Your first job then is to put aside your dependence on alcoholic gaiety and decide if the sober guy would be a decent partner, even if less fun. Then, whether you decide to stay or leave, you’re ready to give him constructive advice. Let him know that, as much as you appreciate his fun side, you now know his way of enjoying life is destructive to his long-term partnership, job, family, and health. Sobriety may make him dull and unhappy and may even drive you away, but it’s still better than the alternative. You hope he sees what you mean.
It’s great to begin a marriage with humor, but if a marriage is to last and do what you need it to do, it must tolerate the times when laughter is impossible. So don’t overrate laughter as a value or goal of marriage, but accept it as a welcome dividend, like the special humor that can only develop over years from sharing good times and hardships, together.
Did You Know . . . Truth, or Bullshit?
We examine widely accepted beliefs about relationships to determine whether they’re true (or not so much). The phrase in question:
“What women look for most in a man is a sense of humor.”
“A sense of humor” may be what women say they most look for in a man, at least when asked by lady magazines or the pollsters at Family Feud, but this notion is hard for many men to believe; skeptics believe that women only say this to be nice, and that, if they were being honest, they’d favor a more superficial trait. Many (fairly humorless) men argue further that what women look for most is a guy with a hot bod, a sweet ride, a fat bank account, or any other icky adjective-and-noun pairing that’s unflattering to everyone, because women are just as shallow as men and no sane woman would choose a prop comic over a personal trainer (although the world’s premier prop comic, Carrot Top, is now built like a personal trainer, but that’s beside the point).
While prima facie the guy with a tight five-minute set would lose to a guy with tight abs, a “sense of humor” doesn’t necessarily mean “comedian” or even “normal guy whom I find to be hilarious.” No woman wants to be with a guy who has no sense of humor—who, like the angry jerks described above, is humorless—because besides being less than fun, humorless people are quick to anger, and men that are quick to anger tend to get violent. And if there’s one thing most women don’t look for, it’s a guy who chooses fists over funny.
So, guys, if you’re neither handsome nor hilarious, don’t worry. Sure, it helps to be either or both, but the key to appealing to women is being quick to laugh, especially at yourself, and to face crises with ease rather than easily freaking out or picking a fight.
VERDICT: NOT (EXACTLY) BULLSHIT
Laughter is like conversational lube; it makes getting to know or be with someone easy and frictionless, but only for so long. When it eventually wears away, you’ll need a more permanent, reliable way of finding a good partner and working on the hard issues that life presents. Enjoy humor, but don’t idealize it or let it stop you from evaluating people by their other qualities and actions instead of their quips. If you don’t let humor distract you from the serious process of finding a partner with a strong character and compatible goals, you will find something far more long lasting to smile about.
What to Look For
What to Achieve/What Not to Be Fooled By
Mutual attraction
. . . in part, from a shared appreciation of the same jokes and an ability to laugh at things that are painful and not mainly from laughing at the things you both despise or are afraid of.
Mutual respect
. . . that comes from your shared ability to accept and laugh at your weaknesses while calmly accepting those of others, no matter how tough it gets, and not from your talent for getting laughs from a tough crowd.
Shared effort
. . . that continues even when there’s no way either of you can smile, let alone laugh, rather than from trying to one-up each other’s amusing banter.
Common interests
. . . in activities that do not necessarily require fun, laughs, amused third parties, and/or a designated driver.
Common goals
. . . such as figuring out how to spend time together, not when you can include friends and fun, but when you’re tired, fed up, irritable, and as unamusable as you can get.
Five Ways to Tell If a Relationship Has Staying Power
1. Quantify your quality connection time: While the hours of looking into each other’s eyes, endless deep conversations, and entire weekends spent naked may seem overwhelmingly significant, those moments don’t tell you much. Instead, total up the minutes when you don’t have much to say and aren’t feeling particularly needy, lusty, or chatty, but like spending time with each other doing nothing much at all.
2. Rate your ability to protect your time together: Most people worry that their spouse will destroy their relationship with a secret affair; more frequently, however, the real threat to relationships are very public, overly responsive connections to parents, exes, bosses, etc. If you’re with someone who prioritizes your relationship ahead of the needs of his chummy or needy exes, grown kids, or at least one nutty parent, then you may have a future ahead of you.
3. Consider whether this relationship is copacetic with the major life goals of both of you: No amount of mutual love and affection can sustain a relationship if one party is always out of town, moving from city to city, or risking life and limb, and the other party just wants deep roots, constant company, and a partner with all limbs intact. Remember, love can’t change character, and if someone’s character moves her in a unique path that the other can’t accept, you can’t move forward together.
4. Try overcoming a major challenge together: Nothing tests the mettle of a relationship like jointly taking on a tough situation, e.g., a trip to the emergency room, a backpacking trip through Patagonia, a fight over whether the novels of Susan Sontag are brilliant or self-indulgent, overrated crap. Watch to see what shape you’re in when you get through, as well as whether your partner includes you and asks for help when he faces a major loss or setback.
5. Live with your partner: Move in and see if he or she will give you closet space, do the dishes, replace the empty toilet-paper roll without being asked; overcoming a specific obstacle or tragedy or argument is one thing, but getting through a series of daily struggles is a test like none other. To up the ante, get a puppy with a nervous stomach, or move into a house that needs major repairs, or go live somewhere you have no other friends or barely know the language. There’s no better way than sharing space to figure out if you share enough fundamental values and complementary traits to spend the rest of your lives together.
Chapter 6
F*ck Good Family
There’s no easy way to describe someone who has a positive relationship with her family (which hopefully doesn’t consist of drunks, convicts, or people with horrifying genetic diseases). “Family stability” doesn’t exactly sum it up, nor does “positive parental relationship,” which is more confusing and creepy. Even though “good family” sounds like something sought by those searching for a mate with a Downton Abbey–style pedigree and we doubt this book will be big with the Dowager Countess set, the term will have to do.
Searching for a partner with a good family means looking for someone who has a strong relationship with a loving family who provided her with a stable upbringing, or just someone who doesn’t pretend her parents are dead and whose family visits don’t have to take place at supermax prisons.
Some good partners can rise above dubious beginnings, forgive their parents, and maintain contact. However, when a possible partner reveals that she was raised by wolves after her parents left her in a cave on a drunken dare or hasn’t spoken to her family since being ceremonially shunned twenty years ago for reasons she doesn’t want to talk about, it should make you wonder what kind of parent she’d make, or what kind of issues her upbringing has burdened her with that could affect your life together.
Some people are drawn to good family pedigrees and some to
family-trauma refugees, and logic doesn’t shape their choices other than to frame the after-the-act rationalization. The good family seekers say they’re looking for the aforementioned stability and child-rearing advantages, which is valid but not nearly as important as a would-be partner’s character. Those drawn to damaged refugees explain that they feel an additional closeness and helpfulness because their loving relationship is healing old wounds, ignoring the risk that the old wounds are not the healing kind.
Getting to know someone’s family is usually a great way to get to know who she is and what it will be like to raise a family with her. Be aware, however, that family stability isn’t always the best indicator of future relationship stability.
Sometimes the family relationships that are particularly enjoyable while dating cause problems later on, and some relationships that are obnoxious or difficult now also reveal a partner’s strengths. Having a stable family yourself may create unrealistically high expectations for a partnership or make it harder for you to integrate new relationships with those you have. Be aware of your prejudices and reflexes and don’t let them determine your choices until you’ve developed a good, solid method for evaluating family relationships and their likely impact on your life together. Learn to assess weaknesses and risks that can arise from family stability (yours or a prospective partner’s), predict their possible impact on a long-term relationship, and determine whether you can protect yourself from that impact if need be.
In managing family relationships, be they with your own difficult clan or with a partner’s, establishing strong boundaries is the best way to prevent either of you from reacting to parents more than you react to each other or your shared and individual priorities. More important than whether you like your partner’s parents or get along with them well is how well the two of you manage your differences in responding to parental guidance, pressure, guilt, or just invitations to family get-togethers. You may love your partner to pieces, but that love will be endangered if he seems to listen to his parents’ advice more than yours or enjoys spending time with them more than he does with you.
When you meet a prospective partner’s parents, you’re not just trying to please them (though it doesn’t hurt if you do); you’re evaluating what they will be like as in-laws for support, intrusiveness, neediness, and influence. Don’t neglect any opportunity to gather information or elicit the opinions of others who have married into the family and dealt with its leaders and their leadership style.
If you suspect cultural differences—and the risk goes up with prospective partners who come from families, regions, and cultures that you know nothing about—your evaluation must include an element of anthropology as you try to figure out the norms and rituals of regular get-togethers, religious customs, and the role of those who marry in. Never assume that love will sweep those differences away.
Someone’s having a good family is not necessarily a good enough reason to commit to the person, though liking and admiring a partner’s family is a good place to begin. Develop careful methods for assessing a prospective family’s values, the boundaries of your possible partner’s relationships with it, and the way it may influence your life together before deciding whether you have found a good fit.
Good families can drive you crazy and apart, and bad families can have almost no impact on your future lives together. Your job is to put the facts together until you understand what influence your partner’s family, good, bad, or in between, will have on the stability of the life (and possible family) you build together.
The Good Things You Want Someone from a Good Family to Deliver
• A friendly, accepting welcome from the clan that gives you everything you always wanted but have never received from your own family, or even from a visit to an Olive Garden.
• A confirmation that your prospective partner is every bit as nice, calm, and loving as she seems to be, thus guaranteeing acceptable offspring.
• A word from her parents or sibs supporting, praising, and generally marveling at how reasonable you are when she goes off the rails.
• A promise of strong financial and child-care support and an ever-ready beach house whenever you need it.
• A clean bill of family health for mental illness, substance abuse, and cystic acne.
Profile of the Family Man or Woman
Here is a list of traits associated with someone with a solid family tree:
• Physical attributes: Beyond his beloved mama’s nose or his admired papa’s chin, his general look should reflect his place in his loving family, depending on whether he fits in with the clan. So your good family kid either cuts a confident look, as if he takes socializing for granted, is comfortable with adults and strangers, and knows his place in the world, or he dresses like an oddball, wishing he knew why he didn’t belong but unable to find a way to blame his perfectly nice family for his angst and all-black wardrobe.
• Common occupations: A good family prepares you for a job persuading the relatively rich and comfortable that they should trust you because you’re one of them; just having the right last name can open up opportunities and memberships in clubs and secret societies unavailable to most. If your family name is dirt, you can still convince fellow less fortunate outsiders that they should trust you because you feel their pain and know the importance of sticking together. Those with strong family support, financial or otherwise, become money managers, fund-raisers, golf-club and condo-board chairmen, and terrible US presidents.
• What attracts you first: Perhaps it’s the sweet way he respects his mother or the way her family seems to immediately accept you as their long-lost son when she takes you to one of their weekly dinners. You get the impression that the parents raised their child right, sending a moral, baggage-free adult into the world who would likely also be good at raising kids right.
• Red flags: Noticing that your prospective partner’s interests and opinions rarely stray from the family party line or background or culture and don’t reflect an individual point of view based on his own experience. He may generally overly respect authority and require a bit of spine reinforcement, especially to respect your needs over his parents’. Most troubling, she pushes you to fit in with her family rather than enjoying the ways that you don’t.
Seeking Good Family
Of all the traits people inherit from their parents, the ability to be good parents or create a home as stable as the one they grew up in is not one that always gets passed down to the next generation. That’s why, when you seek someone from a strong family, you shouldn’t expect his or her family goodness to envelop you and the family you wish to start. Instead, check out how well you and your prospective partner agree on the way you experience your relationships with significant family members and believe they should be treated. Undoubtedly, seeing people in the context of their families is a great way to get to know them, but even when you think the families are wonderful, what you often discover are significant differences in the ways you respond that can’t simply be negotiated out of existence, into harmony, or into line with the parenting DNA you’d come to expect.
Here are three examples:
• I love my boyfriend’s mother—everybody does, she’s just that kind of person—but my love for her drives my boyfriend crazy because she wasn’t the greatest mother to him and his feelings are much less positive or clear-cut. That everybody, not just me, thinks she’s the best makes him both angry and insecure. My goal is to get along with my boyfriend’s family without getting my boyfriend annoyed.
• My girlfriend loves her parents, but her father totally hates me, and while my girlfriend says he’s often hard on her boyfriends, she won’t admit that he hates every guy she’s ever been with just on principle. I don’t want to talk shit about him because he means everything to her, but I don’t see how we can stay together if someone she loves so much thinks I’m such an asshole. My goal is to figure out how to get her beloved father off my back.
• I wa
s excited to meet my girlfriend’s family because she’d talk all the time about them and how fun and nice they are, but when I met them, I was horrified. Her parents and siblings yell at each other and cut each other down constantly, and everything they say to one another is nasty. I don’t know how she can consider that house of horrors to be loving, but she does, and it makes me question her judgment and what she can offer a family of her own. My goal is to make sense of what my girlfriend’s misperception of her Manson family means.
While a family may run as a positive, amiable unit, it’s still made up of individuals who have distinct tastes and points of view and unique sets of chemistry within the group. Even the most stable family can be a fragile ecosystem, so as natural as it is to assume that people who have stable, positive relationships with their families are more likely to have such a relationship with you, those relationships may be more steady than the sum of complicated, possibly shakier parts.
So, when you finally do get to know your partner’s individual family members, your response to certain members may be much more positive or negative than your prospective partner’s, and certain family members’ response to you may be far from what you would wish. You’ll realize that the family that seemed so loving and cohesive may be split over how certain members feel about one another and about outsiders such as you.
As little control as we have over other people, we have even less over groups of people, especially those who are related, and the closer the family, the stronger the influence these differences in personal chemistry will have over your future life together.
F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship Page 14