Relationship/political advice
Dante, Inferno Canto 5. Illustration by William Blake. Copyright: Wikimedia
This week’s topic is way out of my normal wheelhouse, but I keep coming across political stories that get bogged down in procedure and process. Back in the day this used to be called “horse race” journalism, though it’s now not so dignified. Maybe the analogy is that thing where someone pushes a horse off a high dive. But you know the type of story: what does such-and-such think about something that was said, or rumored to be said? What are the chances of so-and-so? Can you believe what x did? If y happens, what would be the implications for z? This political logorrhea reminds me of interpersonal strife, and thus of the one unambiguously insightful piece of relationship advice I’ve come up with on my own.
On the one hand, the connection is depressing. I hope this isn’t a terrible sign of something or other. But on the other hand, who knows. It might be useful. I’m 17 years and counting into my marriage and fairly early on I achieved a breakthrough that really helped us get along better. It was, “comment on the result, not the process.”
It is, though I say so myself, great advice. It’s inevitable that you’ll run into misunderstandings and frictions when you go from being an a-priori-dateable-but-fundamentally-independent individual to one half of a new organism. Did I mention I have pretty expansive views of marriage? And though Jamie and I are extremely compatible we do have, shall I say, different instincts for how things get done, in which order, at what frequency and intensity. I’m thinking mostly of household chores here, but the principle can be generalized. The results matter because you want your shared life to consist of certain things; the processes (probably) don’t because there are multiple ways to get there. If you get wrapped around the axle about each deviation from your preferred process, you a) massively increase the possible circumstances for conflict and b) flood the zone with petty bickering and trivialize the disagreements that actually matter and need to be resolved.
And this brings us back, somehow, to the political analogue—possibly because it seems like politics currently consists of mass participation in one person’s psychodrama. There’s a ton of political horse-noun coverage, and even more coverage of just politics-adjacent weirdness. There’s a lot of process to get bogged down in. It’s not easy to understand when a process coalesces into a result, nor what that result ultimately means; nor is it easy to fully detach from the emotional grind of the process. But I’d argue it’s the healthiest available engagement with current events. It minimizes the scope for emotional fatigue, and lets you focus your attention on the results, which actually have significance.
Otherwise you’re just one of those shades in Dante’s second circle, the ones who couldn’t control their impulses in life, now eternally buffeted about by currents that they can’t control and don’t ever understand. Politics sure feels like that sometimes—and frankly relationships can too—but perhaps they needn’t.