The 24/7 Relationship

On Thursday, May 15^th, Leslie Kaufman wrote an article in the New York Times about Michael Roach and Christie McNally. Ten years ago these two Buddhist teachers took two vows. The first was to never be more than 15 feet apart, literally. Never. The other? You’ll never guess. Celibacy.

Uh huh.

Sometimes I read an article and think, gee, I wonder if there’s a column in here somewhere. This time I was having a hard time deciding which of the many goldmines of love dubness to choose.

First let me explain a bit more about Mr. Roach and Ms. McNally’s unique situation. For ten years now they have not been more than 15 feet apart. If they can’t be sat within that distance on an airplane, they don’t board. If one has to go to a public restroom, the other waits just outside the door, no doubt earning arch looks of reprobation from the non-15 footers.

Leslie writes, “If Michael is inspired by an idea in the middle of the night, she (Christie) rises from their bed and follows him into their office 100 yards down the road, so he can work.”

Yes, did I mention that they share a bed? Double, not queen or king. I have to admit that I don’t know if cuddling is a violation of their celibacy agreement. But I think it’s fair to say that spooning is almost unavoidable in a double bed situation. Maybe they sleep head to foot.

According to Mr. Roach, “It forces you to deal with your own emotions so you can’t say, ‘I’ll take a break’.

Really? Is there perhaps something to be said for having some space so you can deal with your emotions in peace? No, says Mr. Roach, “you must deal with your anger or your jealousy.”

Call me crazy but I’d think one thing you wouldn’t have to deal with in a 15-foot relationship is jealousy. I mean it pretty much rules out cheating unless you happen to find an invisible, silent man or woman to cheat with.

What this really made me think about, however, is what I call the 24/7 relationship, also known as the college-type relationship. In college, you have a lot of free time, share classes with a lot of people, and have a very flexible living situation. You can come pretty close to spending every hour of every day with your partner if you want. And in truth, many of us have done it once or twice.

And it doesn’t necessarily stop when college stops. Some people do the same thing in medical school, or even in careers if both people work in the same office (see Jim and Pam on The Office for reference).

So is this a higher form of relationship as Mr. Roach and Ms. McNally claim? Should we all be choosing some arbitrary distance and writing it into our prenups? Agreeing never to be more than 7 feet apart, or half the distance to the goal line?

The problem with these relationships is that we cut ourselves off from so many other people and experiences that would help us grow and become better people. And this doesn’t just hurt us, it hurts our partner as well because it deprives them of all that they would otherwise have learned from living with and interacting with another dynamic, independent person.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes that we need to grow and flourish in solitude before we can ever share ourselves with another. But beyond that, even once we have entered into a committed relationship or marriage with another, we need to still have some solitude, so that the time we do share can be all the richer.

A friend sent me an e-card the other day from Someecards.com and while I was looking through their offerings I came across one that said, “Let’s temporarily stop communicating to ensure that we’ll have something to talk about tonight.”

Interesting. What do people talk about when they haven’t left each other’s side all day?

Person A: “Hey, honey, today I saw this incredible art show.”

Person B: “I know, I was there.”

A: “Right, right. Well later I had this fascinating conversation with my friend Bob.”

B: “I know, I was there.”

A: “Right, right, well I had a really satisfying bowel movement at around 2:30”

B: “I know, I was right outside the door, I could hear.”

A: “Okay, well listen, I love that we share so much, let’s have sex.”

B: “No, no, we’re celibate, remember?”

Okay, so clearly I’m being a bit facetious. But of all the happily married couples that I know, I can’t name one in which the two partners spend all day together every day. But I can name dozens of college relationships that ended in fire and brimstone after a few months of pretty much 15-footing it.

The real struggle, of course, is how to find that balance. How to make that space. Because at first, when the butterflies are going nuts and the dopamine is flowing freely, there is nothing better than spending every second together. And you’re just getting to know each other, so there is no dearth of topics of conversation.

But as reality begins to set in, all those neglected friends start wanting some time back and all that deferred reading or work gets too piled up to ignore, it is extremely hard to back off. Almost always someone gets hurt, feels slighted, or takes it the wrong way. He’s not into me anymore. She’s going to break up with me. He’s got another girlfriend. She’s sick of me already.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to never let go of the space in the beginning? Have the talk early on. Decide together that one or two nights each week will be dedicated exclusively to other friends, or work, or alone time. It makes sense now, but you know as well as I do that you won’t want to do it when the time comes. You’ll be too intoxicated, ataxic with love, dysarthric with passion.

Dive in, enjoy it, live it fully, it’s one of the best feelings we are capable of having. But do your relationship a favor and at least every once in a while promise each other that no matter how much you want to, you won’t come within 15 feet of each other.

Think about it this way, at the very least it will make the celibacy thing a heck of a lot easier.

Girlz2Women

It occurred to me today, like a bolt of lightning or a flashbulb (the energy saving kind, of course) that there is a gold mine out there just waiting for four women to start an R&B group, call themselves Girlz2Women, and name their first song Mo’ Down Fillies. Can you believe no one has done this yet? I mean - personally - I can’t even believe it took me this long from the time I first bought Boyz2Men’s tape (or was it an 8 track?) to think of it.

TLC comes out with “No Scrubs” and then a year later some random group of men no one had ever heard of comes out with “No Pigeons” and makes a bundle. And that’s not even a fun play on words. I mean, seriously people, my idea has an animal in it too but it’s way more creative.

On top of being a success story waiting to happen, my epiphany bulb reminded me of an interesting nuance of our conversational language. Even now, in our twenties and early thirties, we often refer to women as “girls”. But we hardly ever refer to men as “boys”. Why is that?

I asked around a bit and both women and men admitted feeling strange saying “one of the women in my small group” or “I was talking to a woman in the pharmacy school”. In fact, people told me that if they were to hear someone say “a woman in the pharmacy school” they would assume the person was referring to a professor or staff member, not to a student.

Granted, we don’t say “I was talking to a man in the dental school” either. But we also don’t say, “a boy in the medical school”. We say “guys” for men and “girls” for women.

One person suggested that maybe it has to do with our being students, but au contraire. In this month’s issue of 7x7 San Francisco magazine (what, you don’t read it?), Alan Thuma, an assistant restaurant manager in Nob Bill who appears to be in his early forties or thereabouts is quoted as saying of his IRS economic stimulus package rebate check, “I’ll go to dinner somewhere nice and buy a girl some lilies.”

I think it’s safe to assume he is talking about a woman more or less his own age. So what’s up with this? Does it last forever? Do 75 year old guys in retirement homes refer to their female neighbors as girls and only to the 90 year old chick across the street as a woman?

There really are two issues here. One is the fact that we don’t refer to ourselves or to the people our age whom we know as men or women. Men and women are older. We are guys and girls. Could this be because we always think of ourselves as young? I remember when I was 15 and my older cousin was 25. I couldn’t imagine ever being 25, it seemed impossible to ever be that old. Now I’m 28 and I feel as young as I did when I was 15, except now I can drive a car and percuss a liver span.

The other issue is the difference in nomenclature for males and females. Why don’t we say guys and gals? Or boys and girls? Why girls and guys?

Yes, I know there are exceptions. A man might say of a friend of his, “yo, that’s my boy!” or “I’m going out with the boys”. But usually you don’t hear, “these three boys in my small group…” or “one of the boys in the first year class...”

A female friend of mine told me last year, “Jed, we’re not girls anymore, we’re women, you need to start calling us that.” So I started paying attention to my speech, and sure enough, I used the term “girl” much more than “woman” when referring to my peers. I’ve been transitioning, but it still feels strange sometimes. You should give it a shot, it’ll be interesting if nothing else. But I don’t have CHR approval for this little experiment so if you go for it, you have to say it was your own idea.

Some people, both women and men, when I told them this story said that they thought it didn’t matter. “Who cares, it’s not a big deal” they said. Well, maybe. But maybe words do matter. We have a presidential candidate who certainly thinks so.

So let’s take a look at the words for a minute. Of the seven definitions for “girl” in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, three are labeled as “offensive”, one is “a daughter”, one is “an immature woman” and one is “a child”. The last is “a female who is from a native place, ‘she’s a Missouri girl’”

Interesting.

But to be fair, the word “guy” isn’t exactly a laurel wreath of a label. One definition is: “Informal. A man or boy; fellow: He’s a nice guy.” But it also means: “a grotesquely dressed person” and “a grotesque effigy of Guy Fawkes that is paraded through the streets and burned on Guy Fawkes Day.”

Yikes.

Well, I’m going to go start writing some lyrics for “Mo Down Fillies”, but in the meantime, I think I’ll try to wrap my synapses around the idea of calling men “men”, and women “women”. I’m all for leaving the word “girls” for those brilliant 12-year olds who taught me how to use emoticons, and “guys” for grotesquely dressed flaming scarecrows in England. I mean, like seriously, that is just not my style.

The Pen is Mightier

If you’re reading this, Sean Connery, I am NOT talking about a “penis mightier” device. What I really want to know is whether I am the only one who thinks emailing is a better way to communicate, even a better way to get to know someone, than talking on the phone.

Just think about all of the advantages that email has over the phone. You know they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine how long it takes to SAY a thousand words. I don’t know, but I bet it takes a while. With email you can save all that time and just attach the picture.

Oh, oh, and you can attach songs too. I’m not sure how many words a song is worth (it might not be a one to one ratio you know) but I do know that you do NOT want me singing it to you over the phone. The magic of email allows me to send you the song so that you can hear the original artist sing it. Brilliant.

Email gets underestimated because most of us shoot off one liners with no punctuation that we put about a nanosecond of thought into. But by no means does that define the limits of what can be done. An email can be a nuanced, witty, intriguing, well thought out communiqué.

Maybe I’m writing an email and it strikes me that a quote from a favorite poet or author would complement my own thoughts. Easy to include said quote in an email, slightly stranger to say, on the phone, “You know, if you’ll indulge me for a moment I’d like to share a quote…”

A friend said to me, “but you can’t hear tone of voice over email, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if someone is being serious or kidding.”

Au contraire. Have you not met the emoticons? They’ve gotten a bit of a bad rep, I know, and in some crowds they are still considered very uncool. But just because they were first popularized by 12 year old girls does NOT mean they aren’t astonishingly useful little guys.

And, of course, if you know someone well enough you don’t really even need emoticons to indicate whether a phrase was written with a wry wink, a challenging stare, or an impertinent poke.

There are many other advantages that the email pen has over the cell phone sword. It is too easy to get distracted when talking on the phone. We have 5 senses for a reason and they are used to all working at the same time. It isn’t easy to shut down 4 of them and just talk. So we tend to “multitask”, checking email, unloading groceries, driving, etc.

But “multitask” is another way of saying “do a few things not so well instead of one thing really well.” And so we rarely have someone’s full attention when we talk to them on the phone. When writing, on the other hand, if we get distracted we can just take a break from the email. And I have yet to see anyone successfully unload groceries while typing a letter.

The time issue is a big one. Imagine trying to describe a beautiful scene that you saw on a hike to a friend right when you get back. If you’re on the phone you tell them about it, and then the conversation moves on. You aren’t going to come back, later in the conversation, and add a few details to the description. But if you’re describing it in writing, you can take all the time you need or want to make sure you are describing the scene in as much detail as possible.

In our busy lives, it is often hard to find a time when two people can both have an hour long conversation, especially if there is a time difference involved. But email neatly deals with this problem. I can write when I’m free, you can read when you’re free. We don’t have to match up.

Written communication allows us to be better “listeners” as well. How many times have you zoned out for a second (or a lot of seconds) during a phone conversation and ended up just saying “uh huh, awesome” to someone’s story instead of asking more in depth questions that you could have asked if you had been paying attention? But of course you can’t rewind their story. You CAN, however, go back and re-read their story if it’s in written form.

I’ll bet when you were brainstorming ways to spice up your relationships you didn’t consider adding in some more writing. Maybe someone suggested it, but they probably did it over the phone and you zoned out. Truth is, if you aren’t writing, you just don’t know what you’re missing.

If your communication with your friends and significant other is all talk and no writing, well, “you’re sitting on a gold mine Trebek!”

What is the ecstasy without the agony?

April 21^st was the 112^th running of the Boston marathon. The Boston Athletic Association, in blatant defiance of the firmly held belief that the human body can no longer run without an ipod’s accompanying cadence, banned the use of mp3 players during the race. Scandalous, I know.

Without the dulcet sounds of Snoop, Dre, and of course both Iced Tea and Cube, my mind was free to wander. All this meandering led me to thinking how relationships and marathons really aren’t that different, and no, not just because at the end you’re left with a bunch of smelly socks.

Somewhere around mile 14, I was feeling great, and I remember thinking to myself that if I still felt this great at the end of the race, I would be disappointed. I would wonder if I had pushed myself as hard as I could have, if I had given it my all.

Later, as I crested heartbreak hill…no, no, too easy, not even going to touch it.

Okay, so around mile 21 or 22 the pain set in, as Dr. Guljan would say, “big time, big time.” But here’s the thing. This is when it really got hard, and for me this was the defining time of the race. It was making it through that pain and managing to cross the finish line at mile 26.2 that made the feeling at the end so worthwhile.

A friend told me once that the reason we have such a high divorce rate in this country is that people get married expecting everything to be fun and easy. Then, when they hit a rough patch, they assume it means they made the wrong choice, and they jump to divorce as a solution. In an age of instant gratification, he said, we’ve lost the ability to patiently work towards a goal in the face of hardship.

Running a marathon well means feeling good for part of the time, and working through pain at other times. You could walk the 26 miles and avoid the pain, but unless you’re someone who needed to really push their limits to walk that distance, you will miss out on the reward of knowing you made it through despite the difficulty. You will avoid the agony, but miss out on the ecstasy.

Obviously there comes a time in some relationships where the good times no longer justify the hardships. But I think it’s safe to say that many of us set our bar pretty low. We never even bother to explore ways of working together with our partner to make it through the tough times, we just assume that hardship and pain is the sign of a bad relationship.

On the contrary, a marathon without pain is a race run too softly. And a relationship without hard times is one being lived too hesitantly. A friend told me recently of having to end a relationship when her partner refused to share part of his life with her, for fear of causing conflict. It struck a cord with me because I once had a relationship in which my partner, too, refused to open up completely.

Holding back in this way might make the sailing smoother for a while, just as running slowly for the first 20 miles will prevent pain at mile 21. But how rich can a relationship be if only the easy pieces are shared? And how sweet can it be to cross the finish line if you didn’t have to fight to get there?

Taboo

Barack Obama, when asked why he is struggling for support in Pennsylvania, mentioned a variety of reasons, most of which he later regretted. But one thing he didn’t say, though undoubtedly it is a major factor (perhaps even the major factor as the New York Times’ Bob Herbert argues), is that a sizable number of white voters will not vote for a black candidate.

Richard Dawkins, in his book “The God Delusion” makes the point that despite the fact that a significant percentage of educated Americans are atheists, it would be political suicide for anyone considering public office to admit to not believing in God.

The West Wing television show highlighted the Iowa “Ethanol Pledge” during an episode where the presidential candidates were campaigning in Iowa. No matter how convinced a candidate was that supporting ethanol fuel was a bad idea, it would have been the end of their presidential hopes to admit these doubts publicly.

Taboo topics are not limited to the political arena. There are certain things we know we aren’t supposed to say in relationships as well. The television show Friends amusingly had Ross and Rachel giving Chandler advice on what to say if his girlfriend asked if she looked pretty in the dress she was wearing. They asked Chandler what he would say. He said, “I would look at her and say yes.” Ross replied, “NO! You never look! You say yes instinctually, without looking. If you look it implies that you have to think about it.”

I don’t know about you but I have a hard time with this philosophy. When I ask someone how I look in a certain outfit, call me crazy but I really want to know the truth. Maybe this just stems from the fact that I know I need the advice, but still, seems logical to want the truth right? If not, why ask?

Is it possible that some people ask not because they want to know the truth but because they want to hear that they look good? Fishing for compliments so to speak? But it really doesn’t take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out that if someone tells you that you look good in an outfit without even looking at you in it, there’s something fishy going on.

I tried to break with this norm once with somewhat unpleasant consequences. When my girlfriend at the time asked me if I liked a certain dress she was trying on, I said, honestly, that I didn’t. Her face assumed a rather stony appearance which I had come to learn was not a sign of good things to come.

You know, this discussion reminds me of medical school evaluations. What’s the point of even having the 1 and the 2 on the 5 point scale? It is an unwritten double secret taboo to use the 1. Maybe if the person you’re evaluating set your shoes on fire you could give them a 2. But 1 is totally off limits.

Whether in politics, evaluations or relationships, what this all means is that we’re left looking for the truth in between the lines. If I’m trying on clothes and I ask someone how a certain shirt looks, I can’t expect them to say “it looks pretty bad, you shouldn’t get it.” So instead I have to distinguish between “Yeah, it looks good”, “I like it” and “Yeah, I really like it, looks great”.

After a first date, most people aren’t going to tell you “So yeah, these past couple hours with you were pretty miserable, I wish I could get them back, but since I can’t I am going to leave now. Please don’t ever call me again.” Well, okay, obviously they won’t say that. But most people won’t even say, “Thanks for dinner but I don’t think I want to see you again, take it easy.”

But why not? Why the taboo? Sure the truth might sting a bit in the moment, but then at least you know and you don’t have to waste time guessing at what the person really means.

Just think how much faster the game “Catchphrase” goes than the game “Taboo”. The only difference is that in Taboo you have a whole list of words you aren’t allowed to say while in Catchphrase you can say anything you want (except the word itself of course, that would just be silly).

Perhaps we’d all be a bit better off if we took some time to think about the kind of answers we really want from the people in our lives, and then told them. Personally, I would be extremely impressed if a girlfriend said to me “I know you are attracted to me, so when I ask how I look in an outfit you don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings. If you honestly tell me it doesn’t look great, I know you don’t mean that I don’t look good and I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t want your honest opinion. So give it to me straight, okay?”

Okay.

Timing

Let’s be honest here, with 9 hours of jet lag separating my brain (still in South Africa) from my body (floundering about here in San Francisco), is there any topic I could write about other than timing? No? Okay, then let’s do it.

There are two aspects of timing that I want to delve into here. One is the issue of being on time versus being late. And the other is how the time of our lives when we meet someone can have an immense effect on how our relationship with them develops.

I had an interesting discussion with an intriguing person in a place in South Africa called Coffee Bay last week. She said that she is always late for everything, partly because when she has shown up on time other people tend to be late and then she ends up just waiting around.

I asked, if she’s always late, why doesn’t she just leave herself more time and then she’ll be always on time instead of always late. She said it doesn’t work. She thinks she’s leaving enough time, but then something comes up and she ends up late. The real question is, does she ever get so excited about something that she just can’t help but be early? If I ever run into her again I’ll have to ask.

The discussion reminded me of how some of my high school students used to show up late every single day. It always seemed so simple to me. Just set your alarm 10 minutes earlier and do the exact same routine and you’ll be on time. Is it just me or does that seem ridiculously obvious and foolproof?

But it didn’t work. Like Ms. Coffee Bay, my old students were 10 minutes late no matter what time they woke up.

Uncanny.

It wasn’t as if they were showing up late because they didn’t want to wait around. I am pretty sure I started class right on time every day. So what is it? What is this inherent chronic lateness syndrome all about? If you know, please share your knowledge because it remains an absolute mystery to me.

My best theory, which doesn’t explain things completely, is that in this world there are green light people and there are red light people. Green light people, when planning on getting somewhere, assume that all the traffic lights will be green as they drive to their destination. They leave with just enough time to get where they are going on time if, indeed, every light is green. But if even one light is red, they will be late. They then say, “I don’t know what happened, I left with plenty of time”. And in their mind, they did.

Red light people, on the other hand, calculate their travel time assuming every traffic light will be red. Therefore, if only 1 light is green, they will be early.

There are probably yellow light people too who leave late but drive really fast and end up being more or less on time, but that’s getting a bit beyond the scope.

Maybe a green light person needs a red light person to get them to important places on time, and a red light person needs a green light person to help them relax when being early isn’t really all that crucial.

But either way, timing itself is an immensely influential thing. In a very literal sense, if you arrive somewhere late and someone has already left, you will never meet them. Less extremely, there are times of our lives when we are more open to meeting someone and starting a new relationship and times when we have no desire to be anything but single and free.

I’m not talking about the “easy let down” technique when someone tells a potential date “I’m just not ready to be in a relationship right now” when in their head they are adding a silent suffix “with you”. I am talking about that feeling, maybe when you are newly out of a relationship, when you know you need time to be alone.

Conversely, there are times when you feel you have done sufficient self-reflection and are ready to start a new relationship. It’s always amusing when people ask “are you single?” And if you say “yes” they ask “are you looking?” I could be wrong here, but I don’t think a whole lot of people respond to that one with “Definitely, I am desperately looking for someone, anyone, to date right now.”

Instead we respond with some interesting phrase that basically means, “I am, indeed, single and looking, but I want it to actually sound like I am saying that I am single and not looking too hard, but definitely willing to be looked for, wink wink.”

But however convoluted we are about expressing our intentions, there is something unique about being in a place where we are open to starting a new relationships that makes us look at people we meet in a different light. It is very possible that we could miss someone who we would have been very happy with if we, or they, are not in that place when we meet.

What’s really got my neurons in a knot right now is how jet lag plays into this whole thing. My brain is still 9 hours ahead of my body, so am I 9 hours early or 9 hours late? And if the part of me that’s 9 hours ahead meets someone, will she stick around long enough to meet the rest of me?

Morality of the Mister/ess

Along the Eastern Coast, South Africa

Shockingly I have found that here in the fabled Southern Hemisphere, although the toilet water maniacally swirls counter-clockwise, people go about dating pretty much the same way they do up North. So much for my big plan to write this column about the differences.

However, I have heard from several women here that they think South African men are notoriously unfaithful, much more so than American men. And it reminded me that all the hubbub about Eliot Spitzer’s self-immolation brought up an interesting point that wasn’t really talked about all that much. What is the moral responsibility, if any, of the other woman (or in another case, the other man)?

Let’s put aside for a second that “Kristen” was selling sex. Even if she wasn’t, she was sleeping with a married man. Is it immoral to be the one somebody cheats on their wife or husband with? Is it wrong to be a mister or mistress?

“Kristen”, the young woman who Mr. Spitzer paid for sex, was widely quoted as saying “I just don’t want to be seen as a monster”. I think it’s safe to say she knew the ex-gov was married. So was sleeping with him, for money or not, a monstrous act?

Some argue that everyone has the right to make their own decisions, and so if a married man decides to cheat on his wife, the “other woman” has no obligation to turn him down. After all, she doesn’t know anything about the situation, except, of course, that he’s married.

One man wrote saying “If I walked in on my girlfriend sleeping with some other guy, I’d pull her off of him and knock his teeth out with one punch.”

Yikes. Dental work is so expensive these days.

But that’s beside the point. I think a lot of guys would feel the same way, even if they wouldn’t actually knock out any teeth. So why such anger at the “other guy”? Does it hint at some subtle (or not so subtle) sexist viewpoint? A belief that women are the passive recipients of sexual relations and thus less to blame than the man who is involved?

Indeed, one woman wrote saying that they are both to blame, in different ways. “The man doing the cheating is obviously acting immorally. But if the other person knows they are sleeping with a married man, they are blatantly immoral as well. It’s easy to hide behind the excuse that ‘I’m not cheating, I don’t have a boyfriend’ but what you’re doing is condoning the heartbreak of someone else, more than condoning actually participating in it, and that is immoral, without question.”

On the other hand, a woman here in Cape Town told me, “It’s not my worry if a man wants to cheat on his wife. Maybe she cheated on him, maybe she don’t care. But it’s his decision, I have no obligation to turn him down for her.”

Obligation or no, how about when feelings develop between the woman and the mister or the man and the mistress? What boggles my mind is what makes the mistress think the man, if he leaves his wife, will not just turn around in a couple years and cheat on her?

But it happens. How many times have you seen someone cheat on their boyfriend or girlfriend and then eventually break up with them to start dating the person they cheated with? What exactly is going through the new boyfriend or girlfriends head? Is it delusion? Do they somehow believe the person cheated once but won’t again? Perhaps it is a monumental amount of self-confidence, a belief that the person cheated on that woman but would never do it to me.

Oh yeah? I doubt it. Serial cheating. It’s an epidemic. And while we can debate the morality of the “other man/woman”, there really isn’t a debate about the morality of the cheater. The little whirlpool may swirl in the opposite direction here than it does back in the ol' U.S of A., but cheating is just as reviled.