Welcome to Valentine’s Day.
I thought that for Valentine’s Day I would do something special and discuss what I find to be a common fight/complaint couples have. Hopefully you won’t find this overly male, but the last time I checked I was about 57% male, so there’s only so much I can do.
Fight: “I Want Him to Want to [do X]”
Total classic.
Let’s say the lady, who we’ll be calling Kathy Ireland for the remainder of this post, wants her boyfriend, who we’ll be calling Joey Lawrence for the remainder of this post, to take her somewhere special. Like the nice Quiznos that’s on the other side of town but has a much cleaner floor and a cabinet in the bathroom where they keep the mop instead of just leaning it against the wall for you to stare at while you shit.
Joey has agreed to take Kathy, however this is not really doing anyone any good because she knows that Joey does not WANT to take her. He’s only doing it because she wants him to. Therefore, he doesn’t want to go, and to a certain extent, neither does she.
Kathy: I want to go, but I want him to want to go.
Joey: I don’t want to go, but I will because she wants to. Except then she’s mad because I don’t want to.
Okay, in this instance, both Kathy and Joey are complete idiot fuckheads, as are we all in this situation. Kathy is wrong, but Joey is also wrong. Allow me to explain.
First we’ll talk to the Joeys, then the Kathys.
Joeys:
I understand where you’re coming from. You don’t want to go there. You can picture yourself getting ready to go, and the whole thing sounds like misery. You consider driving off a bridge and ending it all, but after some Googling you discover the nearest driveable bridge that’s high up is a good 4 hous away. So you tuck that little piece of knowledge away for a rainier day and move on.
You’re willing to go. Sort of. You’re willing to go, but you feel compelled to tell Kathy that you don’t want to go.
To you, it feels like letting Kathy know that you don’t want to do the Quiznos thing makes the act of doing it all the more admirable. You want to differentiate between doing something mutually enjoyable and doing something that only she will enjoy. Basically, you want double credit because not only are you doing something with your girlfriend, it’s something you don’t want to do.
The reality is that double credit does not exist. I know, it seems insane. But it’s true. You need to learn to live with plain old regular credit. No more extra credit bullshit questions at the end of the math test that I never got anyway because they involved words and numbers and giving a damn about what a farmer was up to on an afternoon. Fuck that guy.
When Kathy says she wants to go to the nice Quiznos with you, she wants to do that WITH YOU. When she says she wants to do that with you and you say you don’t want to do that, in her mind you’re saying, “I don’t want to do that WITH YOU.” These conversations go from Let’s to I.
Let’s go to the nice Quiznos.
I don’t want to.
You’ve cut Kathy Ireland right out of the equation just the way I cut her out of an ad for Necessary Roughness and taped her to the wall of my bedroom.
You’re being kind of a dickhead.
It’s like this:
Imagine you’re at a farewell concert for AC/DC. They’re never playing again. They start rocking “Hell’s Bells” and you sing along. You have a great night, but as you’re leaving, a stranger comes up to you and says, “Hey, man. Just so you know, it’s kind of a tradition not to sing along to Hell’s Bells.”
What Admiral Fuckface just told you is completely worthless information. The concert is over, it will never happen again, and rather than correcting a behavior that needed to be corrected, all he did was make you feel like shit. He can’t unhear you singing along in whatever insane voice you used to sing along to AC/DC, you animal.
Telling Kathy is the same deal. She steal wants to go to nice Quiznos. She still wants to spend a nice night with you. You’ve already committed to doing this, but you want her to know what a big deal it is.
Joey, you need to either go or not go. If you don’t go, you don’t go. If you go, part of going is not being a dildo and saving your hate of lettuce THAT GOES THROUGH A FUCKING TOASTER WHICH IS AN ABOMINATION for something else.
Go or don’t go. But don’t go and ruin the time for everyone.
The advice I’m giving you, in general, is to make sure you’re taking your significant person you fuck on a date once in a while. If you’re not averaging at least once a month, you’re in for painful experiences. Initiate, pick a place, pick an event, make a day of it, and follow through at least once a month. And make it something you both enjoy. Oh, and don’t attach it to something like, “I had to be in t city for work anyway, so…” because that shit kills the romance. Make it a thing, and make it about nothing but that thing.
Alright, now let’s talk to the Kathys:
I understand what you’re asking for, and it’s very reasonable. You want to do something enjoyable, and you want to do it with your partner. And it’s your very reasonable hope that your partner isn’t going to be a grump the whole time. You don’t want to feel like you’re dragging him through every phase of a simple night out.
You feel like the love you’re both sharing should be enough to overcome the shittiness of any event and turn it into a positive, much like it is in most of those movies where a boat sinks or a volcano does stuff. And it is. That’s why he’s going. But let’s not forget, although the love conquers the volcano in the end, the hero dude usually gets a good burn at some point and more than likely his chubby friend in the backwards hat who is good at computers will die horrifically.
You also feel like, after he told you that he didn’t want to go, telling him that you want him to want to is fair because you’re both just expressing feelings.
The key here is cutting things off before they get to the part where we’re both explaining why we’re going to be miserable for the entire night.
First off, you need a friend to do some shit with. You know that stuff you really enjoy, like salsa dancing or going to plays or taking a painting class? Joey doesn’t enjoy that. And he’s only going to make you enjoy it less if you make him do too much of it because, and I think we all know this, he’s never going to want to do something because you wanted him to want to. That just doesn’t work.
I’m sure I could jack off to weird pregnant lady porn with a gun to my head…maybe even without the gun, but let’s not experiment too much here. I could probably do it with a gun to my head, but no matter how large the gun or how painful the death or how pregnant the starlet, there’s no changing the fact that I don’t want to. The threat of death is a decent instigation to action, but it doesn’t do much to change the landscape of motivation.
What I’m saying is, if there’s something that you want to do every week, something you know Joey doesn’t enjoy yet something you have enjoyed and will enjoy as your own person, find a friend to go with you. Save the things where it’s important that Joey be with you for things where it’s actually important that Joey be with you. If Joey actually feels like he needs to be there, if he feels like he’s adding something to the equation, he’ll be much more willing to go.
I know Joeys are frustrating because it seems like they don’t want to do anything. Even when you suggest things that they would be into, they prefer to do almost nothing at all. What you have to understand is that your frustration over the fact that he doesn’t want to go out and do stuff is just a different version of his informing you that he doesn’t want to go with you to nice Quiznos. In other words, he tells you he doesn’t want to go to nice Quiznos, but you both go anyway and stew because you’re both very aware of the fact that neither of you want to be there. Flipside, you tell him how you hate just sitting around all the time, and then when you end up sitting around you’re both aware how you feel about that and are, again, both miserable.
You can help Joey be happy by being somewhat protective of his personal time, even if that time seems like time wasted. Yes, he’s just screwing around on the internet or watching sports or reading comic books or doing god knows what in the garage. This is important for Joey. Joey likes afternoons where he doesn’t have anything looming. That’s what events feel like, stuff that’s looming and cutting his time off. Even if he doesn’t have any malice towards the event, he will miss the time he spends without any real agenda.
I don’t think anyone out there is willing to say that his/her significant sex partner who they also eat meals with is not allowed to have any free time. But if you’re judging that free time, it means you’re not really giving your loved one any free time at all.
The advice I gave Joey is to take you out a little more often. The advice I’m going to give you is to let him off the hook once in a while.
You’re going to your parents’ house on Sunday? Awesome. Let him make an appearance and then leave early, and do it in such a way that it’s clear you’re cool with it. Make it your idea. Say, “Make an appearance, sit down for a half hour, then we’ll say you have plans with one of your buddies. I want you to be there, but you don’t have to be there as long as I’ll want to be there.”
You guys both agreed to go to an event and now it’s the night of and you don’t feel like going? Go with that feeling once in a while. Let both of you off the hook.
The key is making this distinction between events where you need him there, events where you want him there, and events where you can be perfectly happy on your own or with a friend and he’s going to feel like an accessory. If you’re fighting over the ones where you really need him there, something is wrong. If you’re fighting over the ones where you want him there, that’s normal and you both need to compromise. If you’re fighting over the ones where you could easily take a friend instead, take a moment to ask yourself about the balance of the relationship in terms of how he’d like to spend a Sunday afternoon and how you’d like to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Okay, dummies?
I know none of this is realistic because these suggestions involve regular maintenance. If there’s one thing humans are bad at, it’s regular maintenance. We could easily get gas on the same day at the same time every week, regardless of whether or not the tank is full. But instead we ride until that fucker’s empty and coast it to the pump just in time to keep it limping along.
It’s not good for your car, though, and it’s worse for your relationship. When your car dies, it’s dead. You might miss it a little, and you might be in some financial trouble for a few months, but ultimately you’ll get over it. Your relationship dies, it’s painful, you might feel it the rest of your life, and you can’t just move into another one because it’s not like a car. Relationships are not a tool we use to get from point A to point B. They’re what making the trip from A to B less painful, maybe even worthwhile and fun.
I don’t know. Just try, huh? Be a little fucking nice to each other for once. Maybe you won’t do any of this stuff, but at least try to not have the same argument that goes nowhere, yeah?
