The mindset which underlies enduring marriages

If our lives can be explained by the treasurers we adventure to find, one of my few holy grails is understanding how to be a soulmate. I search, everywhere I can, for little bits of the wisdom that can help Robyn have a marriage that endures for our whole life and for anything that exists after.

My perspective on marriage and soulmates has evolved, to something like this:

We start our lives with a paintbrush in our hands, and a blank canvas. And we start to wonder - what’s the most beautiful picture I can put on this canvas? What is the life I want to live? As we grow up we experiment a bit as we learn to paint.

Eventually, we get a pretty good idea of the most beautiful life we can paint on the canvas, and we go after it. We start to paint more feverishly as we hit our teens and twenties.

If we’re lucky, along the way we fall in love with someone. If we’re really lucky, we take a leap and marry them. And then the dynamic at the canvas changes.

A wedding, I think, is the moment two people start to paint onto one canvas.  But here’s the the trick: the moment we say I do, we suddenly have to figure out how to paint while both holding the same brush.

And suddenly, were not only painting, we’re both trying to prevent the brush we’re both holding - our marriage - from breaking. It seems like there are three ways to survive this.

First, we could strengthen our brush and make it more resilient. In a marriage, there are times when each person is pulling in a different direction, and the brush has to be strong and resilient so it does not break. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about integrity, being faithful, committing to better/worse/richer/poorer/sickness/health, having a thick skin, continuing to date, rekindling love and romance, etc.

Second, we could learn to compromise. Maybe sometimes we paint the way I want to paint. Other times, we paint the way you want to paint. We never pull in different directions at the same time. By compromising, we put less tension on the brush. By putting less tension on the brush, it does not break as readily. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about conflict resolution and compromise.

Third, we could both imagine the painting we want to put on the canvas the same way in our heads. What do we want our lives to be like? What’s the beautiful picture we want to paint together? By having a shared vision for what we want our marriage and life to be, we don’t put stress on the brush because both our hands are moving in the same direction. This strategy represents the body of advice people give about shared values, shared vision, and growing together instead of apart.

Truthfully, every married couple needs to be good at all three of these approaches. Moreover, the first strategy of having a strong and resilient brush seems like a given. I don’t know how any marriage survives without that.

What struck me is that compromising seems to be the least optimal strategy here. Sure, every married couple has to compromise at some point and compromise a lot. Robyn and I compromise, too.

But how terrible would it be to have a lifetime full only of compromise? Either you are settling for the average your whole lives, and the painting you produce is the average, path of least resistance. Or, one person dominates, and one person gets the painting they think is beautiful and the other has lived someone else’s dream. 

Compromise is necessary, but it seems best as a last resort. What seems much better is to just be on the same page about life together - and wanting to paint the same painting, constantly evolving with each brushstroke as life unfolds.

This metaphor reminds me of a fundamental tension within management. Teams - whether it’s at work, in sports, in government, or in community - fall apart if people care more about themselves than what the team is trying to accomplish together. So to in marriage. 

If I care more about what I want life to look like than I care about painting our shared vision for the canvas, and painting it together our marriage will suffer. This is no different than any team - a team only endures if its members sacrifice to advance the aspirations of the team and evolve as the team evolves.

When I first began to think about soulmates, I thought it was a question of predestination. There was a soul out there, and through God’s will I was linked to that soul. All I had to do was find her. We’d fall in love. We’d work through problems. We’d put in the work for a great marriage, and after we departed this world we’d be committed to anything that came after.

And I did, thank God, find her. But my perspective on soulmates and marriage is different now. I don’t think that it’s only about this compromise, loving each other, keeping on dating, and putting in the work stuff anymore. 

To be clear, I do still believe all those things - love, compromise, romance, and commitment - are required to be married and probably to be soulmates.

But because of my own experience being married and learning vicariously from hundreds of other couples, I now believe that there’s a key prerequisite to marriage and even being soulmates. It’s a mindset and orientation toward life that believes together is better.

We can’t just keep painting the canvas we started with prior to being married. We also can’t just find someone compatible, that we love and try to stitch our separate canvases together. We can’t even create a fully detailed blueprint for the canvas of our life and marriage, agree to it prior to a wedding, and never evolve it - life’s unpredictability certainly doesn’t permit that.

Instead, deep down, we have to fundamentally believe that the enterprise of painting a shared canvas, with a shared vision, using the same brush is what a beautiful life is. The critical prerequisite for marriage is that our mindset shifts from believing that the best way to live is being a solo artist, versus being part of a creative team.

No amount of love, destiny, resources, compatibility, or compromise can make up for not having this pre-requisite shift in mindset. For our marriages to survive and thrive - whether to our soulmate or not - we have to believe it’s better together.

The Artist’s Choice

To continue as artists, we have to keep making a choice to be out there on a lonely limb. Because artists, by definition I think, break new ground. Artists explore ideas and techniques that haven’t been done before. To be artists we have to create tension and push cultural boundaries further. It’s what we do and it’s our job.

The hard part about pushing boundaries is that it requires some level of independence and that cultural distance can be isolating.  We cannot do our job pushing the boundaries of ideas and culture if we’re beholden to them. And so we have to set ourselves apart from orthodoxies or operate in the spaces between worlds. For me, this  manifests in a feeling of, “I feel like I can exist almost everywhere, but I don’t belong anywhere.”

And so the choice. We can be artists that create tension and push the edges of things or we can be craftspeople that masterfully create something that’s already accepted - not both.

To be clear, I don’t apply this definition only to who we conventionally think of as “artists.” Sure, photographers, painters, actors, dancers, musicians, and sculptors are all artists. But so are the chefs, computer programmers, corporate strategists, public servants, doctors, parents, physicists, and teachers that push up against the conventional wisdom of their domains to explore new ground.

In addition to being lonely, choosing to be an artists has frustrating trade-offs. The idea of a “starving artist” captures it well. 

It’s hard to be paid handsomely for your work when you’re pushing boundaries, because the world doesn’t know it wants to pay for this weird, uncomfortable thing we’re exploring. If we’re lucky, maybe the world will develop a palate for what we’re doing while we’re alive, or even we’ve gone ahead. But maybe it never will.

I have felt this tension in my own vocation. I don’t really fit in anywhere in a corporate setting, even though I’ve always worked in them. I don’t have a career aspiration that’s as simple as, “I want to be a CFO” or “I want to run my own company.” A lot of the time, I don’t think my colleagues have any idea what to do with someone like me, because my skill set and aspirations are bizarre and hard to fit into existing functions. 

I suspect that if I told people at work, “the aim of my work is to bring goodness to the world by creating high-performing governments and help organizations to stop wasting talent.” They’d be like, “what the hell are you talking about?”

But that’s the choice, isn’t it? We could probably be wealthier than we are, or have more status than we do now by just creating what we know people already like. 

But that wouldn’t be art.