I’ll second the hatred of the Marriage Takes Work mentality.  Call me crazy, but I like doing nice things for the people I care about and I like it when people I care about do nice things for me.  In my experience, it only becomes work when one or both people in a relationship just can’t be bothered anymore.  At that point, I say break up, because why bother staying with someone who considers it a chore to take you someplace nice on your birthday?

There’s a lot of racist shit surrounding the “backlash” against the Obama’s good marriage.  I think so anyway.  I watched a short video yesterday of a man on the street interview right here in NYC.  The question was “Is Obama knocking you off your game”?  or something very similar.  The premise was as you mention above; men are pissed because OBama is making them look bad.  Most of the answers were fine, but two women, a mother daughter team, both “agreed” that “Now they’re taking advantage”.  The southern accents on these two obvious tourists were noted. 

What are the OBama’s taking advantage of?  Don’t know.  It cost the same amount of money when shit-for-brains hightailed his lazy ass down the ranch, which he did all of the time.  But he was white.  Taxpayers can be expected to pick up expenses for a white president to travel/take some time off.

And there has been other shit surrounding their date nights, some right wing idiot complaining that he should take her to the neighborhood bar, etc.

A lof of it may come from right wing men, but as the dipshit mother daughter scarlett team showed, there are plenty of white women who resent a black woman with that kind of husband, with that kind of marriage, with that kind of life.

It generally does involve work to be empathetic, caring people.

Romance novels are for people who don’t want that. twu luv and all that.

Well, yeah, because you love someone doesn’t mean that common decency flies out the window.  But this is more about “working on your relationship”, and questioning why we’re such workaholics that this doesn’t raise a red flag.

I think the original point of “marriage/relationships take work” was that they take effort.  My husband and I make date night, and schedule it, and make time for each other, and we both put the effort into scheduling so that we can spend time with each other.  I see too many people thinking marriage is a magic cure, and end up doing nothing.  To paraphrase Kate Harding, there’s a married person inside you and that person is so much XX than you—happy, mature, responsible, etc.  If all you did was come home and watch tv before you got married, that’s what’s going to happen when you get married.  And it becomes easier and easier to do when you have other concerns that may seem to take precedence. 

Blech, I’m rambling, but I’m trying to make the distinction between someone who is willing to put the effort into remembering your birthday and someone who considers it “work.”

I remember as a kid feeling like the whole romantic love thing must be overrated.  I felt like a neat apartment in a cool city and a dog were pretty much all anyone could need.  I’ve come to enjoy my s.o. but I still long for the dog. 
I tend to think relationships don’t need work, the people in them sometimes do.

The thing is, when you’re dating, you don’t actually need to remember the person you’re in love with, and say, “Oh yeah, better schedule that in.”  Or make it mandatory, which I think is more to the point, since mandatory dates are redundant, since you wouldn’t miss them for the world.

I highly recommend Jessica’s summary, too—-she focuses on the way that couples are encouraged to be each other’s jailers.  It’s pretty scary, too, because you really see how it starts to seep in even if you’re not a controlling, jealous person.  Where, after all, is the line between basic respect and putting controls on someone?  It’s passive aggressive to run late and then accuse the angry person waiting of trying to control you, of course, but where does “wanting to know when they intend to be home” fall in the polite/controlling continuum?

I’m with Siobahn on this, in that I think the original intent was “it can take effort”, and as a corrective against the idea that “We’re in love! So if anything is going wrong it means it’s all over!”

You know, that mentality that says, “they didn’t read my mind, ergo they don’t really love me” that you see sometimes.

Of course, swinging it all the way over into “It’s a second job” is a disaster as well.

I don’t know.  When you marry someone, you make them your family.  Family can be a very good thing, but if you don’t put in some work—and I think scheduling a date night or just a DATE is work—then things fall apart from neglect.

The Obamas do not neglect each other or their children.  I love the story of how when Obama was working on his inauguration speech, Malia told him “It better be good.”  The first thing he did after he gave it was to go straight to Malia and ask her how he did.

Barack and Michelle hold hands They genuinely seem to like each other and love their children.  More so than W and Laura ever did…but the Obamas are black, and that makes all the difference.

Actually, I think this issue is kind of interesting…

Isn’t this emphasis on “work”, emphasizing that love isn’t natural and must be cultivated?  Love is work in the same way that bicycling or walking or typing on the computer or breathing is work.  I think this is a Nice Guy/Girl® thing, and they deliberately substitute a deliberately ambiguous formulation/definition of “work” as a mask to hide the absence of the real (magic of) relationship dynamics in their lives.

Since what is work about love is generally seeing your partner as a real person with feelings that you are partially responsible for in terms of acting and recieving.  Now that might have its ups and downs, but it’s not the 9to5 sensation.

You know, that mentality that says, “they didn’t read my mind, ergo they don’t really love me” that you see sometimes.

Heh, I really recommend reading the book instead of just rejecting and minimizing.  Kipnis address the “mind reader” thing and it’s hilarious.  Her point is that if people weren’t such needy babies always wanting their significant other to fill their needs, then this wouldn’t really be an issue.  Which cracked me up, because it’s got more than a grain of truth, especially with regards to the fantasy of intimacy, as if people were actually especially deep and needed probing and understanding.  We put too much weight on personality, which is a way of denying that we’re actually variable creatures.

Anyway, long story to say that the mind reader thing is surprisingly irrelevant in relationships where you don’t have needs you expect your partner to attend to.

When you marry someone, you make them your family.

Which is frankly one reason I’m allergic to the idea.  I don’t really want to have sex with family members.    The incest taboo runs strong in this one.

If the hets are hating marriage so much, why NOT throw it over to the gay crowd?

My husband and I have, at different points in our lives, worked excruciating hours and opposite shifts. Scheduling in a few minutes to cuddle was sometimes a big chore. But this too shall pass.

“When will you be home?” is a perfectly logical question so that dinner can be made or evenings can be planned. Not telling someone when you intend to be back is just rude. When I visit my parents, I let them know “Oh I’m meeting so and so for breakfast, we’ll be back by 11.” When I stay out of town with friends, same thing. When we’re camping in a large group situation, my kids are required to notify me before leaving our encampment, for their safety and my peace of mind.

Marriage is work. Families are work. You’re living with another person or people and that’s always work, whether spouse or roommate, parent or other relative(s).

But it doesn’t have to be drudgery.

As for romance, I may write it, but I don’t believe in it really. And One Twoo Wuv doesn’t cut it in today’s romance market, either, shah8.

It generally does involve work to be empathetic, caring people.

This.

Although I can see why this might be a bit frustrating for you, Amanda (if it is, I might be projecting), since you’ve read the entire thing and know exactly what is the argument being made vs. us latching onto the general concept and debating it.

Adultery as rebellion? Meh. It’s about as rebellious as a millionaire rock star trashing a hotel room. You can certainly argue against romantic love, though. You want to rebel against it, though, you need to avoid it altogether. I don’t know if that means no relationships, relationships only for sex, open relationships of some sort, or what.

Jessica quoting Kipnis: “You can’t leave the dishes for later, wash the dishes badly, not use soap, drink straight from the container.” She’s obviously never been to my house…

Well, there *is* Anita Blake’s 12 twoo luvs, that’s gotta push the twoo luv curve to the right some.

But’s what’s a triangle and quadrangle between friends?

Angelia Sparrow

If the hets are hating marriage so much, why NOT throw it over to the gay crowd?

A lot of the rhetoric is, indeed, that hets are graciously saving gays from the horror that is marriage. This is stated with varying degrees of disngenuousness and hypocrisy.

Well, polemics are for bomb-throwing and causing people to question their assumptions, not immediately run to defend them.  The point is the word “work” means “labor” and not “pleasure”.  Kipnis is asking an uncomfortable but necessary question—-why does life have to suck so goddamn much?  Once you buy into the idea that Marriage Is Work and all the other concurrent beliefs, such as You Have To Grow Up And Get Responsible (hint: give up that libido, ‘cause hot sex is for kids), you start to die inside.  So no wonder so many people cheat so often!  It’s a way to be alive, to borrow some of your life back. 

She makes a really good point about how much Americans are in denial about their dissatisfaction with the state of marriage—-we can’t actually speak it out loud, so our resistance must come out the corners.  Through adultery, yes, but also through humor of the “take my wife, please” variety.

befuggled, she got that part from a list of “can nots” that Kipnis cobbled together by interviewing married people.  If those aren’t yours, I guarantee you’ll find some that are. 

But if you don’t have the stomach for hyberbolic humor, this book will freak your shit too much to read.  She doesn’t leave a sacred cow unpoked.

The point is the word “work” means “labor” and not “pleasure”.  Kipnis is asking an uncomfortable but necessary question—-why does life have to suck so goddamn much?

And the answer is, it doesn’t have to suck so goddamn much as long as you don’t buy in to the various claims our society makes as to what is required to make one happy. You’ve got to find out for yourself what makes you happy. For me, in part, it involves a job that’s never going to vault me into the upper middle class but will give me almost 9 weeks off starting next Thursday night (or rather, after I grade the finals I give next Thursday). I might never drive a car made in this century, but free time is way more important to my mental health.

I know, I know. My marriage certainly has its own list.

At the same time, most of those things are best avoided by living alone. You want to avoid problems with relationships? Then avoid relationships. Or make them all short term. Live alone. Do what you want. It’s not that hard.

I think I’ll put the book on hold at the library, though.

I think marriage takes “work” in the same way that life takes work. We have to work just to take care of ourselves - schedule time for exercise, time to get out in the sunshine, etc. to maintain our own physical and mental health. Relationships are the same way. They need tending.

But I totally agree that it shouldn’t be “work” in the sense of drudgery and joyless obligation. If that were the case, I’d be totally against marriage/monogamous relationships, too.

I’d like to think by asking the hard questions, we can find a third way where we aren’t totally alone, but we aren’t also resentful about our captivity and deprived of sexual satisfaction.  But I definitely think that there’s a massive amount of pressure to avoid the hard questions, because people think love is a house of cards that will collapse if questioned.

I think marriage takes “work” in the same way that life takes work. We have to work just to take care of ourselves - schedule time for exercise, time to get out in the sunshine, etc. to maintain our own physical and mental health.

Well, exactly.  We work and work and work and work.  Why is it too much to ask for some fun?  A mental break?  Why do we keep piling on?

The point is the word “work” means “labor” and not “pleasure”.

Except that when you’re doing work that you enjoy—like, say, writing—is it really a horrible slog that you just can’t wait to get through, or is it something that you know you’re going to tear your hair out about now, but in the end you’ll be proud and pleased with it?

There are some kinds of work that you can enjoy doing, which is partly what bugs me about the whole “relationships are WORK!” meme.  Just because something takes a little work doesn’t mean the entire enterprise is a hateful brick around your neck.  I think it encourages people to stay in relationships long past their sell-by date because they think that the “work” that goes into the relationship should feel like hard labor or it doesn’t count.  If things are pretty easy and you don’t have to make huge adjustments to each other, well, that’s not real work, so clearly your relationship must suck.

It ain’t marriage for most people, it’s the other stuff. But marriage takes the blame because it’s the only part of the equation that’s expendable. Or at least portrayed that way in the wage-slave world.

If your boss assigns you more work, or you need a second job to make ends meet, where is that time and energy going to come from? Your allotment for your spouse. If you need downtime alone to recharge for whatever reason, ditto. If you have kids and don’t feel like just parking them in front of Philo Farnsworth’s Magic Box when they’re home, guess where that time/energy/reserve of tolerance comes from…

I think many, perhaps even most couples are as much in deficit on energy for all they things they need (or believe they need) to get done as they are on their credit cards. And because people love their spouses, and know their spouses love them and will understand and forgive, the nice stuff that they want to do for each other tends to go to the bottom of the list. Because bosses generally don’t understand and forgive, and seriously unsated kids are just too damn loud.

The younger loinfruit just started daycare a couple mornings a week. So what did we do? Sleep? Finish that past-deadline project? Nah. Out to lunch together for a couple of really good burgers.

Except that when you’re doing work that you enjoy—like, say, writing—is it really a horrible slog that you just can’t wait to get through, or is it something that you know you’re going to tear your hair out about now, but in the end you’ll be proud and pleased with it?

Writing is work, and I need a break from work at times.  But it’s satisfying work, because there’s end points and goals met.  The “goal” for a relationship that’s completed through your hard work is you get to die and everyone says you made it across the finish line.  That’s not really the sort of goal that I care about, no.  That’s way too close to Christianity for my tastes—-slogging through this life to get to death, living for dying.

I loved your second paragraph, Mnem.  I think one advantage that I’ve found living with someone is it goes so against the grain of the Relationships Take Work mentality.  The only way that I know, as a writer, that I’m off work is often when I unplug from the computer and plug into my man, which is officially Fun Time.

paul, I think you’d enjoy the section where Kipnis talks about how adulterers are rebels against time.

At least the dog is blissfully happy when you feed him, walk him, and scratch between his ears every so often. You don’t expect him to learn to walk on his two legs, cook dinner, and play the violin.

People who enter romantic relationships and demand “work” are passive-aggressive (Amanda’s definition of Nice Guys/Girls). They expect you to do the work: cordon bleu cooking, losing twenty pounds, getting a raise at work so you can buy a bigger house, etc.

A lot of the rhetoric is, indeed, that hets are graciously saving gays from the horror that is marriage.

Now that one I’ve never heard. I thought pretty much all the people who truly oppose gay marriage wanted us to get into straight marriages, because straight marriage is holy and sacred and the only real path to happiness, so it needs as many hypocritical supporters as it can get.

who wants your love affair to be work?  It wasn’t work when you got into it.

wtf? Of course it was work, it just wasn’t hard work. By the same token, friendship is “work.” Any time you have to resolve a conflict between two individuals there is “work.” I’d be the first to admit that the term work can have misleading connotations vis-a-vis relationships and can be overapplied, but pretending that managing conflicts of interest isn’t work is a gross error. Again, friendship is work. However, friendship usually doesn’t involve significant amounts of sex or money, so it’s profoundly less effort to enjoy than any romantic relationship is.

I’m not talking about treating the other in the relationship with empathy or buying presents or being romantic—if that’s “work” then the relationship is already failing. I’m talking about resolving conflicts.

They speak to audiences through their dissatisfaction with the matrimonial prison.  And they do it well—-Helms’ girlfriend is like a sum total of every complaint about having your wings clipped by marriage that Kipnis gathers from a multitude of friends.

If a given marriage is shite, it’s not because society is insisting on making it shite, it’s because many married people create contracts for themselves that they can’t live up to. Marriage is two creatures—the personal contract between the couple and the contract the couple has with the state. The latter doesn’t mean a damn thing in the context of this discussion. The former means whatever the couple says it means. If marriage is a hardship for most Americans, that just means most Americans shouldn’t be married. (Obviously, the bennies the government gives to marrieds need to be unpacked, but many of those would be unfair no matter how mature Americans were about getting married.)

The details of Obama’s marriage are pointless beyond fucking belief and are as irrelevant and distracting as any celebrity gossip.

The “goal” for a relationship that’s completed through your hard work is you get to die and everyone says you made it across the finish line.

That pretty much describes all of life, though.  I mean, very few people reach the top of their profession and then immediately die.  Why not spend at least some of it with a partner?

What can I say, I like to rehabilitate words and “work” is one that’s been bugging me for a while (and not only in a relationships context).  When did we decide that “work” had to be actively unpleasant and soul-devouring in order to be real work?  My job has its sucky aspects, but it also has some really interesting ones.  It’s annoying to be the assistant and constantly on the periphery of the fun stuff, but it’s still very cool to watch (and assist from the sidelines) a museum exhibit being put together.  Unfortunately, like Incertus said, I have to take a crap wage in order to have this interesting work.

wtf? Of course it was work, it just wasn’t hard work. By the same token, friendship is “work.” Any time you have to resolve a conflict between two individuals there is “work.”

My friendships and romances have never started in a place of conflict.  If I conflict with a friend or a lover, it’s usually not big enough of a deal to constitute “work”.  If it becomes that big of a deal, there you are, working again.  Which you’re required to do, or you’re a lazy SOB.

It’s funny seeing people deliberately misread this, because hey, we’ve all bought into it so much!  But it’s a valuable and necessary thing to say—-why are we so hostile to the idea of playful, easy relationships between people.  Why must it be endless conflict resolution, needs-meeting, work work work?  I’ve found, through experience, that if I’m conflicting with someone to the point where I’m actually working, something better give.  Either our investment in the conflict, or the relationship.

It’s actually a huge relief not to have a bunch of needs you put on someone else, and therefore you don’t have a lot of conflicts with them. 

mean, very few people reach the top of their profession and then immediately die.  Why not spend at least some of it with a partner?

Well, yeah, spend it with a lover.  Or on a hobby.  Or having fun with friends!  Or staring into space.  I’m arguing that we shouldn’t be working all the goddamn time.  Meaningful work is a lovely thing, but even meaningful work is a horror story if that’s all there is to life.  And the police state/love is work reality of marriage—-the reality, not our fondest hopes—-feeds right into that.  The idea that one should always be working on it, conflict resolving and needs meeting and compromise reaching and intimacy exercises and blegh.  Seriously, Kipnis has a great point.  Most relationships start off as pleasure, and end (or worse don’t) in the work zone.  But the sacred cow of Relationships Take Work prevents anyone from asking if it has to suck so badly.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people here who have easy-going relationships have already rebelled against the dictates.  I thought about it, and yeah, I think about how I go out by myself all the time, and it’s no big thing, but that sort of thing would be considered a Major Issue requiring Relationship Work for so many other people.

That may take effort, mainly because many people find it difficult to drag themselves away from their “obligations” to make time for the person they sleep next to each night.

If I found myself in that position, I’d seriously have trouble forgetting that it was never hard to make my lover a priority when we were first dating, and it was exciting and I couldn’t wait to see him.

Thank you Amanda. I thought I was the only one that found the spouse as family idea creepy. I’ve never said anything because I thought I must have an overly sensitive creep out response since I’ve never heard anyone else express it.

I’ll have to check the book out of the library. I dug a couple of interviews, and fortunately she sounds more interesting than your description of the book. I’m pretty skeptical, though. One quoted her as saying: “What’s interesting to me in this context about adultery is that it’s a way of registering dissatisfaction and protest in the absence of there really being public or official ways to think about alternatives.”

There are no public alternatives? If you’re not satisfied with your marriage, if your marriage is too much work, there has long been an “official” way to protest it: leave your spouse. People get divorced all the time, and it’s often (probably usually) for the better. I can’t think of a more clear-cut way to say it.

I suspect part of what makes adultery appealing is that adultery really cuts out the boring parts of the relationship. First of all, most relationships are better at the beginning than they are later on. In an affair, you rarely get past this phase. Second, you miss all the little irritations that come up because you don’t live with the person you’re having the affair with. There’s no opportunity for them to skimp on housework, steal your tooth brush, or whatever else irritates you about your spouse. Third, you don’t have any joint decisions to make except where to meet next.  Finally, a lot of the crazy things you have to do in order to get together is spontaneous and fun (which is I assume at least in part where that “rebels against time” line comes from). So of course in many ways that’s more appealing than marriage or other long-term monogamous relationships. I just don’t think it’s an honest way to live.

By the way, I get a kick out of thinking of famous “rebels against time” like Joey Buttafuoco and Newt Gingrich.

There are no public alternatives? If you’re not satisfied with your marriage, if your marriage is too much work, there has long been an “official” way to protest it: leave your spouse.

She talks about serial monogamy, which is what you’re suggesting, as a typical liberal (instead of radical) response—-make minor changes to relieve tension without changing the basic structures.  Her argument, which is tongue-in-cheek, is that adulterers aren’t happy to make moves that are essentially another flavor of joyless work. Adultery is the prankster response, mucking things up for the joy of disorder, instead of the Official Adult method of responsibly and tediously ending your marriage.

She’s not wrong, really.  A lot of people cheat because they don’t know what they want, and fucking shit up forces the issue. 

I suspect part of what makes adultery appealing is that adultery really cuts out the boring parts of the relationship. First of all, most relationships are better at the beginning than they are later on.

Kipnis would argue, no doubt, that this is just the way things are, and instead of lying to ourselves or joylessly deciding to subsume our basic desire for pleasure and excitement, we should accept that love is brief and change our institutions to suit that, instead of pretending you can love a person at length.

here’s no opportunity for them to skimp on housework, steal your tooth brush, or whatever else irritates you about your spouse.

The sheer pettiness of this sort of thing is something this book really caused me to think about.  Personally, I’m pretty hard to irritate.  But a lot of people aren’t, and so you have to ask if it’s really worth all the soul-sucking negotiation?  Life’s too short to get angry about toothbrushes.

I just don’t think it’s an honest way to live.

Vague.  It involves lying to others, but it’s more honest, for the people who do it, to their desires.

Her one hat tip to diversity is this—-some people desire monogamy.  It’s just that we can’t tell who they’d be, since it’s forced on most of us.  Internalized, really.

By the way, on the Skeptic’s Guide podcast some months ago, I heard a study that showed that a small percentage, something like 10%, of couples are still “in love” after years together.  That is, their brain activity at thinking of or seeing their S.O. was the same as it was at the beginning of the relationship.  So, there is variation there, but the sense that love dies for most people isn’t wrong. The question in my mind is whether some people are just made to stay in love, or if it’s a matter of making the right match.

If you want to raise kids, household formation is a big deal.  If you don’t, it isn’t.  I’m not sure why one has to make this more complicated than it is.

Households are economic constructs.  Sex and love aren’t.

That’s an interesting point, and raises the question of whether or not people would be happier if households constructed around child-rearing were separated from sex and love.  It’s not set in stone that people take relationships built on fun and escape and turn them into child-rearing partnerships based around shared duties instead of love.

I guess I’ve never thought of “work” in the context of relationships—platonic or romantic, familial or non-familial—as drudgery or antithetical to joy, fun, nurturing, or pleasure.  Then again, I’ve never faced pressure from family or friends to seek out marriage relationships, or penalized by the people I’m in close relationships with for not following the normative expectations of dating or marriage. 

I suppose if people are seeing “work” as something horrible, I should re-think my vocabulary on this one.  I, personally, find it deeply satisfying to muck about in the complications of relational intimacy and think about how people with different background experiences and expectations can communicate and care for each other. The effort of doing that is, for me, inextricable from the pleasure of intimacy.  I don’t think of that as negative energy-sapping work, I think of it as creative, constructive production of something immensely valuable to me—something in which I feel grounded, valued, nurtured, and can value and nurture in return. 

Which is something that can happen within or outside of a legally or socially recognized marriage. In or outside family relationships. 

I think it’s indicative of the powerful construction in our culture of a “work” vs. “leisure” or “work” vs. “private” divide that we automatically see things labeled “work” as a joyless duty and construct those things over which we have choice and control as not-work, the opposite-of-work.  I guess I resist that formulation of categories, and would like to think of the work that I do as (ideally) as true to who I am and what I find pleasure in as the not-work, whether inside a sexual relationship, platonic relationship, or in other areas of my life altogether.

I’ve never understood the ways in which working on your marriage is supposed to be any different or more onerous than working on any other relationship in your life.  I agree that the verbiage is perhaps unfortunate - in another social context, where we weren’t, as someone said, wage slaves, but work was widely conceived as something that could be challenging and effort-demanding but also satisfying and enjoyable in its own right, and not just for the money it created…in that context maybe “working on a relationship” wouldn’t be such a dreadful phrase.  Also I should note that maybe I’m not a great sample of the average modern human because I’m quite depressed and socializing-averse, so normal “easy, fun” things like “hanging out with friends” is work for me.  My first impulse (and my second through seventh) is going to be to stay home and be alone, but the fact is that much of my alone time is miserable time, and much of my friend time is happy time, so I need to work (gasp!) to be happy.  That’s not necessarily the norm of human behavior, though I do note that there seem to be a lot of depressed people around.  But anyway...all my relationships are better when I “work” at them, which I conceive of as “remember to respond to their email, make the effort to call them up and ask if they want to do something, don’t go forever without contact.”  My relationships with my friends, my relationship with my dad, all flourish when I put in “work”.  And I’m happier when I put in the “work”.  So for me, at least, working is what keeps me from being miserable most of the time.  I don’t see why a romantic relationship is supposed to be different.  (I, at least, have been a failure in my few attempts at having a completely superficial, “fun” relationship, and those have wound up as much uglier situations for me than my “serious” relationships have, but again that might just be me.)  But living with people, romantically or no, can be just a huge pain in the ass.

As anecdata, my only model for a “successful” multi-decade marriage is my parents, who married each other at 18 and 21 and stayed that way until my mom died almost 28 years later.  My mother was severely depressed, and dysfunctional, and not an easy person to be in a relationship with (romantic or filial), and my father’s response was to become passive aggressive, which drove her up the damn wall.  When it was bad, it was very bad, and they came close to divorce three times.  But when it was good, it was excellent, like people assuming they were giggly newlyweds excellent.  I hope I’m never in a relationship as troubled as theirs was, but I’d be very lucky to be in a relationship as loving as theirs was, thirty years on.

I suppose if people are seeing “work” as something horrible,

Even if I believe work is a good thing—-and I enjoy my work—-I strenuously object to the idea that I should be happy to do it all the time.  Sorry.  Everyone needs a break, and if you leave work to work more, you will start to die inside.

agree that the verbiage is perhaps unfortunate - in another social context, where we weren’t, as someone said, wage slaves, but work was widely conceived as something that could be challenging and effort-demanding but also satisfying and enjoyable in its own right, and not just for the money it created…in that context maybe “working on a relationship” wouldn’t be such a dreadful phrase.

No, I disagree strongly.  You can enjoy your work immensely, but it’s still work and it’s still draining.  Sometimes even more so because you’re dedicated.

But love, when it’s passionate and fun, is energizing and not work at all.  When it drifts into work—-even if you convince yourself it’s pleasurable work, because goals and intimacy (which is a concept that Kipnis skewers beautifully), etc.—-then you have to ask why.  Why work all the time?  There are things we see as actual fun, not work.  Going to shows, playing games, etc.  They take effort, but rarely do we drag ourselves to therapy to “work” on these things.

Sorry to add to my overlong comment, but in the midst of rewriting, my stated concept of “work” in a relationship of any sort got rather thin.  I would’ve added something which covered the notion that left to my own devices I can be kind of a solipsistic bastard when it comes to my personal interactions, and sometimes it takes an extra (or initial) effort for me to really engage with someone and come out of my shell - to be dependable, to really enter into a meaningful conversation, to remember not to live life inside my own small head, basically.  For me, at least, this is both serious work and a minor victory when I get it right, and it’s not just for my romantic relationships.

Even if I believe work is a good thing—-and I enjoy my work—-I strenuously object to the idea that I should be happy to do it all the time.  Sorry.  Everyone needs a break, and if you leave work to work more, you will start to die inside.

I hear what you’re saying, Amanda, and I don’t disagree, really.  I guess I just don’t see work as exclusively “paid employment” or “vocation” or as any one single thing. I think of it in more general terms as something that is effortful, or requiring mindfulness rather than something one can do without conscious consideration or without practice. 

I also don’t think, personally, of “relationships take work” as meaning “relationships ARE work, full stop.”  To me, the work/effort is bound together, holistically, with all of the other facets of a dynamic relationship—including breaks, including pleasure that is so second-nature to the parties involved that it requires no conscious deliberation. 

I just think the work/play dichotomy is an unhelpful binary.  But I realize this is only my own experience talking . . . and that for other personalities, it might help to have more separate compartments for one and the other . . .

I think what I was fumbling towards when I was talking about imagining a different connotation for work really extended beyond the idea that work is primarily conceived of as the thing I do for money, and when I come home to my at-the-moment hypothetical partner, I need to do more of the same thing I did from 8:30-?:?? for money.  There are things that I find passively enjoyable - reading, listening to music, watching TV - but most of those pursuits are more rewarding to me, most of the time, when I work at them.  I enjoy a TV show that demands my thought and patience and emotional engagement more than Law & Order, though I will watch a marathon in comatose contentment.  But as much if not more than those things I enjoy recreational activities that call on me to be active somehow - writing, playing music, exercising (well, some aspects of exercising are fun, and some aspects are “do this, you fat fuck, you don’t want to stay fat, do you?”).  And I need to work at them, because, to pick music, I have more fun playing it the better I get at it, but that means sitting down and working on my chops and improving my ear and lifting stuff off records.  Sometimes that work is more fun than other times, but it’s necessary for me be able to enjoy myself more fully in the long run, and I don’t begrudge it.  And part of the point here is that all of these kinds of work are different, and tax me in different ways, so if you lead a balanced life, you don’t really get tired of “working” - the things I do for fun wouldn’t be fun if I did them all the time, no matter what they were, up to and including being with a loved one, so I need balance.  (In theory - I don’t lead a balanced life, so who am I to say?)  And sometimes you need to do nothing at all, but for me nothing at all really meant nothing at all, which can be more enjoyable with a partner than alone, but isn’t the “fun” part of the relationship either.  I dunno.  When people talk about “date night” as “work” I see what they’re saying, but the work isn’t being on the date, which would probably be a sign that you need to get out of that situation asap, but making the commitment to the date, and I’ve never gotten why that’s supposed to be such a chore, whether or not it counts as work.

Those are useful ideas, but I think it’s more useful to push back against the idea that we should always be working, and therefore finding ways to rationalize work on things that would make us so much happier as a break from work.  Expanding the definition of work allows us to avoid asking the harder questions, particularly those about why we’re so wed to the idea that relationships must meet certain goals, and that people in relationships should bend to relationships, instead of relationships bending to meet people.

Also, the balanced life and all that is the sort of responsibility/drudgery that Kipnis delightfully rebels against.  I love it, really.  Americans really are obsessed with responsibility, obligations, meeting needs, finding balance, perfection, etc.  I’m as much a victim as anyone, but I’ve got a strong streak of wanting some excess in my life and I’m happy to hear someone voice some objections to the immense guilt trip about avoiding excessive pleasure that risks putting everything off balance.

God, one more thing to add—-medrawt, the difference between instruments and TV shows and love is that love is demonstrably more rewarding for most people in the beginning, before it becomes work, and you rush to see your lover, and you don’t have to work at it, because there’s nothing in the world that could distract you from all-night conversations.  So, it’s really not the same.

My friend’s dad sold tools for a living.  Her mother and father were very devout Christians, and took their marriage seriously.

I will never forget the sign on their fridge: MARRIAGES ARE NOT MADE IN HEAVEN.  They come in a kit and have to be assembled!

My marriage thought: living in MA as I do, I want everybody to know that I can’t see living in a state without equal marriage.  That’s because PRIVILEGE marriage isn’t real marriage, because it diminishes the value of my marriage through it’s unearned discrimination.  No.  I want to have an EQUAL marriage because it is the only fully democratic marriage and therefore the only real marriage.  Privilege marriage is a sham.

I’m, personally, a big fan of the idea that relationships should bend to meet people, and that we’ve got a very restricted, almost perversely restricted, set of modes into which socially acceptable relationships can be categorized.  One of my most valuable intellectual courses in college was a course on Foucault, which was valuable for a variety of reasons, but what I took away from it most directly was Foucault’s desire to question our concept of what kinds of relationships people can have with each other - and pointing out simultaneously how ingrained they are, to the point that they’re codified in our legal system and difficult to circumnavigate or innovate against, and also how historically contingent they are.  I’ll also say that I individually am probably more small-c conservative by inclination than my intellectual aspirations for society are, so I personally am relatively ok with the small and restricted set of relationship types we have available right now.  Who knows, maybe the world would open up for me if it were different.

But look for example: I wouldn’t have said “expanding the definition of work” because that makes it sound like the kind of phenomenon sociologists talk about where work takes over our lives, and/or we make work the focus of our life, as in the canard that our grandparents went to jobs they hated but did for money and then came home and derived enjoyment from other things, whereas we (because “we” always means “degreed professionals who work in an office”) never get to come home, so we need to pretend we derive enjoyment from our jobs…that’s not what I’m talking about.  I was trying for a reconceptualization of the word “work,” or perhaps saying I wanted to use a different and more apt word, but I couldn’t make one available in the time allotted me; the definition I was trying to suggest is in some ways antithetical to the reality of what I, personally, happen to do during the daylight hours that we call “work”.  Maybe the distinction isn’t meaningful or helpful for you and/or others, but it (seems?) meaningful to me.

That’s an interesting point, and raises the question of whether or not people would be happier if households constructed around child-rearing were separated from sex and love.  It’s not set in stone that people take relationships built on fun and escape and turn them into child-rearing partnerships based around shared duties instead of love.

Anyone see George Friedman’s book The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century?  Part of his projection is a continued social conflict due to differences in how relationships and marriage are viewed by most of the population (which is changing) in contrast to how they are viewed by traditionalists, who more and more will be restricted to religious fundamentalists.

His arguments are that we’ve (at least in part of the world) decoupled a woman’s economic fortune from marriage, so it isn’t a critical necessity for her as marriage isn’t the only way to secure her future, and that we’re well on the way to decoupling it from reproduction.  People are generally having fewer kids and there are more options which allow the parents (most importantly, the mother) to not have to devote all her time to caring for them, giving up her own life in the process.  Children therefore take up a significantly lower proportion of an adult’s life.

He concludes that with marriage becoming more something choose to do because of emotional reasons instead of being forced into it do to economic or social reasons, there’s no justifiable reason to stop gay marriage because two partners can have strong emotional ties to each other regardless of their sex.  But because marriage is based on emotion, peoples’ emotions can change, and with it decoupling from personal economics and reproduction, there’s less reason for two people falling out of love to stick it out.  He figures that serial monogamy is going to be an even bigger part of the social structure for most people, with a decreasing percentage of the population thinking of marriage as a lifelong commitment.

Growing up it seemed like every woman in my family gave me the “marriages are hard work” speech.  From what I could tell, these women were MISERABLE. 
“You think it’s going to be easy, but it’s not.  It takes WORK everyday.”
Um, yeah.  Didn’t really sell me on that there, Auntie.

Well, exactly.  We work and work and work and work.  Why is it too much to ask for some fun?  A mental break?  Why do we keep piling on?

I realize this is a sign of how pathetic my life is, but I view even the planning of fun to be work. I love doing fun things with family and friends, but I definitely find the process of coordinating schedules and making plans to be work. Maybe it’s my tendency toward introversion or my struggles with depression, but I have to make specific efforts to get myself out of my head and out of my house and have fun.

All that said, I do get what you’re saying. If a relationship loses that joy from the beginning and becomes all “work,” that’s just a tragedy.

My friendships and romances have never started in a place of conflict.

I have to throw another wtf out there. What relationship does? A conflict (in this context) is a pragmatic problem that two partners have a difference of view on how to solve. If your spouse thinks a second job is the way to handle the current financial problems you and s/he endure and you think the answer is to cut household spending, voila, there’s a conflict. Resolving it takes work. The work need not cause suffering, or bloodshed, or screaming, and it may even involve jokes and smiles, but it’s still work. That’s why friendship requires far less work: there are fewer pragmatic problems associated with friendship. (Unless you’re in business with your friend, in which case—work again).

Why must it be endless conflict resolution. . .

I don’t see where this exaggeration is coming from; our society doesn’t necessarially believe that marriage = endless conflict resolution. Many people suffer from the opposite delusion, that a therapist or guru or technique will end all pragmatic conflicts in a marriage for ever and ever amen.

This is one of those times where I’m just not buying it.  I think you are working (ha!) way too hard to make the work/not-work distinction when it comes to relationships.  I agree with the comment above that ALL relationships are work (i.e. require effort), even at the beginning.  Did you make time in your schedule to go out with the new love-interest, did you call them just to say hello, did you put effort into looking nice, did you consider nice things you could do for that person, when you saw a book they’d love did you buy it?  That’s all effort—work—to build intimacy.  That it was easy and didn’t require a lot of deliberation does not make it not-work.  As relationships progress and you grow comfortable with another person’s presence, it takes a bit more effort to ensure you don’t take them for granted. In addition, seeing someone all the time will eventually produce conflict, which requires effort to resolve so as to avoid establishing bad communication habits.  So you schedule date nights to avoid the “epiphany” moment of realizing you aren’t spending enough time with your partner (which is often the time when problems have developed around the lack of attention).  That’s not drudgery; it’s protecting something important to you with some extra effort.  Having a healthy relationship, like any skill one develops, requires practice. 

Me, personally, things that are effortless bore me to tears and make me quickly lose my interest. Things that are effortless require no passion because there is no challenge and I don’t feel anything important is at stake.  And I identify strongly with medrawt’s take on why for some of us relationships of any sort require effort, but that effort is worthwhile and makes us happier.  Without the effort, I’d withdraw into my own head and be miserable because that is my personality—I am a natural introvert which makes intimacy work no matter what the circumstance.  Even a purely sexual relationship is effort for me.

Now, a BAD relationship takes a huge amount of effort. It is drudgery. And sadly, it is too often the type of relationship which produces the “It takes work everyday” (said without humor or with a hard edge).  I do agree with Amanda that adultery becomes a form of rebellion in a society that persistently assumes that couples divorce for frivolous reasons (most especially women) and have not thought it through. In these circumstances, one has to create a “reason” to leave a failed marriage.

I realize this is a sign of how pathetic my life is, but I view even the planning of fun to be work. I love doing fun things with family and friends, but I definitely find the process of coordinating schedules and making plans to be work. Maybe it’s my tendency toward introversion or my struggles with depression, but I have to make specific efforts to get myself out of my head and out of my house and have fun.

Phoebe, I just wanted to chime in as a fellow introvert/depression sufferer and say that I know EXACTLY how you feel.  It’s not pathetic, it’s just harder for some people.

So, at the least, us seriously depressed people need to “work” so much anyway that working on a relationship isn’t any added burden! ... do we win?

It’s funny seeing people deliberately misread this, because hey, we’ve all bought into it so much!  But it’s a valuable and necessary thing to say—-why are we so hostile to the idea of playful, easy relationships between people.  Why must it be endless conflict resolution, needs-meeting, work work work?

Yeah, no kidding. In my experience, people who talk up the fact that relationships take “work” are trying to justify staying in bad ones. When you’re in a good one, there might be issues you have to resolve because the importance of the relationship exceeds the difficulty of the relatively minor stumbling block, but if two people need to constantly “work” to get along, then you’re doing something wrong.

So, at the least, us seriously depressed people need to “work” so much anyway that working on a relationship isn’t any added burden! ... do we win?

I’ve never been diagnosed as “seriously depressed,” but I was always used to situations in which doing things and learning things was difficult and took work to figure out and get right. So it seemed natural that relationships would be this way, too, until suddenly I woke up and thought to myself, “wait a sec. This isn’t like calculus. This isn’t one of those ‘suffering is good for you’ situations.”

I think I’d need to read the book. I kind of agree with history_mom here that Amanda is trying way too hard to make this distinction, but then she’s read the book and we haven’t and so she may be arguing from a far clearer place than we think - we just don’t have the same reference point.

I also think a lot of this is semantic quibbling over what work means.

I said before I think the “it takes work” stuff comes from a place of reaction to the people who say “If you can’t read my mind and give me what I want, you must not love me”.

Your answer to that confused me a bit. It sounded like you thought I thought people should be mind readers. Or maybe not.  Or maybe that she and you are arguing that no one has needs unless they are neurotic, or should never expect their lover to in any way attend to their needs or something.

I’d like to think the book and you are arguing that this idea people have that “I’ll be in a couple, then that person will meet all my needs!” is at the heart of the delusional mind reading thing and a source of endless pain and misery, because I can get behind that.

So I’m tempted to read it, just to see what she’s actually saying, because I suspect the little filtered glimpses we’re getting through you aren’t enough context. (She is currently sounding like many of the more annoying Poly people I know, or the “radical honesty” crowd, or the faux buddhists, or libertarians, or any other number of people whose philosophy comes down to “any obligation on my time, attention, or emotions ever is an infringement of my autonomy”.)

Tyro, I think you missed what I was saying with that sad little attempt at a joke.  It’s not work for me to figure out what to do in a relationship (familial, friendly, romantic), it’s work for me to do the things I know I should be doing.  What happens if I don’t forcibly change my own behavior is that I don’t socialize, with anyone, ever.  The best relationship I’ve ever been in was nearly sabotaged, by me, in the early stages when everything was supposed to be peachy and impetuous, because I was letting my depression (which, actually, was at its most severe point ever, at the time) stop me from spending time with her, in favor of sitting by myself in my room.

This is really a sidebar to what I was saying earlier about trying to reconceptualize what “work” means if we’re going to talk about “working” on a relationship instead of finding a more felicitous verb, but I think this discussion has been somewhat hampered by what appear to be some wildly differing impressions of what “work” is supposed to mean in this context.  I wholeheartedly agree that if you need to “work” to “get along,” you’re doing something wrong.  If a guy needs to say daily affirmations like “Remember I love my wife, remember to give her a hug and a kiss and ask her about her day, remember I love my wife, remember how happy I am,” that’s ... probably a big problem.  What, especially in the context of the Obamas which started this thing off, I take “work” to mean is that these are two extremely busy people.  They were both busy professionals long before Obama was a national politician.  That eats a lot of time.  They have two young children.  That eats a lot of time.  I can see how it would be easy for two people with full schedules and tons of obligations to drift away from doing the things that drove the relationship in the first place because “there isn’t any time.”  It’s not about “reminding [themselves] that they love each other” - a functional couple doesn’t need the reminder, one hopes - it’s about ensuring that external obligations don’t completely overwhelm the relationship that exists just between the two of them.  Hence, if they actually have “date night,” e.g., the commitment that no matter what this space of time is carved out just for them, because if it’s not planned for then on any given occasion it can get overwhelmed by the thought that “we could put it off, I really ought to work late,” or “the kids want to go see a movie tonight, we should all do that as a family,” or what have you.  Not to presume I know anything about the Obamas’ private life, of course.

  Hence, if they actually have “date night,” e.g., the commitment that no matter what this space of time is carved out just for them, because if it’s not planned for then on any given occasion it can get overwhelmed by the thought that “we could put it off, I really ought to work late,” or “the kids want to go see a movie tonight, we should all do that as a family,” or what have you.

I would agree that this kind of “work” is helpful. In that sense, it means “pay heed to your relationship and your spouse rather than anything else.” I wouldn’t call it “working” on your relationship as much as “giving attention” to it.

I tend to agree with Amanda on this one. Even if the word “work” in the context of a relationship can be technically correct, too often the word is used to justify staying in a bad relationship.

That it was easy and didn’t require a lot of deliberation does not make it not-work.  As relationships progress and you grow comfortable with another person’s presence, it takes a bit more effort to ensure you don’t take them for granted. In addition, seeing someone all the time will eventually produce conflict, which requires effort to resolve so as to avoid establishing bad communication habits.  So you schedule date nights to avoid the “epiphany” moment of realizing you aren’t spending enough time with your partner…That’s not drudgery; it’s protecting something important to you with some extra effort.  Having a healthy relationship, like any skill one develops, requires practice.

I agree, and will add that part of the “work” in marriage is simply to preserve a basic level of tact and good manners, no matter how well you know the other person or how comfortable you are with him. It’s vitally important to maintain a certain level of respect, as opposed to taking a spouse for granted and saying potentially hurtful things to him you’d never dare utter to a *new* love interest or even a co-worker.

More established relationships may also take work merely because the circumstances surrounding them have become more complex – kids, aging parents who need additional care, financial difficulties and so on. For as much as our society talks about marriage as the platform for a long-term romantic connection, this institution is still about greater economic stability. 

I think, then, that respect is a more important part of marriage than romantic love: Respect is a choice, whereas noun-love is the sort of thing that ebbs and flows and can’t always be brought back through an act of will.

There’s nothing wrong with partnering for fun, so long as both parties know that’s the basis for the relationship. But a lot of things that happen to individuals aren’t fun. Long stretches of life can suck. Partnerships based on “fun” will either dissolve pretty quickly in the face of that, or change in nature such that “having a good time” is no longer the basis. (And for people who don’t anticipate that sort of transformation, the result can be a cancerous kind of bitterness.)

I think the best relationships are those where mutual pleasure is the goal regardless of circumstance, and where each party is committed to making a space for the other to be comfortable and feel respected and valued no matter what is happening beyond the front door (e.g., at word). Such relationships are pretty elastic: they stretch to meet new demands, but always return to their former shape – the fun shape – when the stress has been remediated.

Dealing with these stressors and either removing them or mitigating the potential damage – well, that also takes work, whether a person is going it alone or with a partner.

I’d say a successful relationship is less about “hard work” and more about tolerance and ignoring unpleasant things about your partner while highlighting the nicer ones.  Beyond that, if you can find a mate who laughs at your shit and you can laugh at theirs, that’s a keeper. 

Probably not the most pithy and incisive thing ever written on Pandagon, but it’s the best I can offer.  /shrug

In all this talk about marriage and what kind of work it does or doesn’t take to maintain one, the one word I haven’t seen is “friendship.”  Romantic love is all well and good and awesome, but I’ve always believed that liking your spouse is the key to longevity.  I’ve been married for almost eleven years and I consider my husband to be my best friend, as he considers me his.  We like hanging out together and we laugh at silly shit like DonnaDiva above me notes.  He can drive me crazy and I know I can do the same for him, but in the end we accept each other for who we are. 

Oh—and it helps that we don’t have kids. 

Amanda,

How does your stance in this post (relationships shouldn’t have to be work) reconcile with your support of the relationship advice in the Cog Psych book Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me (you should make it a point to say “I love you” to your SO, because then you’re more likely to believe it)?

Yo that Kipnis book was really good.

I wish that our society would get past this perfect ideal of having one partner over a lifetime.  I think that if a relationship is over, then we should just let it be over and move on with our lives and not feel like we failed at our life’s mission or something.  Before someone says, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”, I think it’s better for children to have divorced happy parents instead of two miserable parents who stay to together out of a sense of obligation.  I think of love the same way I think of friendship.  Sometimes it lasts a lifetime, and many times it doesn’t.  I think it would be silly for me to make an effort to have the same best friend for life, if we grow apart or develop different interests.  I’d love to have a life-long friend if it works out that way, but I don’t see any point in forcing the friendship just to feel like accomplished something.

Also, we should be really careful about judging other people’s marriages based on appearances.  While I hope for their sake that the Obamas have a good marriage, just as I wish everyone a good marriage, we really can’t know completely what’s going on.

I’m fortunate enough to enjoy my professional work. It’s not something I want to be doing 24/7, but I like it—it’s satisfying in and of itself, not just because it pays the bills.

That as prelude to the fact that the work involved in marriage (and indeed live-in relationships) is not the kind of work I enjoy. As for results, well: I date (without expectation that this is “going somewhere”); I have boon companions (some female, some of those friends “with benefits”); I have family who care about my welfare as I care for their welfare; on any given week I spend quality time with young children who are genuinely pleased to see me. The “work” involved in getting those results fits my personal cost-benefit comfort zone better, doesn’t impact my independence or options, and carries with it a minimum of unnecessary drama. That’s what works for me, personally—I wouldn’t claim it works for anyone else.

I’m not opposed to the concept of marriage in general—although most of the ones I witness are miserable or dissolved, the good ones (and this includes one “marriage of convenience”) seem to make both partners/friends/lovers pretty damned happy, despite the work (or perhaps because they enjoy the work, or because the simple courtesy and consideration for others that some couples consider “work” is already part of their character). The love and lust is there, but they’re given equal billing with friendship and household-building (and often business/career-building) partnership. Good on them.

In regard to same-sex marriage, I usually turn the “graciously saving gays from marriage” formula (usually promulgated by married people trapped in miserable relationships) on its head: “Why shouldn’t GLBT folks be allowed to enter into the same high-risk, life-long, potentially disastrous contracts that straights can enter into?”

In the end, I’m opposed to the state conferring special partnership privileges on a very narrow definition of “family” and, of course, to all the societal pressures to enter into marriage and then put in all sorts of mandatory work (which really boils down to serious and on-going sacrifice of independence and personal desire) to preserve it come hell or high water—especially since society itself generates a lot of that hell and high water with its other demands.

But you really need to connect to those feelings regularly and attend to those times when you can renew them.

Well, I also hope that I’m not just hanging around trying to revive a memory, either.  My point was that I have to work at feeling that sort of affection, if I have to dig around in a memory or strain myself to feel excited and happy and like I’m on vacation when I’m with my lover, than that’s work.  Which our culture teaches us is a good thing, and I enjoy questioning that strongly.  We work most of the time, so I’m happy to resist turning that into all of the time.

history_mom at 12:59:

<blocquote>Having a healthy relationship, like any skill one develops, requires practice. </blockquote>

Oi vey.

I’m afraid that sentence encapsulates for me all that’s wrong with the “institution” of marriage. And also a lot of what’s wrong with goal-oriented, managerial, ROI-obsessed, Anglo-Saxon capitalist, linear Western society.

I mean, skills? Srsly? Skills are things like touch typing, or making a perfect soufflee. Reducing basic human interactions to skills is just so… Joyless. As in, why would you bother?

Yes, there’s mindfulness and thoughtfulness and effort sometimes, and basic decency and politeness and being a decent human being all the time. But “work”, in the sense of an ongoing project that requires “skills” to “manage”? Oi vey.

In fact:

Neko Onna at 01:16:

Marriage is work. The traditional idea of marriage was to form a home economy, not to create an ideal platform for love.

Haha, exactly this! Yes yes yes. Not only that, but seeing as people no longer need a lifelong economic partner, nor can they rely on keeping the one they think they’ve got, isn’t it time we waved bye bye to marriage in the first place?

I’ve commented here before that the myriad complex relationships that people have with each other - familial, parental, economic, financial - can be codified and regulated with the legal instruments we already have, untangling them from the clusterfuck that is “marriage” and freeing people from the unreasonable burden of practical and emotional expectations that we place on them when they enter into a long term partnership. And once you’ve done that, relationships will become simpler and hopefully require fewer “skills” to be survivable on a day-to-day basis.

befuggled on at 08:52:

At the same time, most of those things are best avoided by living alone. You want to avoid problems with relationships? Then avoid relationships.

Whoa whoa whoa - I strongly object to the idea that relationship = cohabitation, or whatever other implicit assumption is at the bottom of that statement.

Washing somebody else’s socks and taking turns with them to do the dishes does not a relationship make. I resent the fact that my partner has just been written out of my life just because his shirts don’t take up space in my wardrobe.

You can have partnership, and intimacy, and love and sex and pleasure and quality time, without living in the same house. Maybe if people found it easier to accept that, fewer good relationships would be prematurely stifled out of existence by stupid territorial conflicts.

My boss got his head bitten off today for saying “oh I just assumed you and your boyfriend lived together, because that’s what people do”, actually. Minutes after I read that comment, too - so the bite was perhaps harder than he deserved, poor man… *g*

I realize this is a sign of how pathetic my life is, but I view even the planning of fun to be work. I love doing fun things with family and friends, but I definitely find the process of coordinating schedules and making plans to be work. Maybe it’s my tendency toward introversion or my struggles with depression, but I have to make specific efforts to get myself out of my head and out of my house and have fun.

I was going to say something like this.

Perhaps for more extroverted people, relationships are all fun and joy and excitement in the beginning, but for me, *any* relationship is work. Actually answering the phone when my mom calls is work. Remembering to email my friends is work. I often consciously think things like “Okay, I should hug my dad at this point,” not because I feel a desire to hug my dad but because I am intellectually aware that it will make him happy if I do.

And it’s not that I am immune to loneliness.  I feel lonely and as if the world considers me unimportant and I have no friends *all* the time. But the work I need to do to put myself in a situation where this isn’t true is so overwhelmingly hard, I can’t keep up with it. I lose contact with my friends all the damn time because I just can’t bring myself to write that email, or make that phone call… for months and months at a time.

By contrast, as difficult as my marriage can be sometimes, the fact that I live with the guy and he’s constantly demanding my affection and attention means that there is one person, at least, who I cannot easily just drift away from. My marriage *is* a lot of work, and sometimes it feels like too much damn work, but *all* my relationships are work and the only relationships I have that last are the ones where the other person is working as hard as I am, because I’m sure that maintaining a relationship with a person whose default is to want to be left alone all the time is as grueling as it is to maintain a relationship when *you* want to be left alone all the time. My mother, my husband and my children are the only people who put enough demands on me that I *can’t* escape the work, and because I can’t escape the work, I don’t lose the benefits the way I do every other relationship I have.

In other words, Amanda, your perception of relationships as just sheer unadulterated fun when they’re going well is simply not true ever for some people. When I was in a brand new relationship and madly infatuated, it was still work for me to maintain it. Being social with anyone, ever, is work for me.

I believe that a successful long-term relationship takes some effort and mindfulness. My long-term relationship provides me with security, with comfort, with the ease that comes from someone with whom I have a history.

That’s great, but it’s still important to challenge ourselves, don’t you think?  People are scared of this book, because they know within it lurks those fears we don’t admit to ourselves, such as the link between security and loss of freedom, and the fear that the passions we squelch for it will rear up one day, and next thing you know, you’re acting on them and messing everything up. 

It may not be you, but it’s foolish to deny that the country at large feels stifled, bored, and overpoliced and since they don’t have many real outlets for genuine passion, they end up cheating.  A lot.  It’s foolish to pretend adultery isn’t a constant in our society.

Ooops, HTML failzors. Sorry.

f your spouse thinks a second job is the way to handle the current financial problems you and s/he endure and you think the answer is to cut household spending, voila, there’s a conflict. Resolving it takes work.

Yeah, exactly.  That’s the sort of thing that Kipnis quite amusingly rails against.  I don’t know if there’s a way out of it, but it’s really fascinating how you get angry that people are even questioning whether or not it’s so wise to drain the love and passion out of relationships by subjecting them to tense negotiations over intertwined finances.  Or worse!  Trying to get through those tense negotiations by violating humor as well, by introducing forced smiles. 

Until we ask the hard questions, we can’t even begin to come up with answers.  As a classic serial monogamist on live-in relationship number 3, I’ve decided, wisely I think, to minimize the work load I put on what’s supposed to a relationship built on love by minimizing my investment in his financial choices.  We have firmly established boundaries and try to share as little as possible, which is a violation of the official rules of intimacy. 

Reading Kipnis’s book shows me why I blanched at even admitting that he and I try to avoid making joint purchases or having shared accounts or all those other things you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.  Because you can feel people swarming and judging and declaring that you have commitment issues and intimacy issues.  But now I can see a little more clearly that stems from the Relationships Take Work crap, which is a direct assault on Relationships Are Fun, which is definitely my preference.

Your answer to that confused me a bit. It sounded like you thought I thought people should be mind readers. Or maybe not.  Or maybe that she and you are arguing that no one has needs unless they are neurotic, or should never expect their lover to in any way attend to their needs or something.

Well, it’s a polemic that she wrote, but I was saying she actually addresses the “mindreader” thing, which people expect and then are disappointed, so then they have to do the hard work of improving their communication in their relationship, so they can better express needs, and then she hilariously pointed out that “expressing needs” often becomes another form of couple warfare, with the implication that your S.O. is insufficient at meeting them.

So she traces it back to the baffling, if you think about it, belief that it’s natural for people to be needballs seeking out others to fulfill us.  The problem with needs is you don’t have them or notice them if they’re met, so feeling you have to have needs sets an escalating number of demands (including the “mindreader” one) on relationships.

I appreciated that, because it was interesting to consider that people might be happier if they worked to achieve their own ends on their own efforts instead of expecting others to do it for them.

You can say out loud how dissatisfied you are with the state of marriage. The problem is you are then told that you “hate men”, you’ve put your career first, your standards are too high, blah, blah, blah. Which all translates into “blame the feminists”. Therefore smiling and nodding when asked about marriage is easier.

NYExpat, I guess my thinking is evolving.  I was buying then into the idea that you can declare a relationship “successful” based on longevity, but now I’m wondering if perhaps we shouldn’t ask hard questions, like why are we setting goals for relationships that we’re supposed to meet.  Why can’t we ask more of life, instead of acquiescing to the idea that we should bend towards institutions.

Cognitive psychology probably has some fascinating things to say about how people rationalize adultery, I’m sure. And probably also why people persist in relationships that don’t really make them happy.

That said, what I learned about from cognitive psychology has actually helped me rearrange my life so I can avoid some of the misery-making traps that Kipnis describes so well.  One reason people get irritable about their partner’s behavior is they think about it all the time.  And what you think about is reinforced, and becomes your reality.

But you also learn to what degree people are rationalizing creatures, which actually explains adultery neatly.  Once a decision is made, we spend all our time rationalizing it, so we can’t leave bad relationships, or we’d be “failures”, but we want to have sex, so we cheat, and then we decide it’s in everyone’s best interest that we chose that way. Then shit blows up.

And probably also why people persist in relationships that don’t really make them happy.

A sense of misplaced responsibility and social pressure.

While women get it more than men, even for men there’s a sense of disapproval for a man who moves from one brief relationship to another.  We don’t call him a slut (no, he’s a “playboy”), but there’s still an undertone of calling him immature because he hasn’t settled down which is supposed to equal one long-term monogamous relationship.

The Definitive Take on Marriage

“I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it.”

- Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work”

We don’t call him a slut (no, he’s a “playboy”)

Unless he’s over 40, and then he’s considered a pervert or we feel sorry for him and his mid-life crisis.  Yes, the pressure does exist for men to, just less so than for women, and in a different way.

My guess is that many of us who recoil against the “a relationship/marriage is work” line of reasoning is because we once found ourselves in an unhappy relationship that we rationalized by telling ourselves, “well, these things take work. this unpleasant state of affairs is normal.” Once you put things in terms of, “what makes me happy?” (even—especially—if you’re thinking about things in terms of long-term happiness), suddenly you realize the answer to your questions about what you want to do with yourself and your relationships in much different than it was when you were in your “this takes work” mindset.

I’m sure marriages require attention. The flip side of Amanda’s statement that we shouldn’t reinforce our irritation at our partners’ behavior is that we should reinforce the things we like about them and reinforce things and activities that make us happy. One could call such positive reinforcements “work,” but “a relationship takes work” is exploited for so many other uses that I can’t justify the term or the mindset.

Everything Alara said.  Everything.  It’s all work.  Always.  Every word, every kinesic cue, every nuance of intonation has to get run through the big (and wildly incomplete) model of social interaction I’ve got in the front of my head.  It is never easy nor instinctive.  I’ve gotten good at not showing how much work it is if a conversation doesn’t last very long.  The beginnings of relationships are often the hardest parts, what with all the terror of wondering if they’ll leave when they know how bad I actually am at that shit.  I keep having conversations that run along the lines of “Yes I really very likely am autistic.  It’s not just me; people who’ve been around me for a while see how well I fit into Asperger’s Syndrome.”

“But you can’t have AS; you’re not an asshole.”

Oh that’s awesome.  You think everyone like me is an asshole?  “Thanks?”

So yeah.  My marriage is work, even though my wife knows how my brain works (and more importantly how it doesn’t).  Reading the original post and the comments thread I keep getting the impression that I’m doing it wrong, that I shouldn’t be married at all.  That I shouldn’t have relationships with other people at all, or at least they should end at the first fight.  That I am, now and always, doing it wrong.

Once a decision is made, we spend all our time rationalizing it, so we can’t leave bad relationships, or we’d be “failures”, but we want to have sex, so we cheat, and then we decide it’s in everyone’s best interest that we chose that way. Then shit blows up.

That’s because of the mythology of “true love marriage” we have in this country.  I remember reading an interview with a woman who studied adultery as a world-wide phenomenon, and she gave the example that in Taiwan, men tell their girlfriends how well they treat their wife, because they don’t want their girlfriend to think badly of them.  It’s a little more honest than “My wife doesn’t understand me”, for sure.

Here’s a quote from Kipnis that I think you’ll all dig:

I think all that social-biological stuff is such a façade. I don’t want to go down that road. What about the importance of culture? I have a great joke that nobody else understands: When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards when they have dinner guests over, we’ll all start believing their arguments.

(Interviewer)Huh?

Culture intervenes and takes precedent over how we conduct ourselves. We’re not shitting in backyards—are you?

We don’t call him a slut (no, he’s a “playboy”), but there’s still an undertone of calling him immature because he hasn’t settled down which is supposed to equal one long-term monogamous relationship.<blockquote>

He’s only a “playboy” if he’s of high social class/status. And even then, people tut-tut and pity him in the nicest possible way about not settling down, because he’d make such a fine husband and father.

The best a male who doesn’t have high societal status can be called is a “dog” or “babe-hound,” and (as catgirl notes) that goes out the window when he’s 40—the class-privileged “playboy” gets a life-long pass from society.

Oh, and excellent comments from Alara and Kanichen—those sorts of “natural” social interactions are acts of will for me, too. Exhausting. Over the years, though, it’s become easier thanks to technology (e.g. on-line calendar reminders), being brought up with some degree of etiquette, knowing my limits in social situations, and (most importantly) deciding that I don’t need to please every bloody person I meet—just the ones who matter to me.

<blockquote>Reading the original post and the comments thread I keep getting the impression that I’m doing it wrong, that I shouldn’t be married at all.  That I shouldn’t have relationships with other people at all, or at least they should end at the first fight.  That I am, now and always, doing it wrong.

If you’re happy in your marriage (and other important relationships) and the personal cost-benefit ratios work out for you, then there’s no need to beat yourself up for “doing it wrong.” I see nothing wrong with putting in effort and work for people you’re genuinely fond of and those who reciprocate in kind.

I’ve been a long-time fan of saying fuck you to the Marriages Take Work mentality.

But marriages DO take work.

The enormous amount of guilt and pressure applied to get people into marriage should be a signal that there lies dragons.  Things that are as delightful as advertised don’t need to advertise so damn hard.

And there it is.  That’s what it really comes down to.  Why the hard sell if marriage is so damn good?

I really think that its time we start rethinking much about human relationships - including the idea that it may be time to phase out marriage.  Seriously.  Marriage made more sense when we lacked effective contraception and our lifespans were much shorter.  (But even then it was a wholly patriarchal solution to raising children.)  I say long lifespans because I am convinced that part of what allowed marriage to work was that “til death do us part” typically wasn’t such a long time even a century ago.

In other words, there have been radical changes in the world.  I think that these changes are quickly exploding traditional social structures that just don’t fit anymore.  Add to this that, IMHO, many of the fundamentalists* in the world of various stripes are in part** clinging to the old order because they DON’T have an new public order, a new set of scripts and expectations to lean on.  This is a societal conversation we really need to have.

*Note: I am not talking about radicalized terrorists like we’ve seen among the right in the US recently or in the Muslim world.  I’m talking about your average, run-of-the-mill bible banger type who is sincerely confused by the mismatch between the public order and reality.

** I say “in part” because there is also a whole lot of resentment in losing privilege (you know, like the old male privilege to beat your wife to work out frustrations with your boss) or perceived privilege.  I have no sympathy for whining about loss of privilege.

over the years I’ve thought (and even said to my wife a number of times), “If an adult I was in a relationship with behaved this way and treated me this way, I’d break up with her.”

I realize that you’re trying to use an example to show where a relationship that “takes work” is necessary (and good), but the rules that apply to raising a child shouldn’t be considered the norm when it comes to a significant other.

People often end relationships when the relationship triggers some hangup/anxiety/issue.  And that’s fine, they’re perfectly free to do that.  But it’s very likely that the next relationship will bump into the same issue, and it’ll end, too.

Three things:

1. People end their relationships for all sorts of reasons, most often (but not often enough) because they just don’t love the other person anymore. To tie that to some refusal to engage in personal growth on their part is nothing short of cruel.

2. Anyone who hangs their personal growth on the presence of others, who force them into engaging in it, has got some serious. fucking. issues. They need to not so much grow as grow the fuck up.

3. Sometimes people just fit together well, you know. Even if it’s just for a while. They don’t necessarily have to come up against “issues”. Not because they’ve really grown and are totally like, evolved as human beings and that. Hah. To predicate emotional maturity on the idea that you stay in a relationship and change yourself to fit it is all kinds of wrong. Some people just get along well together, and taking the risk of getting out there and finding whoever is that person for you is worth decades of forced rationalization in terms of the contribution to one’s psychological health and happiness. The stiff-upper-lip smugness of “relationship work” is a manmade hell.

And it may have just been a slip of the keyboard, but if you really believe that it’s your child who is difficult to deal with, and if she is receiving that message from you, then you are opening her up to decades of people easily convincing her to carry their shit because any conflict between them is her fault for being “difficult”. You’re setting the stage for a future abuser who will prey on her sense of inadequacy. Women have enough of that guilt crap to deal with without having to hear it from their parents directly. Sorry if this seems harsh and mean, sincerely; I don’t want to disrespect your family or hurt your feelings, but the way you describe that dinamic worries me.

He’s only a “playboy” if he’s of high social class/status. And even then, people tut-tut and pity him in the nicest possible way about not settling down, because he’d make such a fine husband and father.

True.

For popular culture, I’d note that when they show a man taking on a disguise (superheroes are the prototype here), one of the more effective ones for disguising his true nature is the horndog playboy, because people automatically assume that such a person is too damn irresponsible to do anything important. Bruce Wayne, Idjit, is the classic example.

In other words, Amanda, your perception of relationships as just sheer unadulterated fun when they’re going well is simply not true ever for some people.

This is a strawman argument.  She didn’t say anything like that.  I think we should view marriage and relationships just like a friendship.  Of course friendships aren’t just pure fun, and you don’t end a friendship because of one little fight or disagreement.  But if you’re putting a lot of effort just to make the friendship last longer, then I think it’s better to just let the friendship end and move on.  Maybe others will disagree with me, but I don’t think we should out a bunch of effort into making a friendship work, just for the sake of having a successful, long-term friendship.  Of course you put in effort to resolve conflicts and you do things for friends because you care about them.  But if you grow apart or develop different interests, I don’t think you should put in effort just make the friendship last longer.  All of this should be exactly how romantic relationships are treated.  Put in the effort to resolve conflicts and do things because you care about your partner.  But if you just don’t get along anymore, then don’t feel obligated to keep making an effort just because you’ve been told that marriage is forever and you won’t be considered successful if yours ends.  We should be more willing to accept that divorce is a good thing, if the relationship is over.

You’ve said a number of times here that work can be fun and rewarding, but we need a break from it sometimes, and no one can work all the time.  Well, who said anything about working all the time?

Mainstream patriarchal society does: if you’re not working at your career, you’re working at your marriage and household and kids. If you’re lucky you’ll get one hour each day for personal leisure time (2 ea. on Sat and Sun!), and 7 for sleep. The only question is: do you enjoy your work? And mainstream patriarchal society is hell-bent on ensuring that, with the exception of a privileged few, the answer to that question is “no.”

Dealing with those limitations/hangups is often, yes, hard work.  It’s scary and sometimes unpleasant to confront them.  But in a long-term, committed relationship, you really have only three options:  have such a shallow relationship that you never bump into those hangups (I think a lot of people do this with their parents); end the relationship when the hangups etc. begin to manifest themselves; deal with your hangups because that’s what’s necessary for the relationship, and thus, grow.

I’m not seeing how that’s an argument in favour of monogamous marriage in particular, except insofar as monogamous marriage locks an adult into a long-term, committed relationship (i.e. makes someone a member of your family), and makes escaping from that relationship especially difficult (as an adult, it’s easier to “divorce” one’s parents than it is to divorce one’s spouse).

I’m all for confronting personal hangups and making changes that benefit everyone, but that’s not a good reason to get married. In fact, it seems that the moment you make an honest assessment that your specific combination of hangups is incompatible with long-term monogamous marriage, you’re branded as “immature” or a “slut” or a “playboy.”

And agreed with the others who put long-term relationships with young children on an entirely different plane.

Life’s too short to get angry about toothbrushes.

I recall a series of posts here about households where two partners have different standards for cleanliness, upholding the view that the household should not devolve to the lower standard.  And those standards are often class-based and gendered, but it’s not a feminist act to let the mess be; and when in a hetero couple the man is slobbier than the woman, the woman has to deal with the difficult decision of either picking up after the slobby man, or letting it go and being judged for it.  I read that as a clarion call to straight men in relationships to do their fair share of unpleasant or tedious work, because there’s unpleasant or tedious work that needs doing.  And it sure sounds like a case for relationships needing work, both materially and emotionally, as partners figure out how to cope with and resolve competing standards and differing views on things from important to picayune.  Probably even toothbrushes.

I think there have been other pieces about how women are made to feel compelled to provide emotional labor.  True.  By that token, shouldn’t men do more work, to balance out the flows of giving and taking, caring and being cared for?  It seems that undoing the gendered defaults almost always takes work.  Empathy takes work, in that it requires more effort than the default of not caring.  Satisfying work, but work, I think.

Writing is work, and I need a break from work at times.  But it’s satisfying work, because there’s end points and goals met.  The “goal” for a relationship that’s completed through your hard work is you get to die and everyone says you made it across the finish line.

Actually, the “goal” for a relationship, in your words, is…

...playful, easy relationships between people.

That’s the goal for me, anyway.  Maybe it’s a matter of personality.  I’m an introvert, a misanthrope and I tend to take myself too seriously.  The result is that all relationships take work for me.  The simple act of picking up the phone and calling can be work for me.

In the end, the goal isn’t death.  The goal is a nice evening out with friends, or, in the case of my marriage, pleasant time spent with the person who is my best friend and lover. Most of the time spent with my husband is fun. It’s usually not work.  My marriage is quite often a refuge from the rest of the world.

But we are not the same lust-struck people who began the relationship some 16 years ago.  And sometimes we get irritated with each other.  And sometimes we have to step back and figure out what the hell is going on.  Which takes work.

In my case, since I’m sort of self-centered anyway, work on the relationship requires that I keep from letting stupid, petty, shit get in the way of what is really a good relationship, with a guy I still really like and admire.

Obviously, “relationships take work” should never be used as an excuse for staying in a relationship that is truly bad for you.  And the notion has certainly been abused where women are concerned; an excuse to make women feel guilty about…well, pretty much everything.

But even the best relationships take some effort.  Everything worthwhile takes effort.  No, we shouldn’t work all the time.  But getting to the “fun” part of life often requires some work.

It’s a long thread, and I haven’t had enough time to read all of it.  So forgive me if I bring up points that have already been made.

I don’t know, aren’t most long-term relationships both fun and effort?  For me, it’s like singing with my chorale.  Parts of it can be tedious or even work, but the rest of it is fun and satisfying and well worth the time and effort spent on the less-fun parts of it.  The problem is, we’re told constantly that relationships are work (the work implied is usually the unpleasant, tedious sort) and only work, so we don’t drop relationships when the effort to sustain them exceeds the joy we get out of them.  Which is ridiculous. 

Well, and as I think was mentioned up thread somewhere, the benefits of a marriage certificate (not the marriage ceremony, not the relationship) are primarily legal and/or economic.  We’re trying to shove various bits and pieces of economic and legal framework into a package of life-long love and devotion, and it just doesn’t work.

For that reason, I’d be perfectly okay with marriage contracts being something that people have to re-sign at the end of a set period, like lease.  Pretty much turn marriage (or whatever you’d want to call it) into a purely civil contract as far as the government is concerned, and so that the government has no concern over whether marriages are between people who actually are lovers or people who just get along great and live together well, but who don’t sleep with each other.

I also think that the benefits that are currently conferred by marriage should also be conferred to other people who would legally like to make an unrelated person their next-of-kin.  So, if two friends wanted to set up housekeeping together, raise their kids together, but not be romantically involved, they still could get the legal and economic benefits of marriage.

De-coupling romantic love from legal marriage (while ironically a step backwards, in a sense), might also provide an escape window for those who are married, out of love, but who either cannot afford to divorce or who don’t want to divorce for their kids’ sake (or for their own; I’d imagine that it can be tough for a parent who only sees their kids every other weekend).  It’d basically give “permission” to have a variation on an open marriage, where the legal family and the benefits thereof stay intact, but the partners in the marriage don’t feel obliged to seek out their romantic bliss within that structure.

Um.  Sorry that got long.  It’s an interesting topic.

Reading the original post and the comments thread I keep getting the impression that I’m doing it wrong, that I shouldn’t be married at all.  That I shouldn’t have relationships with other people at all, or at least they should end at the first fight.  That I am, now and always, doing it wrong.

Yeah, I feel a little bit the same way. All social interaction is “work” for me in a sense, because my instinct and my nature is to keep to myself. But that gets old eventually, and I want and need the effortless, enjoyable parts of interaction, but it takes work for me to get there, to approach people, to have conversations that can feel forced, to make a point of calling friends when I think I’d rather not bother them. It’s the same way when I’m in a relationship for a while; there are times I think it would be easier to just not call, to cancel plans because I’m not up to going out, but I’m a lot happier once I do, even though it took effort to get me started.

Thanks for the reply, Amanda.  I definitely agree that too much emphasis has been put on longevity.  After reading this thread, I think (at least for now) I’d say that marriage should be about supporting each other in enjoying their lives (relating to you and others talking about emphasising the good qualities in your SO, and not dwelling on the annoying ones), so your comments about maintaining autonomy (financially and temporally) are dead on.

I thought about it, and here’s a list of (mostly) bad reasons people enter into long term relationships:

1)  Desire for Sex
2)  Belief that Sex == Long Term Relationship.  Related to this thread, there was a trend in porn stories between the ‘70s and ‘80s that could be reduced to the following (putting aside other issues with porn):

‘70s:  “That was great!”
‘80s:  “And they all lived happily ever after”

3)  Fear of loneliness
4)  Knowledge that someone has to put up with your shit (i.e., personal foibles, not abusiveness).

I don’t think 4) is really bad, but I can’t see it being the sole reason for maintaining a relationship.

I’m going to give the Kipnis book a read (Dark Avenger, thanks for the link to the review), and I think I’m going to do two other things:  Watch the Ice Storm, and read Updike.

Count me in with all the introverts who find all social interaction to be a fairly difficult amount of work.  And yes I do think it’s important to have some time when we’re not working, which is why making sure I have some solitude is just as important as making sure I am in fact spending some time with the people I love. 

It seems like some of the arguments are centering around the idea that relationships become more work overtime, which seems a bit odd to me because in my experience the first stage of the relationship was the hardest.  If there’s something I want to go out and do it’s far easier for me to bring it up at the dinner table, or when we’re brushing our teeth or whatever than it ever was for me to pick up the phone and call.  Plus the feeling of new love was rather disorienting for me, which made it just that much harder to muster the energy to make plans.  In hind sight I see that new love was fun and exciting, but I far prefer older love.

I’d advise the introverts in this thread not to take the distaste for “work” in a relationship personally.  Introverts are a minority and are typically ignored and/or treated like freaks.  You can be sure that those who say marriage (or any other relationship) is work are not speaking for people who genuinely find social situations challenging.

People who equivocate “effort” with “work” should read the Bob Black quote I posted up thread. While Amanda is probably not on page with B.B. politically, I’m pretty sure the reason why I instinctively understand her argument even as this whole thread descends into two groups talking past each other is that she’s using a definition of ‘work’ that is closer to B.B.‘s than that of the people who are disagreeing with her.

Think of “work” in this context as something similar to “having a job”, while we’re basically saying love should be closer to a hobby, pasttime, artistic expression, something which is done for its own sake rather than as a mean to an end to something else (the marriage, for instance…). People still put a lot of effort into their hobbies, things that are not their job. The difference between “work” and “play” is not that one is productive and one is not. It is that one is coerced (socially, economically, or otherwise) and one is not.

I mean, some migrants have to work in fields for a meager amount of subsistence, and some rich people do gardens on their own free time. Nobody would be so confused as to think that even if they were to put in as much effort and produce the same amount, that these actions are the same thing. One is work and coerced, one is play and is free (as in free speech, not free beer).

Huh. I’m a dancer, and it’s definitely work to learn and practice dancing. Hard work.

However, the way I often relax, unwind and experience mindless joy? Is, yeah, to dance. If I didn’t put in the work of practicing when a move is awkward or a routine is frustrating or my muscles ache, I honest to maude wouldn’t be able to experience the mindless joy of dancing. The more work I put in, the freer I become to experience joy and fluid, graceful movement.

I don’t see this as at all different from my relationship. It’s a source of joy in my life and it feeds my soul, but in order to have those advantages I need to put in the effort that strengthens and feeds the relationship. I do that maybe 20% of the time and the remaining 80% I get the fun stuff like hot sex, snuggling and watching the Daily Show, having somebody to bring me soup when I have the flu, and sharing in-jokes.

I don’t continue taking my dance classes and practicing on my own so my tombstone can say “She Was Committed To Dance”. And I also don’t continue working on my relationship so my tombstone can say “She Was Committed To Her Marriage”. In both cases, the work enables the joy.

Alara: Yes! Yes! Yes!  I saw myself in your comment.

TheLady: If having a healthy relationship comes naturally and without much effort, I sincerely think that is wonderful. Some of us do not have that and we need to cultivate healthy relationships with people as we would any other skill in life.  I am both a natural introvert and grew up with quite a lot of emotional abuse, ergo I have had to learn and practice how to have healthy relationships—particularly emotionally intimate relationships.

Over the course of a recently-ended 14-year relationship, I learned that there was rarely a comfortable moment when I could stop “working” on my relationship, even though he was (and still is, most days) my best friend.  My default is the soul-sucking, hyper-critical, and hyper-demanding partner—my mother—and at the beginning I was vigilant about trying to keep these parts of my personality in check.  Being vigilant most of the time meant that I truly enjoyed and derived pleasure/happiness/passion from my relationship.  And then, for my part, I stopped being as vigilant—there was too much work, financial stress, medical issues, a child, etc.  And all the negative relationship dynamics that I had learned growing up became the norm.  And after enough time there was no turning it back around, no matter how vigilant I became. 

It may not be romantic to talk about good relationships as a skill, but I’ve never been a big believer in romance (at least not the kind pushed in our culture). But I do think that (most) people desire healthy, intimate relationships (of varying duration) and that having those relationships means seeing ourselves objectively and trying to work on the things that are antithetical to a healthy relationship.

I guess I’m not arguing so much for marriage, as I am arguing that any relationship that is meaningful and that you want to keep requires effort—for some people the effort is minimal and for others it can be very demanding.

So she traces it back to the baffling, if you think about it, belief that it’s natural for people to be needballs seeking out others to fulfill us.  The problem with needs is you don’t have them or notice them if they’re met, so feeling you have to have needs sets an escalating number of demands (including the “mindreader” one) on relationships.

Amanda, thanks for accepting my brain-fried 1:40 am comment with grace, since upon reading it over it is a little incoherent.

And I get this. I’ve met this. The “We must PROCESS” constantly kind of thing. I mean, of COURSE people have needs. But. as you say, you don’t worry about them when they are being met. I have met people who feel unable to deal with “MY needs include getting to see you and hang out and have fun, so they’re met so we’re cool.”  As you say, they think there’s supposed to be work so if it’s all just cool, then something must be wrong.

“Needballs” and some need to find needs to inflict on your partner… yeah I’ve seen that. I try to avoid it.

But the work I need to do to put myself in a situation where this isn’t true is so overwhelmingly hard, I can’t keep up with it. I lose contact with my friends all the damn time because I just can’t bring myself to write that email, or make that phone call… for months and months at a time.

That def. spoke to me (another introvert).

In the follow-up thread to this thread Amanda noted:

Like me—-in the government’s eyes and in the eyes of people exerting pressure, I’m single.  But in reality, I’m not, nor do people consider me single in my direct social circles.

My response, perhaps more applicable to this thread:

Amanda at 0936am:

The question of rebellion is an interesting one, because the state in its various forms expands its control to those rebellious relationships: palimony laws, commonlaw marriage clauses triggered by a given duration of cohabitation, and so forth.  It’s rather like watching the Russians steal the steppe or Americans steal the western plains: `there be a zone of troublesome, annoying unpredictability with people Outside Our Rules, so let us merely expand where our rules go!’.

In essence (and for hets only - teh gayz are Not Considered in most states), some form of assumed marriage, with its marital fiscal obligations is run like a cable company: you have to specifically opt out lest ye be automatically opted in.

Truth be told, (and, admittedly, practicalities aside), and, again, for hets, I’ve always been troubled by palimony laws.  If want the legal obligations of marriage, get married.  If you don’t, don’t.  If you want some mix of the two, have a domestic contract. If you’ve been screwed then claim under trust doctrines.  I’ve never felt comfortable with what is, in many jurisdictions, an automatic pension merely for having cohabitated.

The late Prof. McLeod of UWO, once the dean of Canadian family law academics, introduced a concept called “causal connection” into spousal support in the late 1980s, and that had a decent run before it was gunned down by appellate courts before it hit its teens.  The premise was this: to establish a need for spousal support one had to establish need, one had to establish ability to pay, and one had to establish a causal connection between the two.  No need or no ability to pay?  No spousal support.  A need and an ability to pay but the need is not linked to the relationship?  No support.

We seem to have a struggle going on within the law (both legislative and judicial) and within our philosophical constructs about just how automatic and how financial a relationship is.  And it is a struggle which does not cut comfortably across left/right or feminist/antifeminist boundaries.  If we are to accept as our starting point the notion of human independence and responsibility and free agency how are we to reconcile that with economic needs?  To choose the cheesiest example, how do we reconcile a woman’s long-overdue freedom to leave an unhappy marriage with her fiscal inability to do so?  Is it the role of the state to force the ex-husband to provide economic redress to a spouse when he doesn’t play a causal role in that need?  From a feminist angle this question will become more and more important as more and more women find themselves in the position of being the support payors.

Absent the discomfort on ‘marriage pension’ I take no position one way or the other.  I simply bring it up because your assumption that “in the government’s eyes ... I’m single” isn’t necessarily so in many, many jurisdictions, whether you want it that way or not, whether it benefits you or not.  And these questions tie in very directly to whether or not a marriage is work.  So far as the law is concerned it is.  A friendship doesn’t create a fiscal entitlement during its existence and possible compensation thereafter as an entitlement arising out of its unexpected end, but workplaces and marriages do.

And I get this. I’ve met this. The “We must PROCESS” constantly kind of thing.

Amen, brother or sister.  I’ve personally and professionally seen people who are not happy unless they are constantly Processing something.  And when they aren’t happy then they make the other person miserable and—magic!—there’s now something to process!!!  Yay them!

seeker6079, one of my granduncles married a woman from New York, and shortly after getting married here in CA, she decided that she wanted to divorce him very soon afterwards, the reason being irrelevant to the point of my narrative. 

One of my aunts who was in court that day(this is the late 40s’, early 50s’ folks) remembered the judge telling the WFNY that divorce wasn’t a meal ticket.

As California is a community property state, she would’ve been entitled to very little in the way of alimony because the length of the marriage was so short , and the judge therefore refused to proceed with said divorce.

Granduncle and she reconciled afterwards, but, still.

I’ve never felt comfortable with what is, in many jurisdictions, an automatic pension merely for having cohabitated.

Some of the early palimony cases also included claims that the defendant made oral promises that the plaintiff would be supported by them for the rest of life, and it was claimed that they were oral contracts, which are more difficult to demonstrate but are just as valid as written contracts.

No doubt, Dark Avenger…

(Why do I have this near-irresistable urge to continue, “...but you have forgotten to take into account my Reverso-Ray HAHAHAHAHA!” ???)

No doubt.  The problem with most family court systems is that they are wildly inconsistent in how they apply what little predictable law there is: there are judges who want to look after the little ladies, misogynists, and a myriad of other personalities who alter things.

Oral promises would certainly create an argument in contract; they would also be of evidentiary value in a trust claim.  I’d note, though, that it is far more normal, practical and achievable to have a domestic contract now than it was when, say, Lee Marvin and Michelle Triola went at it in the 1970s, or when Rosa Becker entered her relationship in the 50s.

Another way of looking at it is this:
At what point does the law say that a person is responsible for their own decisions, however catastrophic?  If they have the option of a domestic contract (which can be as simple as two signatures on a cocktail napkin) and don’t use it then why would the courts or legislatures craft complex quasi-matrimonial modes of redress for them?