As a married woman with our shares of ups and downs, I love these successful relationship/marriage principles. Try to help each other improve themselves and live into their vision and lift each other up. Feminism bit me on the ass and I developed a distorted idea about life success that made me value my marriage less than my professional life for a while. Throw in two children and I eventually had to wake up and reprioritise. A lot of women find themselves in a similar situation and have to deprogram to regain a sense of control and divorce from the toxic hypermaterialistic (including high professional ambition) mindset.
The other thing that women take from granted is the grounding force a stable, predictable man can have. Women who are intuitive and able to ride their emotional waves are not necessarily stable or predictable, though they might think they're 'doing the work'. It's valuable to have one really steady and emotionally predictable person in the relationship that is grounded force for the other.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful engagement. I must admit you have been in my head when I write things like this, and I'm sure you sensed those echoes :-). Divorcing myself from careerist mindset was definitely key to improving every other area of life. It's also interesting that the same women who criticize men endlessly do expect this reliability, which is a stereotypically masculine trait, and masculinity has been deemed so toxic it has no redeeming qualities. My partner mentioned that I've helped him appreciate positive aspects of masculinity and encouraged them in him, which was so wonderful to hear.
After 8 bazillion articles from relentlessly clueless, un-self-aware young women on Medium warning other women how to avoid narcissists and psychopaths, with zero understanding of these two conditions, it's nice to see someone evaluating partners fairly and honestly. It takes two to tango, as my mother always liked to say...
Thank you for sharing this essay! It is full of important and beautiful insights that all of us can relate to in our own lives. One of my favorite parts is this: "To a certain extent, there is no good life without tying oneself to others and caring for their welfare. Self-focus is heavily encouraged in our culture, especially among liberal women, and it leaves us impoverished in our relationships." My close friend and I were just talking about this - honoring and maintaining strong social ties - the other day.
Thanks for your kind words! I appreciate this validation through your experience because I sometimes wonder if I'm constructing straw men. It's because the culture is such a caricature of liberalism.
Excellent article! Thank you! I sent it to my newlywed daughter. My husband and I have been married for over 32 years and agreed at the onset of our marriage that we would never use a tone of contempt or attack each other’s character in an ugly fashion, adding to what you wrote, “both parties must learn to argue without destroying the other person’s self-esteem.” Respect in action and tone has gotten us through many tough times. As I am sure you already know, studies have shown that tone of contempt is the number one predictor of divorce.
In addition, I look for meaning and moments of joy in my life, instead of looking for my husband to make me “happy”. He does provide me lots of moments of joy, but I can’t rely on another person to do that inside job of keeping me in a state of happiness which is both unrealistic and unsustainable. This is the main advice I have given my daughters about marriage -- that tone of respect is key as well as understanding what is your responsibility vs. anothers, which you cover perfectly and thoughtfully. Thank you!
The part about contempt makes total sense. I definitely divorced in part because I couldn't separate argument from my contempt for all the issues I mentioned, and I had to really work on this time around. I think women are also not encouraged enough to examine the contempt they have for men as a group, which then bubbles over into relationships. Totally relate to your quest to find meaning outside the relationship; it is what makes the relationship rewarding.
“emotions, food, drugs, and the phone are the four horsemen of self-indulgence.”
^^^THIS. Spot on. And convicting.
I appreciate your perspective, and agree with much of this, especially about each partner being disciplined. As a woman who thinks more logically than average, I also deeply appreciate your encouragement for everyone to stop using emotional reasoning. It’s killing our society and it’s killing our relationships. This is not to say it doesn’t have value— it’s just being applied in the wrong spaces and in the wrong measure. Society (and relationships) would equally be hurt if everyone made rigidly logical decisions that can tend to forget human fragility. Logic and emotions need each other to balance out for smart decision making that still values humans as flawed, imperfect creatures in need of occasionally empathy. This is why the feminist-pushed war between the sexes is terrible for all of us. Men and women DO need each other, just like emotions and logic need each other.
One thing I will disagree with you on— the idea that men need to use their intuition more to understand what a woman means, because she can’t be more direct. I disagree. I think women can (and should) learn to be more direct with a least some things. My husband and I are flip-flopped from the average male and female relationship in that I am the logical one and he is the emotional one. For the life of me, when I see him upset or moody, I cannot tell the difference between when he is simply hangry, needs his coffee, or actually upset about something. Trying to use my intuition on this has only gotten me in hot water. Some men who have this problem with there wives will simply stop trying if they continue to get their heads bitten off every time they try to guess. They shouldn’t stop trying, they should just ask. I have to simply ask him which it is, and he has to give me a direct answer without expecting me to know it. This has worked much better for us.
In a similar vein, he takes care of the housework much better than I do, it some of our fights are different priorities about housework and different preferences for how it should be done. I will ignore a pile of laundry for a week, or dishes in the sink, not because I don’t care to do my share of the labor, but often because I am either lost in my own thoughts and I really don’t see these things, or I am comfortable with leaving them to another day but my spouse is not. When my husband has different expectations, I am fine to adjust but I first need to know what those are. I much prefer him to simply ask me to do something than have this unspoken battle about expectations and preferences. Sometimes I don’t do a chore because I am being lazy, but if you ask me to do it, I’ll do it uncomplainingly. I start to rebel against doing it if there is some sort of passive-aggressive comment about it. I think more men would deeply appreciate their wives or girlfriends being more direct in this way— simply ask him to put the laundry away or take the trash out. Unspoken expectations are a feeding ground for disputes and fights.
Direct communication is an easy solution to prevent such fights, and I think many men would just prefer as simple “Can you do this please?” than asking them to somehow infer the wishes and desires of their significant other, which they aren’t very good at, and risk them responding wrongly and instigate a fight.
Overall, I think you have diagnosed some acute problems that affect all of us. It reminded me a bit of what Jordan Peterson talks about— start by cleaning your room. If you can’t be disciplined and orderly about yourself, how could you ever expect to re-organize or lead society? We have to start with ourselves, and self-discipline will go a long way to our own well-being and happiness.
Thank you for your thoughtful engagement! I think I could have been clearer in the section you reference. I think many women are capable of being direct, but many more are simply either not capable or don't want to be. For example, I often expressed anger when I could have made less emotional, more direct statements. It's incredibly difficult for me to be direct about intimacy, even though I am otherwise direct in my communication with my partner and others. I think in your husband's case, he's taken on the indirectness I was referencing, and I also am fully in agreement that directness about matters of the household is paramount to prevent fights. But, women are unfortunately socialized to often be oblique, unlike us. This hurts us in the end, and I wish more women were like us in their styles.
Yes, I suppose that even the most direct people can have certain subjects where it is harder to be direct. I get that about intimacy conversation!
Ultimately it’s about both sides coming together— the woman can work on being more direct for her husband, and the husband can work on trying to draw her out in terms of thoughts and feelings to understand her better.
I agree. If the goal is to communicate then inherent or deliberate miscommunication would seem to not be conducive to effective understanding in a relationship.
I would tend to say it’s a negative, since it causes confusion in communication, and communication is always and continually a relationship struggle for everybody. But since many women are this way, I would be open to finding out if there is a reason for it, or for considering whether it may be a positive in certain circumstances.
I agree that it's a negative, but I think many, if not most, women are simply allergic to direct communication. We are psychologically not wired thus. So, given the way modern romantic relationships work and that marriage is based on love, directness becomes more crucial than it once was.
I think in the article you were implying that being indirect (saying one thing and meaning something else) is a positive thing and it adds a mystery to unravel. “If we were direct there would be no mystery to unravel”.
I do think we need to be direct as a rule, but many of us just aren't psychologically inclined. The thing about mystery is sort of in conflict with this. I am direct, generally speaking, but the things I am indirect about, I want my partner to figure out on his own on some level. If I told him everything about how I think it would really be doing the work for him. Same in the opposite scenario. We do have to work a little bit to figure out the mystery of the other person.
Makes sense why you’d like to enjoy the thrill of him figuring out some things on his own. This can became a challenge when the other who (typically) thrives on and appreciates directness. (Me in my relationship). But yes learning the other person is crucial and if eventually there are less and less of those mysteries to unravel then that’s a down the road ‘problem’ 😄
Great read. Really appreciate the insights you bring to modern relationships.
I’m a midlife dad in a 16yo relationship with somebody I love and care deeply for. But our interactions over time have lead to a dynamic where whenever there is tension my partner engages in scorched-earth emotional reasoning exercise to get crystal clear in any misalignments. They are exhausting, and I’ve become the man who apologises early and often to short-cut the exercise and move on. My strategy has exacerbated the dynamic over time leading to decreased confidence and deepening a sense of estrangement.
My partner also has a prevailing POV that nearly everything “needs” to be improved or fixed. While I’m far from sluggish when it comes to self improvement and maintenance, I find her POV that everything has a gap ultimately unconstructive.
These two facets (everything needs to be fixed or is not good enough / scorched earth emotional reasoning inquisitions) are experienced by two other close male friends who are also struggling in ways similar to me.
I don’t read a lot of relationship or psychological texts adjacent to this space, but must say I really appreciate the integrity and candour you bring to the topic given your journey to date. 👏🏼
I’m very glad to know this resonated and I’m sorry to hear about the situation you’re in. I’m not sure how much pushing back would solve the problem but I’d encourage you to. I too once had this inclination of needing to fix everything and nothing was good enough, but that was because I never felt like I wasn’t good enough. There could be something deeper there. May be worth exploring in couples therapy, because I sense that your level of resentment is high (as mine would also be). It’s like a powder keg. I think the issues you describe are probably in no small part due to women being highly neurotic and conscientious, which can ruin relationships if they’re extreme in a person. Women are encouraged to be neurotic by the culture and it was the source of a lot of relational strife for me. She may need encouragement to let that go, because it’s counterproductive to a deep life with rich relationships.
Thanks! Your blog looks up my alley. I've been more interested these days in men's psychology and am realizing it's a hole in my knowledge. Reeves was a good intro.
Yeah, ambition and discipline being thrown away by progressives feels super dangerous to me. I also am increasingly skeptical of the knee jerk anti-ambition vibes I see in progressive dismissal of people like Elon musk and other grotesque images of ambition. It’s like an overly criticism of ambition, cloaked as a critique of the most recent bad thing he said.
I especially agree with the need for both partners to have a yearning for self improvement.
One point I’ll push back on: It is also incredibly difficult for many women to talk about sex or what they need. You’ll have to coax it.
I think it’s well established in psychology and the couples counseling/therapy world that men actually find it harder to express their needs. This is because we’re not as well versed in articulating our emotions and because we see ourselves as providers, not as needy ones. It’s hard for a lot of men to accept that they can have needs too and then further that they should express those needs and expect them to be fulfilled while still manning a sense of being the provider, stable one etc etc. So I think you have that one backward.
One piece of advice I’d add to the section directed to women is to remind them that your (male) partner remembers the honeymoon phase of your relationship fondly. Meditate on that. Some interesting things that are important for intimacy in your relationship might dwell there. (In my experience women don’t think much about that period and consider the mature love that follows it as taking precedence)
A key for me is that relationship advice is not one size fits all. My first and second wives are dramatically different people; after a while I came to realize that the best approach with my second wife was often to think of how my first wife and I would have approached the situation and then do the opposite.
I live in Massachusetts. I used to be on the dating apps a lot. If I had a dime for every time a woman on the app wrote in one form or another of you are the opposite politics swipe left. I think it’s a form of close-mindedness and judging someone without ever meeting them.
I never held that to a woman I dated. I’ve had healthy debates in the political spectrum on dates sometimes. Isn’t that what adults do?
I’m not on the apps anymore, they have much more deeper problems now.
First and foremost, great article, I think in the big picture, you’re spot on with your assessment and advice.
Getting into the specifics though, I have some doubts to what extent it would be well received by the masses, because your advice in a sense reduces down to telling men to behave more like women, and telling women to think more like men.
People will reflexively find this offensive to hear, and difficult to act on. Regardless of if it is by nature or nurture, men’s disposition to not keep a tidy household, or women’s disposition to reason emotionally seems to be deeply entrenched.
In contrast with the tough advice, you also tell people to have more realistic expectations. This ultimately paints a bleak picture, since the implication here is that we are both leaning into gender roles, and leaning away from them, lowering our standards while simultaneously bending over backwards to fight against our nature. Maybe this is just the human condition.
This is interesting, I hadn't considered that I might be asking them to behave as opposites, but you're correct. I think going to the extremes of either the typical male typical female psychological spectrum is probably bad for modern marriages because they are based on love, where once they were based on familial alliances. The emotional component of the marriage being foundational makes it somewhat more important that both parties learn the skills they lack. You are correct, men aren't conscientious enough to run a household because they never had to be. Women have emotionally reasoned since the beginning of the species (and I know many might find this to be offensive because something something social conditioning). But, I'm not sure how else these issues born of these two inclinations might be mitigated. I think to a certain extent one can't escape the need to fight against one's psychological nature. For example, women should stop being so terrible to each other, even though that's in our nature, too.
This is a great article. It’s good to see some principles of building a good long lasting relationship laid out plainly. This has gone out of fashion (or been cast as ‘repressive’ or whatever) which is a shame.
If you haven’t come from a home where these values were modelled by parents, you have to learn the hard way. As divorce is so common I think many younger people have only seen dysfunction and don’t want to fall into it themselves, but it happens.
This is accurate, and I've seen it among my friends. I think some of us make incorrect choices because of previous parental experiences. E.g., I chose a pushover because I didn't have male role models in my earlier life.
However, I have to disagree about the whole "you just have to accept that women won't say what they mean".
No, that's a mental illness. It has nothing to do with being a woman.
The idea that, "I understand what I mean so the other person should understand it too", is effectively a belief in telepathy.
Many are simultaneously, and paradoxically, afraid to reveal what they mean because it might be rejected and make them look foolish.
If the other person ignores their message, they can still tell themselves that the other person failed to understand it. Allowing them to escape rejection, and assign all the blame onto the other person for not getting it.
It is like a teenage boy with romantic fantasies about his crush who he never actually talks to. He builds up an image with no bearing in reality, a delusional obsession, and as the years go by he becomes increasingly angry at the crush for not living up to their expecttiions, for not noticing him or recognising his "pure' affection with some becoming stalkers and others literal serial killers.
In other cases, there's a belief that the other person, "should just do" this thing that really matters to them, but they never bother to explain this to the person they expect it from.
I've seen people blow up entire relationships over a problem that their partner didn't even know they were upset about.
Both men and women do this, it is caused by stupidity, self-absorption, and a lack of empathy.
It simply never occurred to them to imagine the situation from the other's point of view. If they had, they would have realised how idiotic it is.
As a married woman with our shares of ups and downs, I love these successful relationship/marriage principles. Try to help each other improve themselves and live into their vision and lift each other up. Feminism bit me on the ass and I developed a distorted idea about life success that made me value my marriage less than my professional life for a while. Throw in two children and I eventually had to wake up and reprioritise. A lot of women find themselves in a similar situation and have to deprogram to regain a sense of control and divorce from the toxic hypermaterialistic (including high professional ambition) mindset.
The other thing that women take from granted is the grounding force a stable, predictable man can have. Women who are intuitive and able to ride their emotional waves are not necessarily stable or predictable, though they might think they're 'doing the work'. It's valuable to have one really steady and emotionally predictable person in the relationship that is grounded force for the other.
Excellent piece as always Radha
Thank you so much for your thoughtful engagement. I must admit you have been in my head when I write things like this, and I'm sure you sensed those echoes :-). Divorcing myself from careerist mindset was definitely key to improving every other area of life. It's also interesting that the same women who criticize men endlessly do expect this reliability, which is a stereotypically masculine trait, and masculinity has been deemed so toxic it has no redeeming qualities. My partner mentioned that I've helped him appreciate positive aspects of masculinity and encouraged them in him, which was so wonderful to hear.
After 8 bazillion articles from relentlessly clueless, un-self-aware young women on Medium warning other women how to avoid narcissists and psychopaths, with zero understanding of these two conditions, it's nice to see someone evaluating partners fairly and honestly. It takes two to tango, as my mother always liked to say...
Thank you for sharing this essay! It is full of important and beautiful insights that all of us can relate to in our own lives. One of my favorite parts is this: "To a certain extent, there is no good life without tying oneself to others and caring for their welfare. Self-focus is heavily encouraged in our culture, especially among liberal women, and it leaves us impoverished in our relationships." My close friend and I were just talking about this - honoring and maintaining strong social ties - the other day.
Thanks for your kind words! I appreciate this validation through your experience because I sometimes wonder if I'm constructing straw men. It's because the culture is such a caricature of liberalism.
You’re welcome! No straw men detected at all. You’re getting at the heart (and mind) of these issues.
Excellent article! Thank you! I sent it to my newlywed daughter. My husband and I have been married for over 32 years and agreed at the onset of our marriage that we would never use a tone of contempt or attack each other’s character in an ugly fashion, adding to what you wrote, “both parties must learn to argue without destroying the other person’s self-esteem.” Respect in action and tone has gotten us through many tough times. As I am sure you already know, studies have shown that tone of contempt is the number one predictor of divorce.
In addition, I look for meaning and moments of joy in my life, instead of looking for my husband to make me “happy”. He does provide me lots of moments of joy, but I can’t rely on another person to do that inside job of keeping me in a state of happiness which is both unrealistic and unsustainable. This is the main advice I have given my daughters about marriage -- that tone of respect is key as well as understanding what is your responsibility vs. anothers, which you cover perfectly and thoughtfully. Thank you!
The part about contempt makes total sense. I definitely divorced in part because I couldn't separate argument from my contempt for all the issues I mentioned, and I had to really work on this time around. I think women are also not encouraged enough to examine the contempt they have for men as a group, which then bubbles over into relationships. Totally relate to your quest to find meaning outside the relationship; it is what makes the relationship rewarding.
Jesus Christ this is a belter of an article.
Not sure how to take that
10/10. Thanks for sharing
“emotions, food, drugs, and the phone are the four horsemen of self-indulgence.”
^^^THIS. Spot on. And convicting.
I appreciate your perspective, and agree with much of this, especially about each partner being disciplined. As a woman who thinks more logically than average, I also deeply appreciate your encouragement for everyone to stop using emotional reasoning. It’s killing our society and it’s killing our relationships. This is not to say it doesn’t have value— it’s just being applied in the wrong spaces and in the wrong measure. Society (and relationships) would equally be hurt if everyone made rigidly logical decisions that can tend to forget human fragility. Logic and emotions need each other to balance out for smart decision making that still values humans as flawed, imperfect creatures in need of occasionally empathy. This is why the feminist-pushed war between the sexes is terrible for all of us. Men and women DO need each other, just like emotions and logic need each other.
One thing I will disagree with you on— the idea that men need to use their intuition more to understand what a woman means, because she can’t be more direct. I disagree. I think women can (and should) learn to be more direct with a least some things. My husband and I are flip-flopped from the average male and female relationship in that I am the logical one and he is the emotional one. For the life of me, when I see him upset or moody, I cannot tell the difference between when he is simply hangry, needs his coffee, or actually upset about something. Trying to use my intuition on this has only gotten me in hot water. Some men who have this problem with there wives will simply stop trying if they continue to get their heads bitten off every time they try to guess. They shouldn’t stop trying, they should just ask. I have to simply ask him which it is, and he has to give me a direct answer without expecting me to know it. This has worked much better for us.
In a similar vein, he takes care of the housework much better than I do, it some of our fights are different priorities about housework and different preferences for how it should be done. I will ignore a pile of laundry for a week, or dishes in the sink, not because I don’t care to do my share of the labor, but often because I am either lost in my own thoughts and I really don’t see these things, or I am comfortable with leaving them to another day but my spouse is not. When my husband has different expectations, I am fine to adjust but I first need to know what those are. I much prefer him to simply ask me to do something than have this unspoken battle about expectations and preferences. Sometimes I don’t do a chore because I am being lazy, but if you ask me to do it, I’ll do it uncomplainingly. I start to rebel against doing it if there is some sort of passive-aggressive comment about it. I think more men would deeply appreciate their wives or girlfriends being more direct in this way— simply ask him to put the laundry away or take the trash out. Unspoken expectations are a feeding ground for disputes and fights.
Direct communication is an easy solution to prevent such fights, and I think many men would just prefer as simple “Can you do this please?” than asking them to somehow infer the wishes and desires of their significant other, which they aren’t very good at, and risk them responding wrongly and instigate a fight.
Overall, I think you have diagnosed some acute problems that affect all of us. It reminded me a bit of what Jordan Peterson talks about— start by cleaning your room. If you can’t be disciplined and orderly about yourself, how could you ever expect to re-organize or lead society? We have to start with ourselves, and self-discipline will go a long way to our own well-being and happiness.
Great article.
Thank you for your thoughtful engagement! I think I could have been clearer in the section you reference. I think many women are capable of being direct, but many more are simply either not capable or don't want to be. For example, I often expressed anger when I could have made less emotional, more direct statements. It's incredibly difficult for me to be direct about intimacy, even though I am otherwise direct in my communication with my partner and others. I think in your husband's case, he's taken on the indirectness I was referencing, and I also am fully in agreement that directness about matters of the household is paramount to prevent fights. But, women are unfortunately socialized to often be oblique, unlike us. This hurts us in the end, and I wish more women were like us in their styles.
Yes, I suppose that even the most direct people can have certain subjects where it is harder to be direct. I get that about intimacy conversation!
Ultimately it’s about both sides coming together— the woman can work on being more direct for her husband, and the husband can work on trying to draw her out in terms of thoughts and feelings to understand her better.
I agree. If the goal is to communicate then inherent or deliberate miscommunication would seem to not be conducive to effective understanding in a relationship.
I agree. I think we should settle on whether indirectness is a positive or negative first
I would tend to say it’s a negative, since it causes confusion in communication, and communication is always and continually a relationship struggle for everybody. But since many women are this way, I would be open to finding out if there is a reason for it, or for considering whether it may be a positive in certain circumstances.
I agree that it's a negative, but I think many, if not most, women are simply allergic to direct communication. We are psychologically not wired thus. So, given the way modern romantic relationships work and that marriage is based on love, directness becomes more crucial than it once was.
I think in the article you were implying that being indirect (saying one thing and meaning something else) is a positive thing and it adds a mystery to unravel. “If we were direct there would be no mystery to unravel”.
For me the effort an expression of commitment and love I think
I do think we need to be direct as a rule, but many of us just aren't psychologically inclined. The thing about mystery is sort of in conflict with this. I am direct, generally speaking, but the things I am indirect about, I want my partner to figure out on his own on some level. If I told him everything about how I think it would really be doing the work for him. Same in the opposite scenario. We do have to work a little bit to figure out the mystery of the other person.
Makes sense why you’d like to enjoy the thrill of him figuring out some things on his own. This can became a challenge when the other who (typically) thrives on and appreciates directness. (Me in my relationship). But yes learning the other person is crucial and if eventually there are less and less of those mysteries to unravel then that’s a down the road ‘problem’ 😄
Thanks for responding!
Great read. Really appreciate the insights you bring to modern relationships.
I’m a midlife dad in a 16yo relationship with somebody I love and care deeply for. But our interactions over time have lead to a dynamic where whenever there is tension my partner engages in scorched-earth emotional reasoning exercise to get crystal clear in any misalignments. They are exhausting, and I’ve become the man who apologises early and often to short-cut the exercise and move on. My strategy has exacerbated the dynamic over time leading to decreased confidence and deepening a sense of estrangement.
My partner also has a prevailing POV that nearly everything “needs” to be improved or fixed. While I’m far from sluggish when it comes to self improvement and maintenance, I find her POV that everything has a gap ultimately unconstructive.
These two facets (everything needs to be fixed or is not good enough / scorched earth emotional reasoning inquisitions) are experienced by two other close male friends who are also struggling in ways similar to me.
I don’t read a lot of relationship or psychological texts adjacent to this space, but must say I really appreciate the integrity and candour you bring to the topic given your journey to date. 👏🏼
I’m very glad to know this resonated and I’m sorry to hear about the situation you’re in. I’m not sure how much pushing back would solve the problem but I’d encourage you to. I too once had this inclination of needing to fix everything and nothing was good enough, but that was because I never felt like I wasn’t good enough. There could be something deeper there. May be worth exploring in couples therapy, because I sense that your level of resentment is high (as mine would also be). It’s like a powder keg. I think the issues you describe are probably in no small part due to women being highly neurotic and conscientious, which can ruin relationships if they’re extreme in a person. Women are encouraged to be neurotic by the culture and it was the source of a lot of relational strife for me. She may need encouragement to let that go, because it’s counterproductive to a deep life with rich relationships.
I divorced during Covid too. Nightmare.
I really enjoyed reading your article. Very insightful!
Thanks! Your blog looks up my alley. I've been more interested these days in men's psychology and am realizing it's a hole in my knowledge. Reeves was a good intro.
I agree! I like your content and your perspective. Reeves is great!
Yeah, ambition and discipline being thrown away by progressives feels super dangerous to me. I also am increasingly skeptical of the knee jerk anti-ambition vibes I see in progressive dismissal of people like Elon musk and other grotesque images of ambition. It’s like an overly criticism of ambition, cloaked as a critique of the most recent bad thing he said.
The logic is that if someone odious said x, x must be bad.
Good piece overall.
I especially agree with the need for both partners to have a yearning for self improvement.
One point I’ll push back on: It is also incredibly difficult for many women to talk about sex or what they need. You’ll have to coax it.
I think it’s well established in psychology and the couples counseling/therapy world that men actually find it harder to express their needs. This is because we’re not as well versed in articulating our emotions and because we see ourselves as providers, not as needy ones. It’s hard for a lot of men to accept that they can have needs too and then further that they should express those needs and expect them to be fulfilled while still manning a sense of being the provider, stable one etc etc. So I think you have that one backward.
One piece of advice I’d add to the section directed to women is to remind them that your (male) partner remembers the honeymoon phase of your relationship fondly. Meditate on that. Some interesting things that are important for intimacy in your relationship might dwell there. (In my experience women don’t think much about that period and consider the mature love that follows it as taking precedence)
A key for me is that relationship advice is not one size fits all. My first and second wives are dramatically different people; after a while I came to realize that the best approach with my second wife was often to think of how my first wife and I would have approached the situation and then do the opposite.
I live in Massachusetts. I used to be on the dating apps a lot. If I had a dime for every time a woman on the app wrote in one form or another of you are the opposite politics swipe left. I think it’s a form of close-mindedness and judging someone without ever meeting them.
I never held that to a woman I dated. I’ve had healthy debates in the political spectrum on dates sometimes. Isn’t that what adults do?
I’m not on the apps anymore, they have much more deeper problems now.
First and foremost, great article, I think in the big picture, you’re spot on with your assessment and advice.
Getting into the specifics though, I have some doubts to what extent it would be well received by the masses, because your advice in a sense reduces down to telling men to behave more like women, and telling women to think more like men.
People will reflexively find this offensive to hear, and difficult to act on. Regardless of if it is by nature or nurture, men’s disposition to not keep a tidy household, or women’s disposition to reason emotionally seems to be deeply entrenched.
In contrast with the tough advice, you also tell people to have more realistic expectations. This ultimately paints a bleak picture, since the implication here is that we are both leaning into gender roles, and leaning away from them, lowering our standards while simultaneously bending over backwards to fight against our nature. Maybe this is just the human condition.
This is interesting, I hadn't considered that I might be asking them to behave as opposites, but you're correct. I think going to the extremes of either the typical male typical female psychological spectrum is probably bad for modern marriages because they are based on love, where once they were based on familial alliances. The emotional component of the marriage being foundational makes it somewhat more important that both parties learn the skills they lack. You are correct, men aren't conscientious enough to run a household because they never had to be. Women have emotionally reasoned since the beginning of the species (and I know many might find this to be offensive because something something social conditioning). But, I'm not sure how else these issues born of these two inclinations might be mitigated. I think to a certain extent one can't escape the need to fight against one's psychological nature. For example, women should stop being so terrible to each other, even though that's in our nature, too.
This is a great article. It’s good to see some principles of building a good long lasting relationship laid out plainly. This has gone out of fashion (or been cast as ‘repressive’ or whatever) which is a shame.
If you haven’t come from a home where these values were modelled by parents, you have to learn the hard way. As divorce is so common I think many younger people have only seen dysfunction and don’t want to fall into it themselves, but it happens.
This is accurate, and I've seen it among my friends. I think some of us make incorrect choices because of previous parental experiences. E.g., I chose a pushover because I didn't have male role models in my earlier life.
I appreciate your candour and self-reflection.
However, I have to disagree about the whole "you just have to accept that women won't say what they mean".
No, that's a mental illness. It has nothing to do with being a woman.
The idea that, "I understand what I mean so the other person should understand it too", is effectively a belief in telepathy.
Many are simultaneously, and paradoxically, afraid to reveal what they mean because it might be rejected and make them look foolish.
If the other person ignores their message, they can still tell themselves that the other person failed to understand it. Allowing them to escape rejection, and assign all the blame onto the other person for not getting it.
It is like a teenage boy with romantic fantasies about his crush who he never actually talks to. He builds up an image with no bearing in reality, a delusional obsession, and as the years go by he becomes increasingly angry at the crush for not living up to their expecttiions, for not noticing him or recognising his "pure' affection with some becoming stalkers and others literal serial killers.
In other cases, there's a belief that the other person, "should just do" this thing that really matters to them, but they never bother to explain this to the person they expect it from.
I've seen people blow up entire relationships over a problem that their partner didn't even know they were upset about.
Both men and women do this, it is caused by stupidity, self-absorption, and a lack of empathy.
It simply never occurred to them to imagine the situation from the other's point of view. If they had, they would have realised how idiotic it is.