I seem to be unusually resilient to heartbreak.
I once had the following conversation with someone I seriously considered marrying (paraphrased, but as honestly as memory allows):
Her: I don’t think this is going to work out. I think we need to break up. I’m sorry.
Me: That sucks. But if you really think so, thanks for being honest with me.
(Hugs)
Her: You don’t seem really upset?
Me: I feel sad and hurt. But I’m not mad. Were you expecting me to blame or yell at you?
Her: Kinda, yeah.
Me: Would it help?
Her: No.
Me: Then I won’t. I’ll cry eventually.
(More hugs)
I say this not to brag. When it comes to relationships, I’m still learning the basics in a lot of ways, despite being happily married for years. I’ve been through a couple somewhat uglier rejections, and I’ve not always handled them with grace. But I do think there’s a particular attitude that helps here, and I want to share it if I can. So here’s my One Weird Trick for Baffling Partners with Unusually Wholesome Breakups.
Got your attention? Good, now here’s some economics.
A typical retirement fund works like this: You put in money for many years, and then eventually you get a lot of money out in a steady stream until you die. If for some reason that second part fails to happen, you have done something horribly wrong and are probably in dire straits.
A startup is different. In a startup, you pour a bunch of time and energy into a dream, you bond with your quirky and sometimes infuriating cofounders, you build something beautiful together, and then eventually it crashes and burns and leaves you with nothing. If you’re very lucky, instead of crashing and burning immediately it catapults you into stardom first. If you’re extremely lucky, it doesn’t crash and burn at all, but instead the beautiful fragile precious thing you’ve built grows into something more. But mostly it crashes and burns eventually, and you lose even if you’ve done everything right.
Except, not really. You don’t actually end up with nothing, even when the dream dies like dreams often do. At the end of it all, you may find yourself more than you were: Grown in wisdom and experience, perhaps with lasting friendships, but hopefully having learned something about yourself.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss…1-If, Rudyard Kipling
Most relationships don’t work out. Sometimes this is obvious from day one. Other times it’s not. (Sometimes your friends and family know well before you do. Other times they’re dead wrong.) If you treat a relationship like a retirement fund – a large hole into which you pour your time and energy today, in the expectation of future dividends – then it really sucks if it doesn’t work out. Worse, it can suck so badly that the mere expectation of this suckage can make you cling to a toxic relationship long after you should have bailed.
After learning some hard lessons of my own, I now try to approach relationships – and not just romantic ones! – with the attitude of a wise startup founder.
Wise startup founders know their odds aren’t great. They know their idea might be gold, and that shining possibility is often reason enough for the attempt; even so, it’s probably a dud. They set out to discover the truth as soon as possible. “Fail fast” is a motto for a reason.
What’s more, if a wise startup founder has an idea that they aren’t excited to actually build, they don’t even try. They know that the kind of effort a startup demands isn’t the kind of effort they can sustain for months or years on the mere promise of future glory. They pick a seed they’re excited to plant and nurture for its own sake, and they see if they can make it blossom.
I think the most promising relationships are the sort you won’t regret even if they don’t work out. They’re the sort that gives something back even while you nurture them. If you aren’t good for each other now – not all the time, but more often than not – then you should probably reconsider.
There are many ways for a relationship to be a retirement fund, not all of them obvious. There are those who set out to find a spouse, as if “having a spouse” were the end of the journey and not the middle. But there are also those who set out to get laid – who find someone to pursue and who act out whatever pretense will allow them to score. There are the inverse, who pretend willingness to be scored upon so that they may entice flattering courtship or some other favor. There are more convoluted pretenses still.2
When contemplating a relationship, I ask myself: If this relationship ended tomorrow in loss or breakup, would I regret attempting it at all? Would I regret the time spent building it? Would I have made my life, and the life of this person, worse in the attempt?
I try to conduct myself so as to make the honest answer to each of these “No.”
If I enjoy someone’s company, I seek it out. If that leads to something further, great! If not, I still enjoyed their company.
If someone’s attractive, but unfun to spend time with, I don’t spend time with them in the hopes of enticing them into sex.
I don’t enter a relationship on the strength of who I or they might become, but who we are now. If we can correct one another’s faults, so much the better (and I sure hope we’d both want to better ourselves), but we’d best be okay if the faults remain.
And when I do choose to pay heavy costs into a relationship, I do it as much because of the value it has to me now as the value it might have in the future.
Most relationships don’t work out. Knowing this doesn’t make the hurting stop. But I’ve found that, insofar as I conduct myself in accord with the above, insofar as the risk was always “priced in”, so to speak, the hurt is lessened, and I can say with a smile that it was all worth doing, and I would do the same again.
- The not-breathing-words part seems less valuable to me. Talk to your friends when you’re hurting! It helps! ↩︎
- A retirement fund isn’t always bad. Some people should reverse any advice they hear, some people really do need a long involved courtship and feel horribly betrayed if their investment is lost, and if you use this post as an excuse to lead people on then I will find you and feed you to a pack of carnivorous llamas. Slowly. ↩︎