True partnership

A neighborhood friend is talking about her husband. “He’s a good provider,” she says. “He’s a good dad.” That’s her summary of their relationship. Neither of these is a troubling thing to say about one’s partner, but the way she says them—maybe you have friends in this sort of relationship, maybe you’ve heard it too—I can’t help but hear all the things she’s not saying.

Like, “He gets me. He understands me in a way no one else does.”

Or, “I can’t imagine life without him. When I wake up in the morning, I reach for him before I’m even fully conscious.”

Or, “I’m in love with him.”

I’ve heard people say these things after 50 years of marriage; I say them about my wife and I’m no newlywed. I’ve met people in their first year of marriage who are already too bitter to say them. I’ve met people of all ages and relationship statuses who dismiss this kind of love as naive and immature. Every form of happiness has its detractors. But naive or not, I refuse to outgrow it, because to me it’s everything. It’s the whole ball game. It’s what life is about.

So I feel a twinge when someone describes their romantic partner in purely functional terms (provider, housekeeper, parent, spouse) because that’s not what partnership is. A trust fund can be a good provider. A cleaning service can keep house. Happy, well-adjusted children can be raised by divorced parents, or parents who were never together in the first place. “Spouse” and “husband” and “wife” are, above all, legal and cultural terms—they’re often used in situations where no emotional attachment exists.

A partner is something else. They’re not a list of tasks or functions, nor are they simply “more than that.” They’re not a contract or a formula. They’re not just someone you feel responsible for. They’re fully a dimension of your life: someone you’re emotionally and spiritually consumed with, someone who makes you feel like yourself, someone you want to touch and listen to and spend time with. These phenomena may ebb and flow, but where they don’t exist at all, partnership is reduced to duty, alignment, tolerance. Not that there’s anything wrong with those—quite the opposite—but they don’t constitute partnership.

This could be a post about marriage, but “partnership” is more to the point. Not all partners are married, and not all married couples are partners. Casual hookups, domestic partnerships, and no-fault divorces have all been accused of “making a mockery” of marriage, but I’ve been married long enough to know what mocks my relationship, and it’s not any of those. Marriage isn’t demeaned by those who opt out of it, but rather by those who claim it when there’s nothing underneath. You’ve met couples like this: couples who quarrel constantly, who can’t stand to be around each other, who despise each other but for some reason refuse to break up.

“Marriage means something to them,” you might say. “It’s an obligation they don’t take lightly.” And yet, clearly, they do. Hostile, oppositional marriage is marriage in name only, marriage that means as little as possible. It’s arbitrary. The people who insist on staying in unpartnered marriages—or who trap their spouse in one, by force or finance—are the ones who have chipped away at the definition of marriage until the word denotes nothing more than itself. They’re the reason that, when I say I’m married, people have to look for context clues to determine just how married I am. Is my marriage bliss or misery? Love or inertia? How can they be expected to know, when neither is so common as to be the default?

The terms left to us, the ones that still mean something, are the ones less entrapped by legal and cultural lines: girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, partner. “Partner” may be the most sterile of these, but by the same token it’s the most versatile. It assumes little, but still more than marriage. Two people who haven’t spent time together in 10 years may still be married under the law, but they’re hardly partners. They’re not even in a relationship.

This is the way things are, but it’s all kinds of backwards. Marriage should be defined by a higher level of partnership, of sustained romance, than any other form of relationship—not because of some sacred ideal but because the durability of it presents a constant risk of stifling whatever partnership may exist. Partnership is voluntary above all; obligation and romance can’t coexist. A married couple’s partnership must mean so much to them that the fact of marriage fills only a celebratory, or even decorative, role. Partners must choose to continue every day because they want to, not because the relationship is materially difficult to dissolve. If marriage itself is the basis of the relationship, something the participants owe each other, something that binds them with greater force than their own will, its effect on their love can only be destructive.

No one is saying a partnership should end at the first sign of hardship, or the second or the hundredth. But that possibility should always exist. It should be visible, within arm’s reach. Every partnered person should know, with absolute clarity, that their partner stays with them by choice—not a choice they made once, long ago, but one they’ve made many times and continue to make—and it’s entirely possible for them to make a different one. Anything casting doubt on that knowledge is evidence against true partnership.

In all the implications I’ve made about my marriage, I don’t mean to set it on a pedestal. I don’t know what the future holds for my wife and I. But that’s what partnership is: I can’t guarantee she’ll stay with me for decades to come, as much as I love and hope for that vision of us, but every day she wants to continue is a powerful compliment. If she stayed for any other reason than wanting to, I’d be offended for both our sakes.

That’s why it bothers me when someone talks about their partner like a vacuum cleaner they’d really like to replace but can’t justify throwing away. My partner is everything to me, and I know what that means, and I mean it when I say it. It’s not about what she does or what roles she fills—there isn’t any one thing she could do, or not do, or do differently, that would be a dealbreaker for me. She’s a whole, unique person, not a checklist. Partnership isn’t about learning how little you can survive on; it’s about discovering how much life has to offer.

It’s easy to say that no one should settle for less. But the choice to stay or leave isn’t always simple. Is a choice ever unconstrained? People may depend on their partnership for financial stability, safety, legitimacy, childcare, access to services, or just to assuage the fear of being alone. I can’t persuade anyone to leave an unsatisfying relationship, and it wouldn’t be right to try.

What I can do, maybe, is pull some readers back from the brink. Readers who have begun to believe that true partnership doesn’t exist, or that it’s not available to them. Readers who might be entering an unpartnered relationship without realizing it.

The base ingredients for partnership are simple: love, kindness, radical acceptance, vulnerability. These are real, genuine things that emotionally mature people do when they want to be with someone. Love is real! It’s not an act or a ploy. It’s practiced by countless people around the world. It may not always be easy to find, but it can be learned, and in the meantime, it’s better to be alone than in a relationship where you aren’t loved and desired as your fullest, most vulnerable self. This isn’t speculation: I have friends who are single, not by choice, and friends in relationships that never give them a chance to let down their guard. I can see which one is worse.

The other kind of reader I hope to influence is one in a long-term relationship tarnished by fear. When you feel strongly about someone, it can be tempting to try to cage them in. To a lesser or greater extent, there are many things you can do to make it difficult for your partner to leave: rearrange your finances, change your living situation, constrain their social life, manipulate and threaten and plead. But you must understand these as intentionally poisoning the relationship. In trying to capture what you love, you will destroy it.

Instead, give your partner the chance to love you because they choose to. Show them your true self. Make sure they have the means and opportunity to leave—suddenly and secretly—if they want. Then notice how it makes you feel when they don’t.

I mean this very literally, especially for partners who live together. Your partner should have their own bank account and cash you wouldn’t know if they spent. They should have friends and family who would let them stay over for a few nights, no questions asked. They should regularly spend time away from you—karaoke night, book club, hobbies, whatever—without you supervising or checking in on them. They should know you can survive on your own. If one of the above is missing, you should do something about it.

It’s always possible you’ll lose them. But there’s more than one way to lose someone you love, and trying to foreclose the possibility just makes it all the more certain.

You are, of course, allowed to show your love—freely, openly, unambiguously. That’s not manipulation, it’s exactly what your partner signed up for. Look them in the eye and tell them you want to be with them. Tell them you love them without worrying that it sounds rote or cliché. And when life hands you an opportunity to show them they’re more important to you than anyone or anything else, don’t squander it. That’s how you make them stay.

I know life is complicated, and a lot of people are trying to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe my neighborhood friend, the one whose husband is a good provider, is one of them. That doesn’t stop me wanting more for her, and for him, and for anyone I know who hasn’t found true partnership. They deserve to have a relationship that fills their soul. It may be hard to find and just as hard to maintain. But it’s worth it.