Your Partner Is Not A Backstop, Or: How Not To Have A Relationship
Most happy relationships are spackled together by healthy doses of compromise. And in the happiest relationships, that compromise arrives prenegotiated.
Which is to say that after you’ve been dating for a while, you know what’s going to make your partner feel unloved, and then you set out to proactively fix that. I know, for example, that Gini gets upset whenever the trash bag gets too full.
Now me? I hate taking out the trash. And being more tolerant of messes than my wife is, a teetering stack of garbage doesn’t bother me overmuch as long as it all stays in the bin – a kind of Garbage Jenga, where I can balance three magazines on top of a milk carton for days at a time.
Yet even though to me, bagging that all up is “a chore I have to do prematurely,” I think, “Oh, I know that trash will bother Gini if she sees it – I should suck it up and take the garbage out for her!”
So I do. And Gini is happier.
Our lives are filled with little “head that off at the pass” moments like that, where Gini calls in if she’s going to stay out late so I can sleep without worrying about her, and I try to put the dishes away before the sink overflows too, and Gini consults with me before reorganizing the bathroom to suit her tastes, and so forth.
What I do not do is wait around for Gini to complain before I do it.
What I do not do is figure, “If Gini really wants it, she’ll ask.”
If I abandoned all responsibility for managing Gini’s needs and thought, “I’ll take it out when Gini yells at me,” I would make Gini feel really isolated in our home. Because what I’d be saying, in a very real sense, would be, “I care so little about my wife’s feelings that I’m not going to even *think* about what makes her unhappy until she forces the issue.”
Then our dynamic changes from adult/adult to parent/child – I’d be not a partner, but a kid at bedtime, where Mom has to show up every five minutes to go, “Fifteen minutes to bedtime,” then “Five minutes to bedtime,” then “One minute to bedtime,” excruciatingly aware the entire time that if they weren’t consistently enforcing this impending bedtime the kid would play until three in the morning.
(And be an absolute monster the next day at school. Which, as the parent, would be yet another mess that you had to clean up.)
And our relationship would suffer, because Gini would have all the responsibility for making herself happy. I’d have told her that it wasn’t my job, anticipating her needs, it was her job to show up like some sort of human alarm clock to wake me from my lazy dozing. And she’d feel stressed all the time, because hey, if she wasn’t constantly putting in the effort then nothing she wanted would get done.
I might be more content. But Gini would be a wreck. And if that happened, we’d have to ask the vital question: Do I actually love Gini, or just love the shit she lets me get away with?
I think the answer would have to be that I didn’t actually love Gini all that much, if I could let her suffer for my convenience.
Look. Part of being a good partner involves internalizing my lover’s needs, and not forcing them to ask me for every thing they require to feel loved. I have to be an active partner, investigating today’s case of “So what’s going to make them happy?” and to address that proactively.
And addressing their needs proactively doesn’t take the form of bowing to every desire they have. Gini would prefer that every surface in the house be empty, a kind of Zen clearspace where nobody left a magazine or a drink on the table. I’ve addressed that proactively by telling her that kind of thing makes me feel like I’m living in a hotel, not a home, and sometimes I leave a magazine out on the bathroom counter because I was reading an article and I’ll go back and read the rest of it the next time I brush my teeth, and to me that’s the advantage of a home in that I can trade a little cleanliness for convenience.
That’s an active approach! But what would be spectacularly shitty is if I shrugged and said, “Yeah, we should have a cleaner house” and then left the magazine in the bathroom and waited for her to nag me before I handled it.
This is why polyamorous relationships often fail in that first wave of New Relationship Energy. Your lover finds someone new and goes, “Awww, this feels so good being with New Person, Old Person’s stupid old needs would stop this fizzy flow of love, so… I’m just going to stay here and smooch until Old Person yells at me to come back.”
And no. Even in the throes of NRE, you gotta keep Old Partner’s happiness in mind, because otherwise you’ll stress them the fuck out. You’ll make them feel like that bedtime parent, saying, “Five minutes,” knowing you’d stay out all night if you let them, knowing their needs are irrelevant because ZOMG IT’S PLAYTIME AND WHEN IT’S PLAYTIME I DON’T THINK ABOUT OLD PARTNER.
Hey, maybe five minutes isn’t enough. But rather than losing yourself in bliss and waiting for Old Partner to nag you, you should pull your head out of the clouds to call up and say, “Look, I’m having a really good time at New Partner’s house, I know you expected me home earlier, but I want to stay late. We’ll do something cool tomorrow to make up for it. Is that cool?”
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But either way, you’ve sent a clear message: Old Partner’s needs still matter on some level, and maybe you gotta negotiate a path between your needs and theirs, but at least they know you were thinking of them.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes.
Having A Dog Is Its Own Excuse
Have some adorable pictures of our dog:
That’s it. That’s all the content you need.
Why I'm Not Friending You On Facebook (But It's Not Your Fault)
About six months ago, my friend’s beloved grandmother died. Really broke her up. She still hasn’t recovered. This was her most momentous moment in the past year.
Yet when I ran into her at a party, I had no clue this tragedy had befallen her.
“Didn’t you see my posts?” she asked. “On Facebook?”
No. No, I didn’t.
What I saw was the usual toxic stew of Buzzfeed posts, and “What Firefly character are you?” and “These four thousand photos will restore your faith in humanity. #568 will break your heart” and image memes… but the information that my friend’s grandmother had died, her posts about the funeral, her occasional dark night of the soul as she mourned?
Facebook’s algorithms had decided her life was not of interest to me.
Which is happening more and more often lately – I’ll finally catch up with a friend somewhere in real life, and discover that they’ve graduated from their Masters, or gotten married, or quit their job and moved to Tibet, and out of all the information Facebook could have shown me from my hundreds of Facebook friends, their computers went, “No, not that. You know what Ferrett wants to see? Another webcomic link.”
Yesterday, it hit the fan when Facebook begun showing me images from people I didn’t even know, but random friends had commented on. And I thought, “Why the fuck are you expanding your range to show me a picture of some other person’s book when you didn’t even tell me about my friend’s divorce?” The answer was sadly obvious: since my friends knew this person, Facebook hoped maybe I knew this person, and was hoping that I’d friend him and thus expand their social network range.
That’s when I realized: Facebook was broken.
I signed up to catch up with old friends, so I could have some idea of what’s going on in their lives. And yeah, sometimes those old friends are irritating political cranks, but more often I found that hey, they’re having kids, they’re celebrating wonderful things, they’re enjoying life’s milestones….
….and in its push to churn out linkbait, Facebook is increasingly failing in its job to tell me any of that.
So I’m not accepting any more friends’ requests on Facebook. Why should I? It doesn’t tell me the things I want to hear about the people I currently have, so why would I stack one more person on the pile?
Now, some people will claim that if I rejigger these settings to mark my “important” friends, and create groups, I can make Facebook usable – which is at complete odds with my point. I know what my “important” friends are up to – I see them regularly. I want to know what my quote-unquote “unimportant” friends are up to, the folks who I haven’t seen in years but still have affection for. I would by far rather know my friend got a kitten than see the latest funny Onion article.
Yes, I can make settings (which Facebook often undoes by default) or devise workarounds, or download Facebook Purity to cleanse my page, but:
I should not have to work this hard to cut through linkbait to get at people.
Others will snarkily point out that Facebook is free and I should expect no better. No. Since Facebook is free, I recognize I am the product that Facebook is selling to other people – and I’d be fine with that if Facebook actually served my needs. As it is increasingly becoming a monstrous Buzzfeed-plus, this repository of dreck and quizzes, I have the right to say to Facebook, “Hey, the less usable information you give me, the less usable information I will provide to your customers.”
So I’m not accepting any more Facebook friends requests. Furthermore, I’m not going to click on any articles in Facebook – if I see something I’m curious about, I’ll instead go to Google and look it up directly, short-circuiting any data that Facebook gets from me. (Google can have it. I at least like their mail program.) I will refuse to “like” anything that is not a status update or a picture posted directly by someone I love.
I will starve them of as much information on me as humanly possible. You may wish to do likewise.
I’m not leaving Facebook, as they hold my relatives hostage. It took forever to get my beloved Aunt Peggy somewhere that I can keep up with her, and I adore seeing my cousins on there; the likelihood of them going and registering at WeHaveOnly500UsersButWePromiseWeWillGetBigger.com is next to nil. Facebook is a de facto standard of the Internet for now. This is not a flounce.
But if you find what I say interesting, share this thought. Agree to do it. Try, via what you claim to love on Facebook, to bring some sanity back to it.
Because until Facebook starts showing me my friend’s funerals again, I have zero need to know the Top 10 Celebrity Divorces.
A Surprise Guest Appearance Of Purest Love
“I didn’t sleep well last night,” Eric said. “I never sleep well when my wife’s not in the room with me.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I haven’t slept next to Gini in two weeks.”
Gini is having some fairly serious back issues, and as a result the big floofy bed we bought is hurting her. She’s sleeping in the guest room with the firmer bed, which is a) much smaller, and b) in a room flooded with light when the sun rises, which doesn’t bother her but does wake me the heck up.
So we’ve been sleeping apart. And that worries us. We’ve got our own personal rule that “When couples start sleeping in separate beds, they’re in trouble” – which, yes, I’ll probably hear from a hundred people that they sleep in separate beds and they’ve been married for seventy-billion years, but we know of at least three couples where moving into separate beds led to moving into separate houses and then into separate relationship statuses.
And for us, that sort of late-night reconnection is a strength of ours. We don’t really cuddle all that much – the floofy bed is a fucking quicksand pit – but hearing her next to me, her scent filling the room, being able to reach out and feel her, is just a pillar of reassurance for me. I sleep sketchily without my sweetie, twisting and turning, but her back is in dire straits and until we get her chronic pain managed (which we hope we can and soon), we need to be in separate locations.
Without Gini, I go to bed later, because I need to be exhausted before I can drop off. My friends have noted my later-night texts. I play Civilization 5 until I’m practically nodding off, and even then sometimes I’ll just pop awake and be unable to get back to sleep because this empty bed is lonely.
It’s pathetic. It’s loving. There’s not a contradiction here; we need each other, and are so adoring of each other that we work at home and feel isolated if Gini has to go work in a separate room.
And so, last night, I finished up putting the finishing touches on my early-civ American empire, having just built a University in every township, and slogged to bed wearily.
And there was a Gini.
“I’m going to try to sleep here,” she said. “I need this.”
And she did.
And I dreamed that David Bowie had visited my house, and was hanging around singing songs for me, and that things were going well and when I woke she was there and I had work to do but by God my sweet love was next to me and the day was going to be better.
Nearly fifteen years, and still that in love.
I'm Going To Eat Goop For A Solid Week, And Probably Not Die
I’m going to eat goop and nothing but goop for a week straight, and see whether it kills me.
That’s a bit of overstatement because I’m pretty sure the goop won’t kill me. The goop – a yeasty, thick paste many have compared to watered-down pancake batter – is scientifically designed to provide all the nutrients a human needs. Its proponents tell me I could live on nothing but the goop and still be a healthy human being.
The goop is called Soylent – and no, it’s not made of people, all those jokes have been made – and it’s been getting a lot of press over the last year, a kind of Reddit thread forged from madness and made flesh. A bunch of starving students asked, “Why am I paying for food when I could just put the raw vitamins and proteins in a bag, and skip this whole tedious eating process?” And after a while of tinkering with various formulas – there’s actually a considerable Do-It-Yourself Soylent movement – they perfected the formula. A beige glutinous mass that, when consumed, could replace every meal you ever needed.
(I’ve read a ton of articles on Soylent, but the best primer is probably this New Yorker article – which is fascinating reading, if you’re interested.)
“But why would you subsist on Soylent alone, Ferrett?” you cry. “Aren’t you the guy who’s going around the country to eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, reviewing them? Don’t you love food?”
And I do love food. I love it so much that to me, this is the ultimate kind of food to eat. It’s a food that demands a total lifestyle change, one that could completely alter how I view eating – because the folks who have lived on Soylent for a time have noted dramatic changes, scornfully referring to food as “recreational eating.” A week is a comparatively small time to eat nothing but Soylent in the scheme of things, but I suspect that week will take frickin’ forever.
Yet what happens if it turns out this works for me? I love food, Lord knows, but I’m addicted to all the wrong kinds; even after a triple-bypass, I still crave a fatty steak, crave that sugary cake, long for the fatal smears of peanut butter. Yes, I’ll be missing out on the vital micronutrients that natural foods bring, but let’s be honest here: even with the smoothies, I’m still eating way more Pop Tarts than berries. It could be that this is healthy.
And what happens with all the time and money I’d save? “What to eat” would be a choice removed from my life, a choice that until now has consumed a lot of time, because I love variety. Will I find better uses for that time, or just dork around on Civilization 5? How would I meet with friends, considering “drinks and dinner” is the normal social excuse? And what horrors will this beige fluid wreak upon my digestive system?
Only one way to find out.
Alas, y’all won’t find out right away, as all orders of Soylent are backed up 10-12 weeks. (I could brew my own, of course, but I’ve seen what my first crafts projects look like and I would not want to put them in my belly.) But yes, I will be blogging about this whole experience from first cup to last glutinous sip, and I’ll let you know how this all works. If you’d like to play along at home, well, an order of Soylent is only $85 for a week’s supply.
The crazier bit: my wife, who is a Michael Pollan fanatic, forever bringing up her hatred of artificial foods and chanting Pollan’s mantra of “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” has decided she wants in on this crazytrain. For she, too, is curious about what sorts of lifestyle changes occur when you reduce your eating world to purest nutrition.
When I pitched the idea at her, I expected to be scoffed at, not joined. But hey! That’s why we’re happily married; every once in a while, I remember she’s just as nuts as I am. Especially when we go out back to tend to our beehives.
So. Coming in 10-12 weeks: the complete replacement of my diet with goop. Blogged for your entertainment.
I’m sure you can’t wait.