistake, so I am not throwing darts.
Okay, yes I am, but I have caught the dart myself!)
It is okay to love deeply. In fact, I would hazard that there is no better feeling.
The attraction that we are talking about here, attached to continual curiousity (a growth mindset) allows you to avoid “comfortable monotony”. If you want to fall out of love, feel free to embrace comfortable monotony. This isn’t a threat, but an experience-based caution.
3The third tenet of a great relationship
Foundations for finding understanding (AKA how to argue safely)
When I was first married, I sometimes tried to win conversations through logic. That is both immature and stupid. I didn’t think about how it made my ex-wife feel. I was of the mind that logic should rule the day. That approach is neither nice nor fair, and I am asking you to take a different vector.
When you speak with your partner, you have to show kindness. The main way you can show kindness is through empathy: “I understand that my actions | your co-worker’s actions | the kids’ behavior | our shared friend’s behavior is hurtful to you,” is a good way to start when someone expresses displeasure.
These conversational acts of kindness are the foundation of a solid relationship, even when you are upset, otherwise the relationship frays (and can eventually unravel.)
Some tenets for finding understanding.
- Try not to go to sleep angry | the malleable unresolved issue can easily morph into hardened resentment if you insert a REM cycle in the middle of the, ah, discussion.
- The past is unchangeable | feel free to not bring up old ish. Your partner’s mother was mean during Thanksgiving 2018? Old! Why are you bringing it up?! Go subroutine point number one above (“avoid going to sleep angry or with undiscussed issues”) and you can see why old stuff is for the birds.
It is also a losing argument. If you are bringing up old stuff, the subtext is that you couldn’t speak about it before, or you weren’t an adult that could resolve the issue when it arose. This is perhaps the textbook definition of being passive-aggressive. - Resentment can build if these are not resolved | an amplification of the points above that bears repeating.
- Differences are okay | you all don’t have to agree on everything, and getting your partner to agree or say you are right is immature. You both are looking for empathy and understanding, not being right.
- Some rational discussions, some emotional | create space to do both. Rational how are we going to divide house chores. Emotional how are we going to raise kids. Blendy (both) how are we going to save for the future/what does our future look like?
An example of a rational argument that went sideways and turned into an emotional argument: I made the point that complex carbohydrates turn into forms of sugar when digested, and thus could effectively get minimized in any diet. My former partner was from a culture where rice was a staple, so it looked like cultural insensitivity “you don’t like my culture!” rather than a intestinal bio-chemical conversation (which was my intent.) I had to back up and re-frame after the misunderstanding.
You go on and have your rice that reminds you of home.
That is an awful lot to read, do you have a cheat sheet?
Some things that you should do without thinking about it, and there is a propensity for men to get these wrong, so dudes should read the following if nothing else.
- If you partner has surgery or a medical emergency, drop what you are doing and join them.
- If you partner is crying/upset, ask how you can comfort them and establish physical touch (put an arm around them/rub their back/whatever the partner likes)
- If your partner upset with you, suppress defensiveness; “I didn’t do it/you’re crazy/what had happened was,” are probably not winning strategies on the yellow brick road of empathy.
- It goes without saying, but don’t breach the implicit/explicit understandings of the relationships (outright cheating, emotional infidelity and items in these veins)
How can we keep the fire alive?
Sounds great, nouveau relationship advice-giver named Ty, but we are in a state of comfortable monotony. How can we maintain some form of what originally drew us together?
Verbal handshakes | Reciprocal language creates mutual emotional entanglement. To make it even more complex, a branch of semiotics teaches us that language creates culture (directly stolen from my friend, Erik.) You want to create a culture of positive emotional entanglement with your partner, and these “verbal handshakes” allow you to do so.
- Thank you-you are welcome
- I love you-I love you
- You look great-thank you
- I apologize-I accept your apology
- I empathize and understand-thank you for putting yourself in my shoes
Imagine what your relationship would be like if you didn’t shake hands emotionally like this. You could replace each of the responses above with [crickets]. A sad trombone plays in the distance each time this happens. It also is corrosive to your relationship.
The other short cuts:
Make plans! | Date night, movie night, Netflix/Disney+/Criterion Channel/Amazon Prime/regular TV/board game night, museum afternoon, opera/dance/gallery opening evening: choose your own adventure.
Surprises! | Gifts, flowers, unasked-for gifts (don’t be weird!), experiential surprises (a spa day, extra spinning classes if the person is a spin-addict)
Be curious | There is not a person alive, including the League of Introverts (I can’t tell you if I am the President of the League, as I am introverted), that doesn’t like the infrequent or frequent inquiry as to their well-being and aspirations. If you do nothing besides this, you are winning at life.
Thank you for reading this, feedback and comments appreciated, and I wish everyone a happy and productive relationship.
