In Defense of Standards

The clash of courtship

There are a thousand different rules and red flags one can set in the days between a relationship—drawn from the myriad reflections about why that last relationship failed or fell short. It’s certainly true that by living through a relationship we learn just a little bit more about what we are, and are not, okay with. Take ambition, for instance. Ambition is the combination of countless traits that make someone willing to undergo personal pain for professional gain. Someone is not so much ambitious as they are tenacious, confident, and urgent in a way that is substantively different from someone who tries hard or thinks highly of themselves. Ambition is as much a highly rewarded trait in dating as it is in the workplace because it serves as a signifier for these traits we search for in a partner. After all, who doesn’t want a partner that works hard?

As it turns out, all of that hard work comes at a cost. Every extra hour spent working late nights is an hour not spent raising children, washing dishes, or going on dates. There is a cost—a price you can only feel by living under its weight over the span of a relationship. Whether such a cost is worth it is a question only you can answer, but the question itself is posed in a new and much more concrete way. No longer is ambition a synonym for a stoic success where you holiday in Switzerland and own a summer home in the Hamptons. Instead, it’s 12:03 A.M. and you awaken to your partner sitting at the dinner table, shoulders slouched and back hunched over their MacBook, responding to an urgent Slack message in your cramped one-bedroom apartment.

Sacrifice is a part of every relationship, and ambition is far from unique in its ability to take what we thought we wanted and turn it into a lesson for what we no longer wish for at all. Just as 'ambition' is a placeholder for a hundred smaller traits, a relationship is the sum of a hundred tiny actions of giving and taking. It is when you get that feeling in your stomach that you have done far more giving and a lot less taking that we must stop and reflect on the origin of this discontent.

For this, let’s return to the case study of our ambitious partner. For some, the late nights are a trade-off worthy of sacrifice. Even when we wish our partner would come back to bed, we are at peace with the reality that this is the life they have chosen, and it is the relationship we have entered. For others, though, what felt impressive and attractive at first becomes destructive and difficult in practice. A feeling emerges watching our partner work that something is amiss—that the MacBook screen is magnetizing to them in a way it is not for us. This is where we must be willing to interrogate our introspective self.

Such an interrogation is difficult precisely because it carries the weight of real life in an undeniable fashion. To pursue that pit in the stomach—to treat it as a feeling as real as any other—is to tacitly accept uncomfortable conversations, both with yourself and, potentially, with your partner. This is the type of work that all of our confidently stated “I would never date someone who does X” or “Y is always a red flag” convictions falter under. It is the work of creating standards—a real and firm view of what we want from a partner built on a messy and sometimes contradictory trust of ourselves. After all, this is not a courtroom and we have not sworn an oath of dating. We are not obligated to turn that feeling of neurons saying “this is not for us” into some perfectly spun story of us giving too much and taking too little.

This is where indecision curdles into something worse. The only cruelty one can inflict in courtship is lying—and a decision endlessly deferred becomes its own lie, whether by omission or on purpose. Our partners are always owed a basic level of truthfulness and decency befitting anyone we care for and about. We may very well be conflicted in our feelings towards a significant other—trapped between what we like about them as people and disdain in them as partners—and such indecision is certainly not to be deliberated for the sake of deliberating. Indecision, however, is different from inaction. It is one thing to question our feelings on a partner or how what we thought we valued yesterday is no longer wanted today. It is another to purposefully push away the premise of a question that is either going to be answered swiftly and with dignity now or with bitter feelings and broken hearts later.

Inaction can only come about if we are comfortable enough living without any real knowledge of ourselves or care for our future. It is far harder to stay in a relationship we know does not suit us if we trust our own ability to discern what is good and proper for our own lives. Standards provide this baseline by virtue of our complete ownership of them. Regulating a relationship through online discussions of what-ifs and if-thens is, in this light, an exercise in failure of the self. It is the belief that we are not enough to determine what is enough for us. It is why that MacBook screen is everything wrong with modernity with one partner and the worthy struggle of a striver in another.