As you know, I have been trying to work with a collection of half-baked formulations with only one little curb—it’s not about me—to tell me when I’ve gone too far. There ought to be a way—other than the one Trail Blazers example I offered—to talk about subordinating the role of the individual to the success of the team without talking just about sports. I’m particularly interested in how that focus can sustain a marriage.
I try to clarify this notion in the context of teaching. I think that works as far as it goes. Then I try to define courtship in a way that opens it to the distinction I am working with. Then, finally, I take that courtship distinction and apply it to a marriage where the partners have and pursue a goal that is both intimate and collegial and which—the curb, again—is not about me. This essay takes me as far as I have thought about this. It ought to be a little while before I venture back.
I said I wanted to try teaching next. It is not hard to imagine a classroom setting where the interests of the teacher and of the students are opposed. The best the students can do is “we win some and he wins some.” But every gain of ours is a loss for him and vice versa. It is, more briefly, a zero-sum relationship.
I imagine there will always be some of that around the edges, but I can think of a way that it need not be at the heart of the relationship. I’m thinking of a classroom relationship that might be called coaching. In this relationship, I am the professor and “they” are the students. We agree that a certain skill—let’s say telling the difference between the axis on which an argument turns and the positions that define that axis—is something they want to learn and that I am both willing and able to teach.
So I set up a series of tasks that will both teach this skill and measure the progress of the students toward mastery. Then I teach them lesson one: an axis is the name of the argument you are proposing. They want to learn this skill and I want to help them. They make mistakes; I correct them; they are grateful for the help. They go back at the task and make fewer mistakes. I verify the correct answers and indicate just what it is about the incorrect answers that makes them incorrect. They go back at it and establish their mastery in this skill.
They are satisfied; I am satisfied; we are satisfied. Every advance on their part is a win for me as well as a win for them. They drink in both the praise and the criticism because each, in its own way, moves them toward achieving the goal we both have. That’s what I had in mind by coaching.
Once you are in that kind of a relationship—a relationship defined by mutual commitment to a task—it all just flows. But there are so many ways of not being in that relationship. I don’t want to teach them in the way they learn best. They don’t want to be there at all. They want to be there so long as “the performance” is entertaining, but not longer than that. If they don’t have a goal that is out there, then I can’t help them reach it and they have no reason to accept my part of the process, particularly the criticism, at all. Inside this relationship, they throw off the potentially discouraging criticisms as just another way to make progress. They accept but don’t focus on praise as just another way to make progress. They don’t take the positive things as good in themselves or the negative things as insulting. They could feel that way, in another setting, but here in this relationship, those feelings are accepted just as steps to our common success.
I’d like to look at a more complicated relationship now. You could call it “dating,” but I am going to call it “courtship.” In my way of thinking about it—admittedly not the only way—dating is what you do so you can decide whether you want to court her and by which she decides whether she wants to be courted. There is, or might be, a common goal in courtship. The only common goal in the relationship I called “dating” is the collection of information necessary to a well-informed and wise decision.
I cued this up to some degree in the last post.
I want to look, also, at what I think of as the two halves of friendship. I call them intimacy, by which I mean that we look at each other and build the relationship, and colleagueship, by which I mean that we stand side by side and pursue our common goal. A relationship that is only intimate runs the risk of being fragile and ingrown. A relationship that is only collegial runs the risk of being superficial and, in the absence of the task, meaningless.
The piece of this relationship that is most like the coaching I described above is the collegial part. The romantic couple has a common goal and each values the other at least in part for what the other can contribute to the common project. Imagine an Audubon Bird Census in which George says, “I want Mary on my team; she is better than anyone I know at identifying juvenile gulls.” Now let’s just take George at his word. We are not considering any other aspect of his relationship with Mary or where they will have to go at what time of day in whatever kind of transportation to see these gulls. He values her for her contribution to a project that means a lot to both of them.
But if George and Mary are the ones courting/being courted and this is all there is in the relationship, it isn’t going to be much of a relationship. And we could add half a dozen other more broadly plausible common goals, like playing soccer or campaigning together or going to a party or planning a bagel party or reading to each other aloud or listening to a complex piece of music and having surveyed all those activities, we would not have added anything at all to the relationship beyond collegiality.
So, let’s consider intimacy. As I picture collegiality side by side, I picture intimacy face to face. The questions I ask in an intimate relationship are, “Do you know who I am?” and “Do you like who I am?” Crucial questions, obviously. And, for a long term relationship, there is the matter of still knowing who you are twenty years down the road, twelve of them consumed by childcare, and still liking who you are. So it isn’t a one-time question.
But if that’s all there is, there is a very rapid, very fragile feedback loop set up in which the understanding and affiliation of the partner are all that matters. I breathe in your approval and take sustenance from it as I would take oxygen from the air. Every time I breathe in this intimate relationship and get no oxygen, there is a momentary panic. I have to have it and I have to have it all the time and I always know whether I am getting it or not.
There is no common goal here. There is deep, immediate, and fundamental nourishment. It’s vitally important. But it’s fragile. When I am that fixed on you and don’t get what I need, how to I react? Do I withdraw, discouraged or confused? To I redouble the effort to get something on the next pass (and maybe frighten you)? I don’t just not react.
Let’s go back for just a moment to the teaching situation. Professor criticizes student. Student does not attend to the criticism—it’s not about him—but to the meaning of the criticism for the mastery of the project. There’s no fragility here. It’s not about me; it’s about how to make “it” better. But in intimacy, there is no “it.” It’s just you and me and my needs and your needs and my hopes and fears and yours.
So in a friendship—a relationship in which there is both collegiality and intimacy—how do you set goals that allow me to take what I learn in the intimate part of the relationship and make it not JUST about me. It’s about me; it’s intimate. But it’s about something else too. Maybe it’s about who I’m slipping into being with you without knowing it. Maybe it’s about my missing a chance to engage in some part of your life that is really important to you. Maybe everything I say gets “taken the wrong way,” and only afterwards do I realize that I was angry about something and that’s why “you misunderstood what I was saying.”
Those are all pretty common events in a close relationship. What do we need to rescue them? We need something like an “intimate goal.” Nothing I have said so far has put those two words together. The goals I described didn’t have intimacy and the intimacy didn’t have any goals. But how about “being the person for you that I promised I would try to be?”[1] Let’s say I want urgently to be that person for you. It is deep in my heart to want that. I want it more than I want to be approved for whatever it is I am doing. If I had a goal like that, I could—I could; it would be possible—take your criticism with grace.
I could say that “it isn’t about me;” it is about my deep desire to be this kind of person for and with you. You might say that is splitting hairs, but I think I can see a little daylight between “me” and “that person I want to be for you.” And if so, then I can take your criticism the way the students took my criticism. With this goal, I take her criticism in my hand as if she had handed me a hammer so I could finish up a project we were both working on. Which is exactly true. My being this person for her is, in fact, a project we are both working on and on behalf of which she dares to make the criticism and I dare to receive it as a gift.
I know that can be done. I have seen it done. I have even done it myself a few times. I have done it enough, at least, to know how hard it is to do. I think it does take the marvelous robustness of collegiality and introduce it into the fragile glory of intimacy.
But I still don’t know what to call it.
[1] If the promise was part of a marriage ceremony, I slipped out of the courtship phase, but it doesn’t have to be. People in courtship make promises. Don’t they?
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