How well do you know your friends or your partner?

Don't just know your friend's or partner's qualities — "casual acquaintances" can do that. What requires being closer to them, and what will improve the friendship or relationship, is if you know what they find annoying. (via)

Why divorce?

Today's New York Times Magazine has a piece about Dana Adam Shapiro, who, when he was in his mid-30s, interviewed all his friends he knew who had gotten divorced. He then asked each of them for referrals to other divorced couples. Almost everyone was happy to talk to him about their divorce. He's now making a movie (not a documentary) called Monogamy based on the interviews.

The article sums up three of the couples Shapiro interviewed: "The Young Wife," "The Two-Time Ex," and "The Adultress."

So, what lessons do we learn from the article? It turns out that marriages fail due to adultery, alcoholism, sex starting to feel like a chore, people taking less care of themselves, and the realization that what they had in common from the beginning was too superficial to be a strong basis for a lifelong commitment. Stop the presses!

It's disappointing if those are the most interesting insights from 50 interviews with "people of all ages, all across the United States" about their divorces. There isn't one unexpected observation in the whole piece.

If you like the "Here are a few paragraphs about a couple and their problems" format, I recommend, instead, a book called One to One by Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D. Here's one of my favorite vignettes from the book (102-104):

Lionel and Lisa

This couple was seen by their friends as "glittering, beautiful, fun-loving." . . . When asked how things were with them, their inevitable answer was "Great!" . . .

They gave large cocktail parties every three or four months and ate out frequently with friends, of whom they had many. In actuality, few of their "friends" knew very much about them except that they were good-looking, fun, and obviously successful. . . . [T]hey took pains to avoid any kind of "heavy talk," on the few occasions when they ate out alone. . . .

The fact is, there was very little openness, tenderness, trust or intimacy, caring or kindness between them, or between them and anyone else. . . . This is an example of two highly narcissistic, shallow people who affected a pose for the outside world but who had very little tolerance for each other. . . .

They . . . used history between them only to seek further evidence for recrimination. "Do you remember," said Lisa to Lionel, "the time two years ago when you forgot my birthday?" Interestingly, their sexual lives were satisfactory in terms of arousal and response, but neither Lionel nor Lisa was aware of any love or tenderness during sex. . . . [I]n view of their great similarity, and their high degree of narcissism and alienation, they got through the barrier of antagonism sexually by seeing each other as mirror images of themselves. . . . [T]hey engaged in masturbatory or solitary sex, even though it took place together. . . .

They came to see me, not to get help, but to use me to support them in their onslaught on each other and to win me over to believing that each was right in hating the other. . . . I do not know whether they parted company or continued on an antagonistic basis. Antagonism can keep people together in a state of mutual pseudo-aliveness for a lifetime.

Women want more independence in relationships than men do, and men are more likely to want to children?

These poll results are interesting but should be taken with a grain of salt, as the study was done for Match.com (which has an interest in convincing women that men will commit to them). This is about single Americans, age 21 and up (89% straight, 5% gay, 4% bisexual):

Data show men are quicker to fall in love and more likely than women to want children: 54% of men say they have experienced love at first sight, compared with 44% of women; among singles without children under 18, more men (24%) than women (15%) say they want children.

And, across every age group, women want more independence than men in their relationships: 77% of women say having their personal space is "very important," vs. 58% for men; 78% of women say the same about having their own interests and hobbies (vs. 64% for men). And 35% of women (vs. 23% of men) say regular nights out with the guys/girls are important.

The headline for that USA Today article reporting on the study says: "Men, women flip the script in gender expectation." But does it really flip gender expectations for men to be more likely than women to say they've fallen in "love at first sight"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Grobstein has two theories on why "the pop culture story where the man does not want to settle down" would turn out to be wrong:

I think a lot of our cultural relationship wisdom was formed under conditions quite different from now. In the post-war decades, there was a sharp shortage of men — of course men were less willing to commit.

The other possible bias is that the stories are about men who, because of their desirability, enjoy a strong bargaining position and may be less willing to commit.

Those are both good points. I especially find his second point — about how we tend to focus on certain men because they're more powerful and thus more conspicuous — to be both plausible and systematically overlooked.

But I added:

On the other hand, it could be that the standard story is fairly accurate, and the study results are skewed. Why? Because straight men and straight women (89% of the respondents) are saying what they think the opposite sex would like to hear.

Unemployed vs. single

If you don't have a job and would prefer to have one, it seems that you're not supposed to describe yourself with the most straightforward adjective for this situation: "unemployed." It's considered better to say, "I'm between jobs."

So why is it that if you're not married or in a relationship, the socially accepted way to describe yourself is with the straightforward adjective: "single"? The situations are similar: unemployed people and single people are often very interested in finding a job or a relationship, respectively. Both types will often hope they're in a short, transitional stage. But why are you not allowed to say, "I'm between girlfriends," "I'm between boyfriends," or "I'm between relationships"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Theories.

Sooner or later, love is gonna get ya

Two weekends ago, four days shy of a year after our first date, we made a peaceful, level-headed, and final decision to end our relationship. I don't plan to say much about it here, due to obvious privacy concerns. If that means I have to settle for a blog post like this that's somewhat dull and abstract, instead of publishing the more vividly revealing thoughts in my head, then so be it.

I have an unfortunate tendency, which I'm sure is very common, to obsess after a breakup over all the things that seemingly went wrong. A couple different kinds of regret are inevitable, but important to transcend: (1) feeling bad about all the things that, in retrospect, were wrong with the relationship (how could I have been so blind to how deeply problematic factors X, Y, and Z were?), and (2) feeling bad about how good things used to be (how am I ever going to find such a perfect match again?). It's like Woody Allen's lame joke in Annie Hall: relationships are the restaurant where people say, "The food at this place is really terrible ... and such small portions." In response to point 2: I know, and I try to remember, that you can never get back the past. It doesn't matter whether you'd like to or not; you won't. (This is true of relationships in general, not just breakups.) In response to point 1: I'm reminded of some wise words someone told me years ago:

If you make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you, you'll also make sure nothing really good ever happens to you either.

I wouldn't trade the mix of good and bad times (mostly good, by far) that we had together over the past year for anything. They were flawed and beautiful. No one other than two people will ever know about them; I simultaneously relish and cringe at that fact. 2009 may have been a pretty dismal year for the country as a whole, but it was a great year for me. At the same time, I have to believe there's someone better out there, for both of us. It's popular and palatable, as a single person, to claim you're "not looking for a relationship." I'd love to say I'm totally self-reliant and don't "need" someone else. But it's not true. I just don't know who it is yet.

For now, I'll be reflecting on how I can fine-tune "what I'm looking for," consciously doing things we used to do together and accepting that they're still worth doing, overinterpreting every love song playing in the background...