Category Archives: Relationships

“Be yourself” is common advice. The ode to authenticity.

“Change yourself” is also common advice. The ode to personal growth.

My reconciliation? Love yourself is what should be the baseline. Self-love is the foundation. And then, from that bedrock of confidence, embrace the dynamism of change yourself.

But “change yourself” doesn’t just mean to do so in a macroscopic, grand “I will pursue higher virtue and wisdom in the years ahead” kind of way.

It also means to be adaptive and changing at the day-to-day level, especially in your micro interactions with other people.

See, folks who are merely “average” at interpersonal connection embrace “just be yourself” and hope their authenticity will attract people to them and serve as the basis for connection.

I notice people gifted at interpersonal connection instead adapt themselves to their conversation partner. They emphasize different parts of themselves. They read the other person’s pressure points, insecurities, desires.

The “basic” game is to truly listen to your conversational partner as he or she bobs and floats and tilts in the waves of conversation. You must assiduously stay present.

Conversations in the professional world wilt when one person fails to practice basic listening. Sarah mentions she’s overwhelmed with her new project responsibilities, her voice tight with stress. Instead of acknowledging this, Mike immediately launches into his own exciting news about a promotion. Sarah withdraws; Mike wonders why she seems distant.

In an age of tech distractions and continuous partial attention, staying present to hear the other person, and then say things in response, is actually a differentiated skill.

The “advanced” game is to be a fluid status player in how you project energy. If the person you’re talking to is dominant and expects submissive energy, then you should either channel submissiveness in return or be cognizant of sensitives that can emerge if you choose to match their dominance. As a friend recently put it, “The master of interaction can switch between dominant and submissive energy effortlessly.”

This is interpersonal 4D chess: recognizing energy patterns and status needs. Say Mike projects dominance and expects submission. If Sarah directs dominance back, tension emerges.

What counts as “dominant” or “submissive” energy is subtle. For example, you might think asking questions of another person is a way to convey submission whereas expressing declarative statements conveys dominance. Sometimes that’s so: I have questions, you have answers, I signal submission when I ask you questions. But question-asking can also, depending on how it’s done and in what context, be an expression as dominance. It’s often about tone more than words; context more than content.

In sum, the theory is:

1) Your “authentic self” contains multitudes, and cannot be be singularly distilled. “Just be yourself” is an unhelpful starting premise to guide the way you relate to others.

2) Long run personal change to deepen your capacity for deep connection is powerful but… takes a long time.

3) The key rests in day-to-day adaptiveness in the micro interactions with the people you’re relating to. Conversational presence is a good start. Fluidly shifting status and power dynamics is the advanced game.

(Thanks to Sasha Chapin for helping brainstorm this.)

I was honored to officiate a wedding recently for some friends.

As I prepared for the duties, I reflected on the number of weddings I’ve attended where, by the end of all the festivities, I couldn’t answer two basic questions:

1. Who is the other person in the marriage? I know one person in the partnership really well, presumably. What’s the life story of the guy/gal who’s marrying my friend?
2. Why are these two people getting married to each other? What’s the essence of their dynamic?

Based on this, I structured my remarks to make sure everyone in attendance could at least nominally answer both questions by the end of it. The three-part structure was:

1. Describe the bride and groom each as individuals: their childhood, basic attributes/personality, professional activities. [This required interviewing the bride and groom beforehand and collecting stories/anecdotes/nuggets.]
2. Describe who they are as a unit: why they’re marrying each other, how they’re similar (the hallmark of friendship), how they complement each other (the hallmark of partnerships).
3. Look toward the future and offer some general perspectives on marriage, love, and life.

There were no other speakers or readings during the ceremony, so I ended up speaking for about 18-20 mins and could cover all these points. It worked pretty well.

Of course, no matter what you plan to say, if the audience can’t hear you — literally — it doesn’t matter. I’ve witnessed my fair share of wedding ceremonies where the house A/V doesn’t work, or more commonly, the people speaking don’t know how to use or hold a microphone. With handheld mics, 99% of people hold the mic like an ice cream cone instead of a toothbrush, and so the audio quality oscillates. (Hold it like a toothbrush very close to your lips!) A lav mic is almost always better for this reason but even still it can poorly positioned on the shirt such that as people turn their head when they speak, you start missing words. Anyway, in this ceremony, the mic situation worked fine, thank the Lord!

Below is an excerpt of my closing remarks from my officiating.

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We know there will be moments of joy for you both, we just don’t know what, when, or how. Will they occur at predictable intervals, such as at the birth of a child or the realization of a huge professional goal? Or will joy sneak up on you, will it happen when the two of you are going on one of your regular walks around New York, and for whatever reason you see something that reminds you both of an inside joke and you both laugh uncontrollably?

A spiritual teacher once taught me: Don’t miss the joy when it comes! Stay present with the joy as you experience it, he said. He said to tell yourself, “Oh, this is what joy feels like.” “This is what it’s like when I feel happy.” “This is what it feels like to see a beautiful bouquet of flowers.” “This is what it feels like to experience a beautiful sunset.”  We might even look around the room right now, at all our friends and family, and take a second to think to ourselves: This is what love feels like.

In addition to the joy, we also know there will be moments of serious hardship ahead, we just don’t know what, when, or how. Will there be a wave of expected grief at the death of a good friend? Or will malaise sneak up on you guys in a less expected moment, perhaps a pang of doubt on a cloudy day in late fall, doubt about whether you’re doing the right thing in your career or whether – god forbid – you married the right person.

Marriage, in my experience, brings more joy, and sometimes more pain, than if you were living life on your own. It adds dynamism and love and struggle. Amazing highs and sometimes really challenging lows.

The natural human thing to do is to try to hold onto the joyful moments, and avoid the unhappy moments.

But that’s impossible, because everything changes. In fact, someone once summarized the entire cannon of Buddhism in those two words: everything changes. The Buddha argued that everything in life is impermanent.

There have been so many joyful moments in your relationship so far. [Personal details]

So there have been some amazing moments. They’re now in the past. Marriage will be filled with millions more of these impermanent moments. The Buddha taught: Stay awake to the moments of joy that arise from being married to each other, and feel them.  Know that they will pass.

Also be aware of the moments of dissatisfaction that arise from being married to each other. Know that they will pass.

And do what you can to have more good moments than bad ones. That is what I wish for the two of you.

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Photo Source: A Perfect Match Photography

Consider the communication pattern between you and two hypothetical friends of yours.

With one, you email, text, and talk at least once a week. You’re continuously in touch. If you live in the same place, you may even see this friend pretty regularly for quick bursts. Maybe you grab coffee before work. Or get lunch in the middle of the workday. If you don’t live in the same place, you’ll hop on the phone for 5-10 min phone calls at least once a week, or sometimes a full hour if the stars align.

With the other friend, you’re not in touch all the time. You occasionally forward articles to each other and sometimes exchange a fun text message, but weeks and months often pass without meaningful interaction. When you do talk to or see the friend, it’s a deep dive. It’s a longer interaction. Maybe you see this friend in person once a year for a full day or even a whole weekend. Maybe you have a 90 min video chat catch-up twice a year.

In the busyness of my adult life, my friends increasingly fall into one of these categories. For example, I’m “in touch” with Chris Yeh on a very regular basis; we’ll talk a couple times a week by phone for 10-15 mins each time. By contrast, my interactions with Brad Feld are less frequent, but when we interact, it’s usually for 36-48 continuous hours in person. Interestingly, the one time I’ve had a very long continuous interaction with Chris was when we spent 24 hours together on the Burning Man playa (and slept in the same car). I learned things about Chris that I had not known, despite 10+ years of being in regular touch! I suspect if I ended up talking to Brad 2-3 times a week, I’d appreciate a different side to him, too.

Both are deep, positive relationships. Both types of friendship can be very rewarding. They’re just different cadence patterns.

Of course, there are downsides to each model of relationship. People whose friendships primarily consist of sporadic deep dives probably feel a higher degree of loneliness day-to-day during dry spells in-between the deep dive nourishment. (If you’re in an intimate romantic relationship, this can be okay because you tend to share minutia/quick hits with your spouse so don’t need to lean on friends as much for this.)

People whose friendships primarily consist of regular quick check-ins and texts and workday lunches probably feel some lack of depth with some of their so-called “close friends.” They realize that after years of “how was your day?” conversations and staying up to speed on the real time relationship drama or work battles that will someday be easily forgotten — they realize that they’ve never explored life’s deeper questions with their friend.

If you’re lucky enough to have a deep dive rhythm with someone, I think it’s comparatively easier to add some more day-to-day flavoring — and then perhaps you have the best of both! I was intrigued by how Gretchen Rubin described her approach on Tim Ferriss’s podcast: Every 4-5 days she sends email updates to her family recounting very minutia, day to day details of her life (“I’m getting my hair colored today”) with the explicit expectation that the update is “boring” and no one is supposed to reply. Its function is to simply keep friends in the loop on day to day happenings, like you would around a water cooler.

Finally, I wonder if women and men trend differently on this topic. The women I know tend to be better than men at staying in regular touch with their female friends. There’s a natural, continuous snacking dynamic between especially younger women I know: group text threads buzz a couple times a week, regular walks around the neighborhood, quick “Love you!” text messages, etc. Many of these women also have plenty of deep dives of course but the regular staying-in-touch with quick hits is what I notice most.

Male friendships can be characterized by months of non-communication, and then punctuated — if they’re lucky, and that’s a big if — by a deep dive. The issue is, men like to talk about the “guy I’d take a bullet for” or the “person I’d go pick up at a 4am” — but the deep dives that create  4am pickups rarely happen, at least in the post college years. Many men are deprived of both continuous quick hits and regular deep dives. White, adult, heterosexual men have the fewest friendships of anybody in America.

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I’m reading Knausgaard’s My Struggle Book 6 right now. Yes, it’s another 1000+ page opus — the final installment — and yes, I’m enjoying almost every page of it. That’s for a different post. Anyway, I recently came upon this paragraph:

Great opening paragraphs in this review of Joshua Ferris’s story collection:

It is late on a spring afternoon in Brooklyn. Sarah sits on her balcony, sipping a glass of wine, gazing down at the neighbors laughing on their brownstone stoops. A mystical sort of breeze arrives, one of “maybe a dozen in a lifetime,” tickling the undersides of leaves and Sarah, too, who now finds herself restless with longing for something new, for anything but the same old thing. Her husband comes home. “What should we do tonight?” she asks. “I don’t care,” Jay says. “What do you want to do?”

As most battered and seaworthy veterans of relationships eventually know, this is not the best response to a mate who feels herself to be in a sudden existential quandary, who, anointed by a breeze, is looking for something more than just another late-night superhero movie and familiar takeout sandwich. Bad though a spouse may be who dictates the marital laws, equally awful is the passive partner who simply goes along for every ride.

In that vexed, trembling fashion begins “The Breeze,” one of several standout stories in Joshua Ferris’s new collection, “The Dinner Party,” a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion. Richard Yates once published a collection called “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.” With 11 stories of its own, “The Dinner Party” might comparably have been titled “Eleven Kinds of Crazy.” Coupledom, in particular, is shown to be a nearly hallucinatory proposition, involving those alternative realities commonly known as husband and wife, who suffer veiled and separate lives side by side, breathing in squalid proximity “the stale tenement air of married life,” as Ferris puts it.

Is she enjoying the city she’s living in? Is he enjoying his job, his co-workers, his boss? How’s he feeling about life?

The factor that has the most explanatory power, in my view, on questions having to do with personal happiness and satisfaction in one’s personal and professional life, is the following: Is this person satisfied with their romantic relationship status?

Note I am not saying “in a happy relationship.” There are plenty of people who are single and very happy with that status. But those who are single and yet would like to be in a relationship tend to be unhappy, and project that unhappiness across all aspects of their lives. Those in unhappy relationships act similarly.

Romance rules all. To deeply understand a person and their probable happiness is to understand their romantic happenings. Of course, in almost all professional contexts, and a great deal of personal ones too, it is inappropriate to probe on such topics. Which is one reason why most friendships are not very deep.