So, two days ago, I attended a wedding. It was a highly informal affair, with a five-minute ceremony and a lot of small children running around - which, it seems to me, is rather the best part of weddings.
One thing that struck me, though, and that brought up today's topic, was a specific piece of the vow used, in which it was said "Remember, you never get more out of a relationship than you put into it."
Now, this statement strikes me as foolish. Isn't it precisely the point to get more out of a relationship than you put into it?
At face value, of course, this is absurd, even reprehensible: relationships are not a contest, in which you try to outdo the other person and gain as much as you can for as little effort as possible. But that's not what I said, either.
See, the distinction is between two things: what you put into a relationship, and what the other person gets out of it. You should always get more out of it than you put into it, but that is because you should always get more out of it than they put into it. If the amount of sacrifice and the amount of gain were always perfectly equal, no one would ever enter into a relationship: why do so if you have nothing to gain? But they aren't. The point of being in a relationship - the entire point - is that both of you stand to gain enormously through making smaller sacrifices.
This is not, of course, to say that relationships do not require effort, nor to say that putting more effort into a relationship will not yield more gain (although there is an optimum level of effort, beyond which it begins to damage, rather than help), but simply to say that what you get out of it is, simply by definition in a healthy relationship, worth more than what you put into it.
And this conclusion leads to another, more interesting one; it reads, simply: If the benefit you are deriving from a relationship is significantly more valuable than the sacrifices you are making for it, then that is a healthy relationship. ("Benefit" here is not a selfish word: making someone else happy can count as a benefit.) Otherwise, it is not.
I'm not sure if I like that conclusion or not.
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2 comments:
This reminds me very much of a seminar that Gold and another dude presented in High School. Gold's argument was that the paradox of love makes it impossible to ascribe to purely physical processes, to wit:
you hold another person above yourself, and they do the same, neither is higher or lower than the other, how can this be?
...I don't know if I see how that makes it impossible for love to be chemical, but it reminded me of what you said:
"you get more out of a relationship than they put in"
which would indicate that love is some sort of perpetual motion machine, or perhaps it is draining energy out of the very fabric of space time, or from another dimention, like the engines from Kilgore Trout's Venus on the Half-Shell , a kissing cousin to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, incidentally.
This is, of course, all nonsense because while effort and exertion are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, emotions are far less tangible. While the energy used by your nervous system to register a hug from a loved one may be a fraction of the energy used in the process of hugging, we would not economize on the physical energy if we could, because feeling good is worth a pretty disproportionate amount of work to us (in purely thermodynamic terms, I mean)
The thing about applying any sort of rational or scientific analysis to relationships is that it too often boils down to personal gain, and at this point people will accuse you of being cynical. I think that this can be avoided if you say that the best, perhaps ideal relationship is like symbiosis, or synergy: two independent, self-interested organisms or mechanisms coming together to share in prosperity greater than either could achieve alone, which is about as poetic as you are likely going to get in an analytic description.
...I think this bit on symbiosis will have to be part of my wedding vows someday.
Well you have to keep in mind that women don't think the same as guys. I think something like "the amount of effort you put in a relationship should follow some sort of exponential slope", would be preferable, but my wife just wouldn't go for something like that, I am 99% sure. She believes in crazy stuff like God, the effect of full moons on people and astrology. ;-)
Interesting blog.
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