On Marriage - Your Best Friend
Looking at the factors that help keep a marriage healthy through time
There is a kind of war on marital stability these days. From a kind of hivemind for single women that drifts between on and offline to the continued prevalence of the “masculinity coach” the amount of bad relationship advice out there is staggering.
Much of the bad advice comes in the form of “hot takes” from people for who your stability is, at best, irrelevant and at worst personally detrimental. Masculinity coaches thrive on marital dysfunction as it helps generate the kind of inter-gender animosity that sells their books, courses and seminars. The single female hivemind doesn’t want stable happy marriages because that both highlights its own shortcoming while removing prospective “high value partners” from the pool.
So why do these two groups seem to be generating the majority (if not basically all) of the relationship advice? It’s partly because outrage, audacity and sex sells; but I think another issue is that happy, healthy, stable people don’t think to share what to them is simply just normal.
On Marriage will be an ongoing series of thoughts I’ve had now that my marriage has crossed the threshold of “average length” and as a millennial man. The very idea that marriage has an “average length” is to me a sign that there is an issue in our culture. The supposedly unbreakable bond that makes two people on flesh having an average lifespan of only seven years (as of 2020) is honestly very wild.
While much of the culture of divorce we exist in currently is driven simply by bad pairing choices that were destined for failure from the get, much of it is also an issue of a lack of understanding from both men and women on what marriage means for you as an individual. There seems to be this pervasive idea that nothing should change after marriage, that you will continue to live the life you had but with some name changes and differences in filing taxes.
This is both disrespectful of the institution of marriage, as well as wholly ignorant of how inter-sex relationships work on a timeframe of many years. It also says a lot about the people who are getting married and how they view their spouse. There are many facets to discuss here but I want to start with one that I feel gets a poor interpretation and is constantly misread by people who want to justify their existence and behavior.
The one I want to begin with is the idea and concept as your spouse as a friend. Its my belief that this idea gets mistreated on both sides of the aisle but in different ways. In the past I’ve seen men sold the idea that viewing your wife as a friend is a lowering of your position in the household, an acceptance of the current female led culture, and generally a “beta male” behavior. Once again it is important to understand that these kinds of opinions typically come from men who are single, themselves already divorced, who are financially incentivized to create dysfunctional relationships, or some combination of the three.
There is also and underlying fourth factor, one that permeates much of online discourse, and that is the need to differentiate ones self from the crowd, to stand apart from “normal people” and pretend that their atypical life is indicative of what is typical. It is the millennial version of “keeping up with the Joneses” to want to be anything but normal, healthy and stable.
The core of the issue of spousal friendship is the differentiating between loving and liking someone. Love is a strange sensation that is hard to define and often harder to understand. Many times it makes very little sense and will drive feelings and emotions that are themselves hard to understand. It is, in my mind, one of the primary human conditions because of how little sense it makes. But loving someone is also typically easy, because it is irrational. You don’t think about it, you may not even understand it, you simply exist within it. This irrational ease is best seen in parents. Your children are effectively strangers for the first few years, yet you love them entirely and never stop to ask why.
Liking someone is different. It’s rational, explainable, you can easily write down what you like (and dislike) about something or someone. Many times people misconstrue like for love. You’ve heard it spelled out in countless romantic movies “he makes me laugh, he’s a good cook, she’s fun to be around” these are not love, they’re things you like about a person. Its important to understand this difference because your spouse occupies three different and important roles.
They are a romantic partner, someone you love irrationally
They are a sexual partner, someone you are physically attracted too
And they are a platonic partner, someone you like being around
There is a lot of emphasis in a relationship on those first two, among millennials the sexual aspect is given an grossly outsized level of importance which is most likely the cause of the serial dysfunction that has become a meme of its own among the now 30-40 year olds; but that is a different topic for a different time, for now I want to focus on the third item, the platonic partner.
I can almost feel the uncomfortable outrage of the people who have yet to read this as I write it. The idea of your wife or husband as platonic feels wrong. Platonic is often the word we use for literally everyone else BESIDES our spouse. But you don’t spend all your waking time together loving or fucking your spouse, the majority of your relationship is platonic and I feel this goes entirely underappreciated.
When you aren’t having sex or starring at this person thinking about how the loss of them in your life would break you, you’re being platonic. You’re on the couch, playing a board game, eating a meal, chasing kids, buying groceries, going to a park, going to a movie, doing all the things you could do with anyone else. So why is the idea of a spouse as platonic so potentially off-putting?
Some are going to say its wrong to look at your spouse that way, that it should be a romantic relationship all the time, that it is disrespectful of one or both of you to think this way. But this is what makes a stable long lasting relationship, simply because the platonic is the majority of the relationship. How can you spend a lifetime with someone you don’t like? Love can support a relationship, it can guide and help a relationship through a lot, but in the real modern world you must like the person who you spend the majority of your time with or you will quickly look to spend time somewhere else with someone else.
Beyond that, you cannot actively love someone all the time, it would be emotionally exhausting. Typically this is the behavior of unhinged people, unhealthy obsessives. We intrinsically understand this in the language we use. Love is less an active behavior and more an underlying state of existence, this is why we say I am “in love” rather than “I am loving”.
You can almost appreciate the difference between the two in what is maybe the most well known usage of the active form of the verb, McDonald’s slogan “I’m loving it”. I’m loving it in regards to a low quality fast food hamburger doesn't have the same weight as if someone were to say “I am in love with McDonald’s”. We just naturally understand that to be in love, as a state of existence, is all together different and more important than the active “I’m loving it”
In my mind good proof of the importance of the platonic side of your relationship is in the seeming lack of that side in many aging boomer couples. We see in boomers a more transactional relationship driven by ubiquitous quips like “happy wife, happy life” where they seem to bounce back and forth between aggressive animosity and unadulterated romance with little in-between. It becomes easy to understand why second and third marriages seem to be a defining quality of the now aging generations
I want to stop and say I would not call any of this “marriage advice” simply because all of this starts before that. You cannot force a friendship, this may be the other important takeaway when comparing the three facets above. A sexual relationship is problematically easy to create, a romantic relationship by the irrational nature of love can also be forced, you can kind of see this in arranged marriages. But liking someone is so constant and active that if has to be forced it is destined to fail.
There is a double edged quality to this which is that someone who is currently a friend may not make a great spouse. There are many external factors that play into converting a friend into a romantic and sexual partner that can complicate that. To me it becomes more important to vet those people you date based on this idea (among MANY other things). If you cannot spend casual non-sexual non-romantic time with a person your chances of having a stable lifelong relationship with them are incredibly low.
A good example of this would be the overtly sexual couple. I think most people have met these people before. The sexual and physical side of their relationship is intense and near constant. This leads to fleeting romantic moments but when all of that fades the relationship is overtly and obviously toxic. This is because the overt sexual side of the relationship is being used to carry the complete lack of the platonic side. They don’t like each other, but they enjoy each other, and trying to conflate the two creates animosity.
The other side of this is the saccharin overly romantic couple, often this is a trope in TV and movies where one or both partners quickly become exhausted by the nonstop romantic nature**. Besides emotional exhaustion I think another big issue over being over romantic is that, typically, good relationships improve over time. If you’re doing everything romantic all the time it becomes very difficult to make special occasions special, which can have a deleterious effect over time.
In truth the real secret is balancing all three facets. A strong platonic and romantic relationship with little or no sex life will eventually die. A strong sex life and platonic relationship with no romance is just a long term casual “FWB” relationship. A good sex life with a romantic relationship but no platonic one may be workable, but it will be cold and transactional. It is keeping these three things in balance that makes a relationship stable, long lasting and enjoyable.
When you hear people say that marriage takes work, this is the work they’re talking about. What works one week will not work the next. Humans are fickle, life is chaotic, and things change constantly. What works one month might not work the next. There’s not magic solution, but it also doesn’t need to be as difficult as many make it out to be.