Relationship Advice

The late, great Ruth Bader Ginsburg reported that, just before her wedding, her mother gave her some amusing advice for marriage: “Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf.” (She added it was also excellent advice for dealing with colleagues.)

I thought of that story last year when I got asked by StoryWorth about relationship advice. (It was framed as advice for one’s kids and grandkids; hence the photo of our grandson and his special daycare friend. She’s adorable. She also bites.) The weekly format of StoryWorth inclines one to come up with short, on-the-fly, off-the-cuff pieces. So that’s what I wrote, and that’s what I’ve replicated below, slightly adapted for the blog format. I’m including it here because my advice comes out of my own experience and I’m curious about what my readers might have to say. The people who read this blog have a lot of life experience. (Some of you are even therapists!)  In your comments, tell me what you would have stressed, and why.

Here’s more or less what I wrote for StoryWorth:

Love is so complicated that it’s a wonder anyone gets it right. If you live with a person you love, you’ve added another layer of complication. The other person sees you when you’re brushing your teeth, when you haven’t had enough sleep, when you’re bored and snappish. You see them in those states, too. Infatuation—feeling in love—is bound to recede, or at least fade into the background at times. (Luckily, in a good relationship, it also returns like the tides.) Even worse, your go-to neuroses—installed in childhood—will get trotted out whenever the two of you disagree. It sounds impossible. Yet not only am I in a happy marriage, I see happy couples all around me.

Whatever advice I have is personal, based on a difficult first marriage (which ended in divorce) and a loving, funny, romantic, friendly second marriage. (Michael and I will soon celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary. We know many couples with longer track-records, but as we like to say, it’s a personal best for both of us.)

#1 Anyone you get involved with should be “value added.” Getting involved with another human being adds work to your life, so that person should also make your life richer and deeper, livelier and more meaningful. My friend Liz formulated this rule in graduate school, as a result of bad experiences. (She also announced one day that getting involved with someone at a later stage of life was like shopping at the Macy’s clearance rack: everything there is damaged, so you have to look for items in which the damage doesn’t bother you. I should add that she eventually found her sale item and is now happily married.) The delicious, indefinable buzz of sexual attraction is one important aspect of that “value added.” Other things might include a warm and reliable co-parent, a lively traveling companion, someone who makes you snort with laughter over the dinner table….

#2 Take care of yourself, and get involved with people who know (or can learn) how to take care of themselves. One guy I dated in grad school told me that he and his ex-wife had had an implicit contract: his job was to support them financially, and her job was to make him happy. If he wasn’t happy, she was failing. It was not a good bargain. When you get into a relationship, you are not signing to be the other person’s caretaker. It’s true in reverse, too: although your partner or friend should want to help you, encourage you, and occasionally coddle you, s/he can’t read your mind. S/he can’t always help you in exactly the way you want or need to be helped at that exact moment.

#3 Don’t put the other person down, and don’t let him/her put you down. In general, it’s smart to be restrained and cautious about criticism, in both directions. Of course, it’s necessary to speak up about things and negotiate—nobody’s perfect, and people have differing desires/needs/preferences—but don’t use a disagreement as a way to express your overall disappointment with the other person or talk about it as something s/he “always does.” In Blink, one of Gladwell’s subjects can tell with astonishing accuracy whether a couple will stay together by one small sign: if one or both people subtly or overtly sneer at the other’s life, character, and choices. My husband’s parents sniped at each other a lot; it soured their marriage and was hard to watch. They lasted seventy years, but in the age of available divorce, people who put the other person down often don’t stay married. Since Michael and I met after marriages in which we were each criticized a lot, we’ve evolved a strategy for being careful and thoughtful about how we work out tough issues. We sit down on the sofa and hold hands. We acknowledge, first, that we’re got something hard to talk about and, second, that we probably won’t articulate our feelings perfectly (or perfectly fairly); then we work at listening generously to each other. In general, we try to treat our marriage as a “criticism free zone.” As Donald Hall said about his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, “It took me half my life, more than half, to discover with Jane’s guidance that two people could live together and remain kind.”

#4 Have some fun together.  Set aside some time to do fun things with each other and pay attention to each other. It’s sometimes hard to be human; fun, laughter, and some flirting can aerate the soil and help things keep growing. You will have your own kinds of fun, but here’s an example of the kind of nerd fun we enjoy (exploring Fort Louisburg in Nova Scotia):

If I had to sum it up, I’d say, Be a great friend, and look for someone who will be a great friend to you. It’s totally worth it. And yes, sometimes it helps to be a little deaf.

Now, friends, based on your experience, what’s your best relationship advice?