S2:E20: Not “the (only) one”

Thursday, February 11, 2021

We’re proud to be sponsored by Delta Wines, whose dedication to fighting climate change is rivaled only by the quality of their delicious wines. Use the code SHELTER to get 10% off your order and support this show.

Thank you for sharing Shelter in Place with your friends! When your friends subscribe using the link below, we'll send YOU a special thanks!

https://refer.fm/shelter

Episode description: What if when it comes to love, we got it wrong?

Show notes:

Read Rhaina Cohen’s essay “What if Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?” here.
Find Timothy and Kathy Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage here
Read Alain de Botton’s essay “How Romanticism Ruined Love” here.

-----

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Sarah: Paul and I love each other. We're a team. He's going to kill me for saying this, but I don't know if romance is the top thing that identifies us.

Laura: For most of my childhood, the house I grew up in was classic ‘70s: rust orange carpets and pineapple wallpaper. After years of wishing and saving for it, my parents decided to do a big remodel. Over the years our house was home to four cats, two dogs, and also hamsters, a turtle, chickens, and for a short time even an albino classroom snake. When they pulled up that orange shag carpet and discovered that the cats had secretly been peeing on it, the era of pets came to a swift close. To this day my mom swears that the cats went to an actual farm (and I believe her), but to soften the blow of parting with them, my parents let us kids have a say in decorating our rooms.

For me, this was a longing fulfilled. I found pale green wallpaper printed with cracks and marble pillars. We hung curtains around my four poster bed. We even found a small crystal chandelier. I didn’t want a bedroom; I wanted a castle.

My princess obsession would be less embarrassing if I hadn’t been sixteen at the time. Years later Minneapolis’s most successful magician would buy our house and turn my princess room into a man cave, complete with mounted deer heads and burgundy carpet. It’s not a terrible metaphor for how I feel about that princess room now.

I was not raised to be a romantic sop. I spent my childhood climbing trees, and was equally interested in learning how to throw a spiral as I was in playing with dolls. My mom was a highly capable and independent woman. I can remember seeing my parents kiss often and on their 25th wedding anniversary my dad surprised my mom with a trip and small daily gifts, one of which was a tiny glass slipper. But those romantic gestures stand out because they were extraordinary moments, not because I saw them everyday. I have a distinct memory of my mom telling me that romance was nice, but it wasn’t everything. I also remember my secret scorn after that conversation, when I retreated to my room and wrote letters to my future husband.

My obsession with romance wasn’t limited to romantic love. It extended to friendship as well. Even as I nurtured the belief that true love would complete me, I was also on a hunt for a soulmate best friend. I was oblivious to the parallels at the time, but looking back at past romantic relationships is not all that different. There were long, intimate conversations, secrets shared, endless hours spent together, and the strong desire to see each other again. I’m not suggesting that friendship and love share all of the same functions, but in both there was the hope that those relationships would fill a void in me, and inevitably, there was disappointment when they didn’t.

The backdrop for my childhood was the dawn of romantic comedies and Disney princesses. My fixation on romantic love as the highest goal in life was a reflection of my culture.

Romantic love has a long history; Petrarch and Dante wrote about it in the 1300s, and even the Bible gets pretty steamy with the Song of Solomon. But the idea that romantic love is the great goal of life is relatively new. For much of human history, the kind of love that made John Cusack raise his boombox in Say Anything was referred to as “lovesickness,” a mixture of intense romantic attraction with elements of obsession, impulsiveness, and delusions. This view of love as a sickness isn’t totally off base. Today scientists have linked “lovesickness” to the flood of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine in our brains, a chemical reaction that looks a lot like what happens when we’re on drugs.

It wasn’t until 1750, when Romanticism found its way into poetry, art, and philosophy, that romantic love began to have its day. Before that marriage was less about love and more about economics. During the industrial age, as people began making enough money to think about marriage as more than a means to procreation and financial support, Romanticism dug its claws in deeper. Individual rights and the pursuit of happiness gained importance, and with them came the idea of marrying for love.

During the 1800s as the number of publishing houses in the U.S. and Britain increased, the dark fairytales of Hans Chrisitan Andersen and the Brothers Grimm made their way to the public. I remember those fairy tales, where Cinderella’s sisters get their eyes pecked out by birds, and the Little Mermaid’s tragic ending is turning to sea foam. But thanks to Walt Disney, the aftertaste that those stories leave with me is now a happy one.

After World War 1 and the Great Depression, Walt Disney saw that people were growing weary of sad tales and wanting to escape their bleak reality. Beginning in 1937, Disney launched a golden age of movies that borrowed from the old fairy tales, but gave them happily ever after endings. It was in the prettier versions of those old stories that our cultural obsession with romantic love reached its peak.

I bring up this history because with Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I think it’s worth examining our assumptions about love. I’m not just talking about the love we associate with marriage or even with dating or sex--though the conversation certainly applies to all of those places, too. I’m talking about the perceptions of love that affect us whether we are single or married or divorced or widowed. It’s a belief so common in our culture that we have to zoom out in history to realize that we’ve been indoctrinated.

The idea that Romanticism has fed us--that we’ve swallowed whole--is that whether in friendship or dating or marriage, our most important quest in life is finding “the one,” that person who at last will solve all of our problems and make us whole.

In his essay, “How Romanticism Ruined Love,” Alain de Botton says,

“We can at this point state boldly: Romanticism has been a disaster for our relationships. It is an intellectual and spiritual movement which has had a devastating impact on the ability of ordinary people to lead successful emotional lives.”

The salvation of love lies in overcoming a succession of errors within Romanticism. Our strongest cultural voices have--to our huge cost--set us up with the wrong expectations . . . .We're surrounded by a culture that offers a well-meaning but fatally skewed ideal of how relationships might function. We're trying to apply a very unhelpful script to a hugely tricky task.”

I think Alain de Botton is right. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with romantic love, but that we’ve zoomed in on it so close has blinded us to the bigger picture. Whether with a best friend or significant other, we expect it to be all snuggles and self-fulfillment, and think there’s something wrong with us if it takes work.

Even a quick look at the origins of Valentine’s Day is revealing. In the Catholic tradition, Saint Valentine’s Day commemorates the various saints named Valentine who were martyred. In ancient Rome, celebrations of Valentine’s Day looked a lot more like those old dark fairy tales than today’s Disney happy endings; from Feb 13th to 15th the men would sacrifice a goat and a dog and then whip the women with the hides of the animals they had just killed. The women, who believed that this whipping would make them more fertile, would line up to be hit. The men would draw the names of women from a jar and the two would be matched for the duration of the festival. Don’t get me wrong--I’m not advocating any animal sacrifices, and I’m certainly not lining up to be slapped with a bloody goatskin--but even this history is a picture of our tendency to brush past the harder parts of relationships, to focus more on romance than reality.

I find it helpful here to get a little perspective from others. If you’ve been following season 2 from the beginning, then you know that we’ve called this season Pandemic Odyssey, because our family’s rather dramatic--and occasionally even romantic--journey. Migrating from California to Massachusetts has been the backdrop to the conversations and connections we’ve made along the way. One of the places we stopped on our journey was to see my husband Nate’s Aunt Sarah, who’s also Shelter in Place’s design director. Sarah and I have very different stories when it comes to romance, but I’ve learned a lot from her.

Sarah: I got married for the first time when I was almost 50, and I think somewhere along the line I just figured I wasn't going to get married. And for me--I don't know if this is good or bad--but my life was kind of okay. I was just doing my life.

As if to put a nail in the coffin of ever meeting a man, I got a Chihuahua puppy. Three months after getting her, I met my husband. And I remember one of our first dates, he was at my place I said, “I've got to go walk the dog.” And I remember thinking, however, he reacts to walking the dog is going to make or break this relationship. And of course he said, “great, let's go.”

Laura: If Sarah was just doing her life when she met Paul, I was the opposite: I was waiting for my life to begin. Nate and I met when I was a senior in college. Our very unlikely meeting was the result of several unlikely events that included a last-minute trip, a failed jet engine, an emergency landing, two long “future partner” checklists, and a box of letters from across the globe.

You can hear that full story in season 1, episode 54: Mullethawk, but the short version is that we had a storybook beginning to our romance. This princess had finally met her prince. I had finally found “the one.” At long last, I would be complete.

To his credit, Nate wasn’t scared off by my princess industrial complex. Maybe it’s because he’d bought into that same fanciful vision of love himself. When we heard older couples say that over the years they’d come to prize companionship or conversation more than romance, we’d cringe and whisper that we would never be like them. We would do whatever it took to keep the romance alive. True love would save us!

I’ve been married for over seventeen years now. Nate and I have had a lot of fun together over the years, and our life has in many ways been an adventure. But I think Alain de Botton is right: romanticism is a relationship train wreck. It holds up romantic love as the highest goal, and leads us to put wholly unrealistic expectations on our partners. I was disappointed a lot in those early years of marriage because Nate wasn’t constantly buying me flowers or telling me I was beautiful. That our life together wasn’t punctuated by candlelit dinners and constant adoration seemed like a fatal flaw. I thought meeting the love of my life would make my life easier.

I’d found “the one,” so why weren’t all those years of existential longing finally put to rest?

I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to realize that marriage was more than romance--that to expect another person to complete me was not only unhelpful, but unfair. Nate and I learned together that relationships take work, and that being together doesn’t automatically heal our wounds. At times, it feels like having a witness watch us bleed. We’ve had our difficult seasons and our moments of being each other’s worst enemies, but we’re also each other’s best friends. We have a great marriage--but even on our best day, we can’t be everything the other needs.

In the original Odyssey, romantic love--at first glance--has a leading role. Like a Disney Princess, Penelope waits for Odysseus even though he’s been away for twenty years. And the Odyssey has the happy ending we’re all hoping for--sort of. Odysseus returns. He and Penelope are reunited. Order is restored to the kingdom once again.

But like the real history of Valentine’s Day, the details of these penultimate moments of the story are rather gruesome. Homer describes in bloodcurdling detail Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors who have been pressuring Penelope to remarry. I reread it this week, and it’s gross. But what struck me in reading this time around was something I’d never noticed before: all of those years when Odysseus is on his Odyssey, Penelope isn’t alone. She’s got a faithful friend by her side, Odysseus’s dear old nurse, Eurycleia. It’s that friendship that sustains Penelope through the hard years; it’s Eurycleia who encourages Penelope to welcome Odysseus back once he finally returns. She doesn’t replace Odysseus--in fact, it’s quite the opposite; she’s a great friend to both Odysseus and Penelope, and she plays a key role in getting them back together.

I’ve had some friends like Eurycleia in my life, too. When I trace the course of my relationship with Nate from that first meeting nearly twenty years ago until now, there are parallel tracks that go alongside it. Some of my favorite memories from our early years of marriage are of the many nights when our friend Jen occupied the third stool at our little kitchen table. Jen moved to Oakland a couple of years after we did, and for six years our lives orbited each other closely. We had the sort of friendship where we could stop by unannounced. There was just enough friction to keep us sharp, and more than enough grace to forgive each other when we cut too deep.

A good marriage is a little bit like a mirror. It allows you to see yourself more clearly than you can on your own. Sometimes the reflection can be hard to take.

In the kindest, best moments of marriage, the other person angles the light so you don’t have to take the reflection all at once. They show you only what you can handle in the moment, what they hope will be helpful and good for you.

A good friendship does exactly the same thing--sometimes even better. In those moments when Nate and I let each other down, when all I can see is a distorted reflection, she’s the first person I call to angle that looking glass and give me the needed perspective.

Rhaina Cohen, in her story “What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?”, uses a supermarket image to illustrate our view of romance. She writes, “People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart.”

In other words, in our search for romantic love, we ask too much. No one can be all of those things all the time. Even being all of those things some of the time is exhausting. But Rhaina says that this is where friendships come in. She writes that unlike romantic relationships, “intimate friendships don’t come with shared social scripts that lay out what they should look like or how they should progress. These partnerships are custom-designed by their members. Rhaina says that in our desires for friendship to be deep and committed and cherished, “romantic relationships and committed friendships appear to be varieties of the same crop, rather than altogether different species.
When Sarah describes her marriage to Paul, it sounds a lot more like my relationship now than when Nate and I first got together. But it also sounds a lot like my friendship with Jen--and like every other great friendship I’ve ever had.

---

I’ll be right back with more of this story, right after this short break.

Life hasn’t stopped just because we’re coming up on a year of the pandemic. Now more than ever, we need reasons to celebrate -- and while you may not be able to go out someplace special, with Brick & Mortar wines, you can bring the special home. To make it even easier, they’re offering Shelter in Place listeners free shipping. Use the code SHELTER when you order at brickandmortarwines.com and get free shipping right to your front door.

---

Sarah: When Paul and I were getting married, someone, very close to me said, “Oh, she's so independent. And she's so strong-willed, and good luck. This is going to be difficult.” And he has often said to me that that statement didn't really hold true. Not that I'm not independent, but wasn't anything that got in the way. And maybe that's what he likes about me.

Laura: All of these adjectives could be used to describe me as well. I can be very strong-willed and independent. Nate can be, too. Sometimes it’s difficult. We could learn to like that about each other better. When we met each other, we each had a checklist of at least twenty items of what we were looking for in a partner: athletic, musical, hospitable, and more. That we actually checked off each other’s items seemed like a sign--but since then we’ve discovered that some things we didn’t know to put on our lists might even be more important than the many things we did.

Sarah: I'm sure many of us are married to people that are in some ways quite different from what we imagined. I don't know. I have this pet peeve of people thinking they need to find a mate who shares all their hobbies. And I live in Colorado, so it's like “must bicycle ride.” “Oh, you ride road bikes? Oh, forget it. I do mountain biking.” “Oh, you cross country ski. Forget it. Won't work. I'm downhill.” The chances that that's what someone falls in love with is kind of small.

Laura: When Jen and I met, I didn’t have a checklist for friendship. It was okay that we were different in some ways and the same in others. Changing each other or becoming the same wasn’t the point--and maybe this is why our friendship was able to flourish. When we disagreed, we either worked through it or gave each other space. When we were interested in different things, that was okay, too. It was only after hearing Sarah talk about her marriage that I realized that for most of my marriage, I hadn’t extended the same grace to Nate as I had to friends like Jen.

Our culture doesn’t have quite the same attachment to friendship as it does to romantic love, but maybe it should. We need friendships because they keep us from getting too insular, from falling into the lie that our relationships should give us everything--or that they are just about us.

I came across a perspective lately that challenged all of those old notions about romantic love--and seemed much truer to my experience of it over time both in love and friendship. In their book The Meaning of Marriage, Timothy and Kathy Keller write,

“In the past, people got married and had children with the weighty sense that this was a crucial good for society . . . the private-happiness view of marriage puts far greater pressure on us to feel passionately in love all the time. It is time to think again of marriage as, at least in large part, a public institution, and not just a lifestyle option.”

Marriage for the good of the community didn’t even register on my list of must-haves. But over the years our relationship has been at its best when it’s not just about us. We’ve welcomed dozens of friends and strangers into our home for Thanksgiving dinners and backyard neighborhood happy hours. We’ve laughed and cried over the three kids we’re raising together, and helped each other navigate family conflict. Before we had kids, we spent an entire year together in Manila and almost lost our marriage--but our days spent in the company of the sex trafficking survivors who over time became our friends gave us the courage to continue. A decade later we still look back on that challenging year as one of the best of our lives. In all of those situations, what made life so rich wasn’t just each other, but the community of friends and our connection to a larger purpose.

Sarah: Paul and I love each other. We're a team. He's going to kill me for saying this, but I don't know if romance is the top thing that identifies us.

I'm the first generation of women where this was super pounded into, that the greatest thing in the world is to be you and make it all about you. That's great. Have a good career. Be a big person, all this stuff. But I don't think it's so worth it to do it at the expense of having a lifelong partner and a deep, meaningful relationship where you go through the good times and the bad times, sickness and health and all that. You're going to be working for a lot of years.

Laura: I know Sarah and Paul are happy, that even though she was happy pursuing her career before they met, it’s nice to have someone to grow old with. But I also hear in her words another truth, one that is bigger than marriage or even romantic love: we are not meant to live this life alone.

I won’t argue that romance and friendship are exactly the same--but in both I’ve experienced the parts of the relationship I’ve come to value most. Both Nate and my closest friends have seen me at my worst many times, and yet somehow they love me still. They help me to see the parts of myself that are good and generous, that allow me to forgive and make amends. They remind me that relationships don’t just fulfill us emotionally, they connect us to things and people that are bigger than ourselves.

I’m not anti-romance. I still love a bouquet of roses and a shared bottle of wine. Our desire to be cherished is innate to our humanity, and we all deserve to be looked at with love and admiration. It’s just that when we fix our gaze on romance alone, we miss out on all of the other gifts that relationships can give us. We lose sight of the truth that there isn’t just one way to find that connection we’re longing for. Sometimes we find it in friendship. Sometimes in family. Sometimes the thing we’re needing most can be found only in a prayer.

For many years after Jen moved away, I felt like my life was incomplete without that kind of friend. I had no shortage of friendships--many of them rich and wonderful and fulfilling--but by then most of those friends had children or jobs that kept them too busy or spread too thin to invest in a friendship the way Jen and I had invested in ours.

It took the pandemic and a cross-country move to make me realize my error: I had been approaching friendship with the same unrealistic expectations I’d had for my marriage. I’d been looking for “the one,” that person who would complete me and make everything okay.

When my family and I made the decision to temporarily leave California and wait out the pandemic school year near extended family in Massachusetts, I left all of my friendships behind. Even in quarantine, I’d been able to go for social distance bike rides or hikes with my closest friends. There had been drinks six feet apart in the backyard, even the occasional sidewalk neighborhood happy hour.

I was worried that coming to Massachusetts would mean the end to my friendships, that being out of sight would mean I was forgotten. While it’s true that many friendships went underground when the pandemic began, the small handful of friendships that had continued through those months of quarantine have emerged stronger than ever. With apps like Marco Polo and Voxer, even the difference in time zones hasn’t been an insurmountable obstacle. In a given week I might hear from Annie or Emily or Laura or Jesselle. From Kirstin or Micaela. From Quinn, or Christine, or Katie. What I’ve found in those combined friendships is the same lesson I’ve learned in marriage: no single friendship will be the thing that sustains me, but together, they are an essential gift, one that I’ve come to prize as much as the one I find in my marriage.

In her essay, Rhaina Cohen writes,

“Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others. But these friendships can be models for how we as a society might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care.”

I’ve learned a lot from marriage--from my own as well as from others like Sarah and Paul. But it’s friendship that has given me a picture for how we can care for each other beyond romance. There’s an eb and flow to a good friendship, a flexibility that allows it to change with the season or even the day. I used to think that the only friendship I needed was one like Jen’s and I do still need that today. But I’ve come to appreciate also the way that friendships rise to the surface when I need them most. How sometimes I can go for years without hearing from someone and suddenly they’re back in my life. It’s been a new thing to learn in this pandemic, that no friend can be there for me all the time--but that doesn’t diminish the strength of the connection. I’m learning that in my relationship with Nate, too, that sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is to send each other off to talk to a friend.

I’ve been ending each episode of this season with an invitation. This Valentine’s Day, do something really special--for a friend. Bestow on someone a bouquet of gratitude, a box of compliments, or the precious jewel of making them feel cherished. Maybe the person who needs it most is someone you haven’t talked to in a long time. Maybe it’s the person who shares your home.

From all of us at Shelter in Place, Happy Valentine’s Day.

Shelter in Place is listener-supported. If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info.

If you’d like to help us but can’t donate, asking your friends and loved ones to subscribe to Shelter in Place helps Hurrdat find us sponsors and expands our community. Check out our new referral program where we send you gifts when you get your friends to subscribe. You can find that at refer.fm/shelter.

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode you can hear Shelter in Place, but first I want to thank a couple of our newest supporters.

Vanessa Litman, thank you for being one of the very first people to review Shelter in Place on Apple Podcasts way back in May and for supporting this work all of these months later. Even though this pandemic year has not landed us in Mexico, I will forever be grateful to you and Beto for stepping into friendship when we needed it most--to practice my Spanish, to meet others in Mexico, and to make sure that our girls continued in the friendship they started as toddlers. Thank you for reminding us that friendship is bigger than geography or time.

Annie Gullick, where do I begin? You’ve shown me loyalty and constancy in friendship through the good times and the bad. Your messages and Marco Polos have been my soundtrack on so many walks or runs through the woods, often in the moments when I was feeling most alone. More times than I can count you’ve reminded me that there are people in my life who love me. Your family and your friendship are among the biggest reasons we call Oakland home.

Finally, I’d like to give a special box of compliments to our dear Aunt Sarah, who welcomed these weary travelers into your home, which was the perfect combination of a stylish modern art museum and the warmth and hospitality of the best BNB. We slept better at your place than we have in most of this pandemic, because being with such caring, accepting hosts made us feel like we could finally let down. Thanks for making us laugh often, and for donating your time, your design skills, and for offering your essential advice on what this show is and could be. Getting to work with you has been one of the best things that has come from this pandemic Odyssey.

Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Winnie Shi was our assistant editor for this episode, Sarai Waters was our assistant producer, and Alana Herlands was our assistant audio editor. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Sarai Waters, Winnie Shi, Alana Herlands, Eve Bishop, Gabi Mrozowski, Isobel Obrecht, and Melissa Lent.

Outtake:

Sarah: I'm just telling you, when you get married later in life, the big battleground? Food. I'm joking. Not really. If you're a single woman until you're almost 50, you have certain ways that you eat that are probably, you know, super healthy and all this stuff. And you meet a man who is like meat and potatoes. I'm telling you, we've worked it out, but food's a tough area for us, and restaurants. You know, I'll eat a bowl of kale with who knows what, and that's just not him. We've worked through it. It's so funny. We can go into an art gallery and we'll both say, “well, that's the great painting in here.” (We) don't even have to really speak. “so well, that's the obvious choice here.” But if we have to find a restaurant together . . . oh my gosh. War breaks out.