What is partnership for?

Nan Goldin, Picnic on the esplanade, Boston 1973

I’ve been thinking about this Rachel Aviv piece about how Agnes Callard left her husband after falling in love with her grad student nonstop since I read it. As well as this piece on platonic life partnerships breaking up from The Cut. In different ways, both feel like they get at the the questions that have kept me up many nights in the past few years:

What is partnership, what is marriage for? What are we aspiring to and where do we end up?

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Two passages from the essay about Callard that really struck me:

1. “In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” Rose describes marriage as a political experience and argues that talking about it should be taken as seriously as conversations about national elections: “Cultural pressure to avoid such talk as ‘gossip’ ought to be resisted, in a spirit of good citizenship.”

   Agnes views romantic relationships as the place where some of the most pressing philosophical problems surface in life, and she tries to “navigate the moral-opprobrium reflexes in the right way,” she said, so that people won’t dismiss the topic as unworthy of public discussion".”

2. “Marriage is “an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The whole point of marriage is repetition.” Agnes and Arnold felt that they had entered marriage without clearly thinking through what the institution was actually for. For many couples, marriage ends up being about making a family, and, when it fails to meet other needs, the couple lovingly and generously lets it fail. But Agnes was uncomfortable with the prospect of a relationship that had lost its aspirational character.”

My earliest ideas about marriage were shaped by my parents, and then later on by Madame Bovary. Madame Bovary, one of the greatest novels of all time, is in short about a woman who gets married, and then, bored and dissatisfied with her marriage, goes looking for more a fulfilling romantic relationship, does not find it, and through her folly ends up bankrupt and eventually dead. 13-year-old Ava read it and thought, man, I don’t want to end up bankrupt and dead. It made me distrustful of the experience of falling in love. It seemed culturally agreed upon that romantic infatuation always fades and therefore can’t be relied on; a sensible person should select a life partner based on other qualities, like kindness and reliability.

I have this line in my novel draft that goes, All the men I knew were trying to solve space travel and I was trying to solve heterosexual relations, which in my opinion was a harder problem. It’s flippant, but I think there’s a reason no one ever brings up, “What’s the point of the institution of marriage?” up as a topic at the dinner table. No one believes we could solve marriage, and yet we all go into marriage believing that we individually have solved it, or at least can make a serious attempt to.

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My earliest conception of love came from the Symposium, from Aristophanes’ speech in which he says that the gods originally made people with four arms and four legs. There were three genders: male, female, and both. Then Zeus cut them into two so we were doomed to wander the earth searching for our other half.

The same book mentions Diotima’s ladder of love, which is a ladder that starts with desire for a beautiful body and ends with Beauty itself. The ladder can be understood as a metaphor for a Platonic ideal of love in which a passion for a lover might be sublimated into a passion for life itself.

This is all very abstract. I’ve observed that love is about someone who’ll keep you company forever, or at least for a substantial amount of time, and love is about passion, but love is also about when I forget to screw the cap back on the olive oil and you get spurts of oil all over your cream-colored sweater and you scream my name and I say, “Sorry, sorry!”

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On the bus I met someone who was in her eighties and had been married more than once before she met her current husband. They met through the classifieds of a literary magazine. They knew they liked each other right away and have now been married for something like 40 years. She called him her sweetie.

What she had learned from previous relationships was that it was important to her to have a totally transparent marriage, one in which they could tell each other everything.

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As Aviv describes it, Callard is so aspirational about what marriage could be. She wants, through marriage, to figure out what one human can be to another—to figure out whether it’s “possible to eliminate the loneliness that is intrinsic to any relationship, to be together in a way that makes full use of another person’s mind.”

I have to admit that I haven’t reached the “Is it possible to eliminate all loneliness” level of inquiry about marriage yet. Instead, what’s perplexed me for a long time is the dividing line between a friendship and a romantic relationship.

I view friendships as inherently romantic. Most of my close friendships are deeply emotional, and we do things like go on long walks and get fancy dinners together. We love each other’s minds. But we do not want to date, let alone get married. The inverse of this problem is that many of my romantic relationships have ended because I realized that I actually, genuinely would rather be friends.

Putting physical attraction aside, what gives? People tend to roll their eyes when I ask this question, saying that it’s a “you know it when you see it” kind of thing. Alchemy. Magic.

In the most obviously romantic relationships of my life we just were really, really physically attracted to each other. Is it as simple as that? Intense physical attraction may not guarantee a good marriage, but maybe it’s a necessary prerequisite to one.

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Clementine has her memory wiped to forget Joel, but when she reencounters him they fall back in love anyway. One way to see it is that the fundamental premise of the movie is that just because you absolutely cannot stand someone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue a romantic a relationship with them.

I’ll call this the passion test. Would you ruin your life all over again just to repeat the white heat of the experience?

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My working theory is that maybe marriage is fundamentally about being able to monopolize someone in certain ways while encouraging them still to have an expansive, generative life in other ways. And so the question of who to marry, to me, is maybe about: who do you want to have a claim over? And what is the nature of the claim? 

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Thinking about the ways romantic relationships differs from platonic ones in my own life: 1) sex, 2) the quantity of time spent together (I can hang out with a close friend as much as 4 times a week, but I don’t sleep in the same bed as them or spend ambient mornings and evenings around them), 3) logistics/expectations/obligations—I might ask for things from friends (and I do with some regularity), but there’s not so much this sense of obligation around it, whereas I expect certain things from my partner, like if I text them they need to text back as soon as they’re free, or we should hang out X times a week. If I’m working with a friend there might be a sense of obligation around work tasks, like you have to respond to my email promptly, but in romantic relationships it’s like, you need to book my flight and you need to respond to my email and we need to go to this restaurant on Saturday, it’s just a lot of obligation across the board.

In romantic relationship there’s always an implicit contract, and marriage makes that contract explicit.  Of course, in friendships you have implicit contracts with each other, too, though they’re rarely made explicit. With many of my close friends I would say the contract looks something like: I want to live fairly close to you, I’d like to hang out with you multiple times a month and we’ll both actively try to make that happen, if you text me I’ll always text back even if it takes me a while, I trust you with my secrets, I trust you to tell me what you think, I hope that you’ll be part of my life for many years to come, I would inconvenience myself for you, I’ll advocate for you, I love you. And I actually don’t think that contract is so different in nature from the romantic contract, the romantic contract just tends to demand more from both people—instead of just living close, you live in the same house, instead of hanging out twice a week, you hang out every single day, you combine finances, you have to get along with each other’s family, etc.

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Are you still going to stick around even if I never learn how to properly screw caps onto bottles because there are other things about our relationship that are meaningful and functional and beautiful? Even though it’s like, how can I not manage something as simple as screwing the cap on even though you’ve told me approximately 70,000 times to do it? Am I terribly inattentive, an imbecile or worse, malicious? You’re going to wake up some mornings and think about how you could have married someone who’s not an idiot, like that girl you work with the cute lopsided upper lip who complimented your t-shirt yesterday and incidentally loves the same novelist you do, the one I denigrated recently as “hopelessly midbrow.” I’ll call this the olive oil test.

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The thing the Cut article highlighted to me was that people tend to commit to more obligations with people they’re in romantic relationships with because having sex and being in love provides a very important incentive for why two people should live together and hang out all the time and take on domestic projects together. You can of course live with and even create a family with your friend, but if the love/sex piece isn’t there, you might be eventually supplanted someone they are in love with and want to have sex with. And this of course happens in more normative marriages too, where two people may one day wake up and find that they do not in fact care that much about having a claim on the other person any more. 

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In monogamy we create these guardrails around what your partner can and can’t do with other people to minimize risk, to protect this sense of exclusivity. And in polyamory you still have guardrails (depending on the form of polyamory you practice) but they’re different. 

One thing I had to accept about myself is that I have many needs. I love spending lots of time together with the people I care about, I love to talk, I want to read constantly and discuss what I’ve read, I have a high need for and a high tolerance of stimulation. It has been hard for me to understand which of those needs I can compromise on and which are non-negotiable. Everyone says, “You can’t get everything from one person,” and I personally never thought I would. My question was more, What are the things I need to get from one consistent person? 

I think about these two Heidi Priebe tweets a lot:

Healing from avoidant attachment is not just gaining the ability to be in relationship, it’s gaining the ability to be in relationship with someone you see as your true equal and whom you don’t have significant, inherent power over. 

Healing from anxious attachment means learning to choose partners you see as your moral equal (i.e. just as much as you believe your intentions are good, pure, and loving, you genuinely believe the same of those you date).

It’s really important for me to see my partner as a moral equal. Naturally, I want to have power over them, but I also want them to have power over me. 

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I see why monogamy might not work for a lot of people. For instance, if it were really, really important to me to have sex with people who are not my romantic partner, I think it would be not only acceptable but responsible to be in an arrangement where that was permitted and encouraged. And if I didn’t want to have sex at all, I could see myself in a platonic partnership. I have friends who I would love to live with and raise kids with, and at least theoretically, I really think it would work. Of course, in practice that could be a different story, but that’s true for any kind of domestic situation. 

Though I accept that I will probably be in a monogamous romantic partnership, I am still open to and dreaming of alternate life arrangements. I think my female friends and I are lucky to be in the situation where one of the primary romances of our lives is, well, work. We love the work we do and feel excited to do it for decades ahead. I would like for marriage to be one of the cornerstones of my life, but it is okay if it is not. 

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“What is marriage for?” is a very important philosophical question even if you don’t care for philosophy at all because almost everyone not only has to confront it through the course of their lives, but has to contemplate it and ultimately take a stance.

No one believes we can solve marriage collectively, but if you don’t take a serious stab at figuring out what a partnership is for before you enter one, platonic or romantic, well, you’re in for a lot of interesting surprises.

It is probably pretty hard to pass both the passion test and the olive oil test.

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The word my therapist frequently uses when talking about love is awe. I told her that was very Buddhist of her and she laughed. I searched her up online and she’s been married for a long time, which gives me some faith.

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I don’t want to say marriage is about possession, because that’s not a very utopian thing to say. But isn’t it the basis of romance to say: I prefer you above all others, and I want you to prefer to me above all others? When a monogamously bonded prairie vole has a new vole of the opposite gender placed into its enclosure, it does not mate with the unfamiliar mole; it starts a fight. I hope that’s not too much to hope for in human romance.

If there’s anything the last few years has taught me it’s that life is long, and relationships are very deep and unpredictable. It’s hard to predict at the beginning what the end will be, and I don’t have the kind of arrogance I once did. Every day, something that someone thought would last forever falls apart. But it’s my nature to be hopeful.