The other day I was standing in the bathroom when I happened to look down at my feet. Suddenly I noticed a band-aid on one of my toes– a band-aid I had not put there. I began to wonder how this band-aid had come to be on my toe, but after some thought, I remained baffled. I could recollect cutting my toe against a fragile deck chair while diving into a pool a few days earlier. Then I remembered the cut bleeding some, and people expressing horror at the ugly sight. But I knew I had not gone to get a band-aid myself. It’s almost antithetical to my personality to undertake a task so fraught with logistical weight and depressing minutia, and I was sure I would remember such an ordeal.
Yet somehow, that band-aid had appeared there, and was now, even at that very instant, helping my little toe to heal itself.
It occurred to me that Macy, my dear wife, might have been responsible. After I searched my memories, I did finally recall her appearing on the patio a few minutes after the blood had first been shed, and quickly adhering a band-aid while I sat and casually ate my sandwich. She hadn’t made any fuss, hadn’t ordered me to go get a band-aid myself, hadn’t made me do anything at all, which is why I could barely even recollect the event. I’m sure she thought very little of it herself. She just saw that I was cut, recognized a need of which she was more cognizant than I was, fetched a band-aid and administered the needed relief. And then everyone continued on with their afternoon.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, cites a very interesting set of studies that I think help explain this little interaction. Gladwell writes that human beings only remember what they have to. In a long-term, close relationship, two people will begin to unconsciously understand what kinds of things they are better at remembering and what kinds of things their partner remembers better. Soon, a person will simply stop committing things to memory that she knows her spouse will record with less effort. The result after some years is a rather specialized filing system, where one person is responsible for remembering all facts of category A, B, and C, and the other is responsible for categories D, E, and F. We function as external hard drives for each other.
This rings true for me. Tell me and Macy some pregnant friend’s due date and you can almost see energy being routed out of my brain into hers. Mention the author of the biography you’ve been reading and you’ll hear a whirring sound as her machinery pauses and mine jolts into action. It’s absurd to think of us as two different sources of data. In terms of the information we store, we can’t possibly be anything besides one barely separable collective unit.
According to Gladwell, this phenomenon explains some of the incredible pain of losing one’s spouse. Not only do we lose the company of such a cherished person, but we lose a very sizable portion of our personal files. I know that if I lost Macy, my reasons for grieving would be infinite. But among them would be a new-found incompetence due to years of relying on her to store information I know is valuable, but too much work for me to hang on to myself.
Hence the band-aid. It’s clear to me that most marriages excel in this kind of unspoken specialization not only in processing and filing facts, but in carrying out all kinds of tasks and owning certain priorities. Now I would probably be capable of caring for my own toe if I were on my own. But in that instant, Macy cared about my toe more than I did, and was able to remedy it without much expenditure of energy, where it was the last thing on my mind, and would have been intimidating for me to undertake. Seen as the interaction of two individuals, this makes me look lazy and her subservient. But seen as the practiced behavior of a well-functioning unit, it’s fantastically efficient.
Of course the strength of the marriage depends on this kind of interaction occurring in infinite ways, in both directions. There’s no efficiency gain if Macy cares about everything and Ryan nothing. But I find that we are different enough that we have few redundant specialties, and very little inequality in the natural distribution of roles.
I infer two things from this conclusion. First, the spectacular thing about this system is that I think our relationship represents the average pretty well. Meaning that there’s nothing extraordinary about two people having different gifts, concerns, and priorities. That’s why marriage is so beautiful. Between the two of us the bills get paid, the kids get played with, the dishes get done and the cds get organized. (and, even more extraordinary, the blog posts get written!)
Second, if the above meanderings are correct, to approach marital roles based solely on the gender of the participants probably represents a real efficiency loss. For example, while Macy has many feminine gifts, she’s also much better than me at managing travel, remembering directions, and interfacing with consumer service people (waiters, hotels, etc.). I also have a few gifts that lie across the line in the traditionally feminine domain (not the least of which is the fact that I can tie very tidy bows on presents, which is a lost art to Macy). If our roles were patterned after our respective sexes, rather than our intrinsic gifts, our marriage as a whole would see a sharp decline in the quality of our travel arrangements and bow tying. Thus, I’m grateful to be living in a time where our specialties run not with our gender, but with our personalities.
Based on the above, the meaning of the term help meet becomes strikingly more clear. We think of Eve being there to help Adam, as in with earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, etc. But what she was really there for was to help him become a new person with her, to whole the half. Her help to him may have looked like mundane service, but my guess is she just gave him what he couldn’t give himself, and vice versa. It is amazing to think what was started all those millennia ago by the statement: It is not good for man to be alone.
I don’t know if my contribution to my marriage has been strong enough that I deserve the privilege of having band-aids appear unannounced on my wounds. But there’s nothing more gratifying than to be half of a world where such things really happen.
Ryan, this is a very touching post. I never understood what it meant to have a “help meet” until I married my wife a year and a half ago. Now, we are the yin and yang, the two halves of the whole. It’s a wonderful thing.
Yes it’s very sweet!
And I wish my husband’s idea of giftwrapping didn’t mean stuffing the gift in a brown paper grocery sack and wrapping duct tape around it.
Wow, I cannot think of a more opposite description of marriage than what me and my husband have! That post is so sweet, yet I can’t help thinking of my marriage and wondering…what on earth are we doing wrong? We always joke that we can’t become one because we were already the same half when we got married…we have all the sames strengths and all the same weaknesses. Thus, the bills NEVER get paid on time, the house is always a mess, and both our wounds go un-cared for. We definitly are not a yin and yang, but a yin and yin (even after 3 1/2 years)
It does bring up the point that one of the many problems couples have early in marriage is exactly this one – they think when they leave the temple or church or whatever, some magical “yin-ing and yang-ing” is going to happen. I used to have a complex that because me and my husband were like this it was because I was a failure as a LDS woman (I have always had a gender complex in the church however as I am an extreme tomboy in just about every way). Then I realized that there was nothing wrong with us at all, but that our becoming ‘one’ didn’t necessarily have to do with efficiency in household chores, memory, financial duties etc, but in being of one heart and one mind.
(I do hope we one day reach the efficiency you described above as it would make our life a lot smoother! lol)
Ryan,
Another way to read the event is that you pay insufficient attention to the kindnesses that Marcy performs on your behalf.
Marriage as efficiency? I don’t like it. I have no doubt that married people are often more efficient than single people because they can divide the work and share the burden with each other, but this description reduces marriage. I haven’t read Gladwell’s book, but your account makes it sound absurd. While selective division of relatively insignificant information, like what a neighbor is reading at the moment, may be handy, emotional intimacy and closeness over time in marriage seem to require a lot of mutually shared knowledge. If spouse A remembers only what’s important or of interest to himself, and spouse B remembers only what’s important or of interest to herself, they may be efficient, but not very deeply connected.
JLR
It has probably happened in some ways that you haven’t noticed. And even in yin-yang marriages there are a few jobs than neither is good at or both try to avoid at all costs.
Ryan,
It is nice to see someone noticing those types of things. Those are the things you need to appreciate in your spouse and tell them thank you. Whenever I feel slightly “put upon” by my husband’s less-than-competence in a certain areas (expecting me to pick up the slack) I fondly think of all the things he does for me since I simply don’t think of it, or don’t want to do, etc. It is easy to forget those things, since they are the things that slip my mind in the first place, or I put at the bottom of the list of priorities because I don’t want to do them.
There is a slight danger in becoming too specialized. It is difficult to stop, because although I, for instance, try to tell my husband about our finances and investments so he isn’t clueless, he lets the numbers just go in one ear out the other just because he knows I know everything and he doesn’t really have to remember. He limits his own potential for growth in this area, because of this.
Interesting thoughts. It reminds me of a husband and wife who taught at my high school. He said that she was the only one who could balance the checkbook. I like to see positive articles about marriage such as this.
Melissa,
I think specialization doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate what the other spouse does.
Also, it happens whether you mean it to or not. While of course my husband and I make our financial goals together and work on it together, he will never remember how much the mortgage is, how much equity we have, what our 401K is worth, what the allocation is, because first of all, he isn’t really that interested, and secondly, he knows I am keeping track of it. I have no doubt that if he was single he would open his own statements, talk to someone (mom, brother, friend, coworker) and get a little advice, and then learn as he went. But the fact that I am doing it, means I’m getting the experience and am learning. Does that make sense? He’s not staying out of it intentionally, its just that he doesn’t have to learn it.
And now that we have 3 kids and a house, do we really have time to make every little decision together? No, we don’t. We kind of have to trust each other’s call on certain issues. If I’m at the eye doctor with my daughter and they are making recommendations, I have to make some decisions. Yes, I talk to my husband and give him the summary.
When your child is injured or sick you make a decision, sometimes without your partner. When I am alone, I make the call–doctor, bandaid, nurse on the phone, etc. When my husband is around and a kid is bleeding, he takes care of it. He was called into action two times at a bbq on Saturday.
It just kind of happened naturally based on our own personalities and talents.
Melissa, your laser-like precision in seeing past my excuses made me laugh. Alas, your diagnosis is undoubtedly correct. This story proves well that there are thousands of gifts being given to me on a daily basis that I fail to appreciate.
Still, I think you dismiss the point of our shared knowledge a bit too quickly. I did not say that all information is processed this way. You are correct that much information must be redundantly recorded to allow for mutual understanding and intimacy. Two points:
1. I think the specialization of information adds to intimacy in its own way. For example, knowing that Macy is a resource of information that is valuable to me makes me depend upon her more, and vice versa. Thus, we form a web of dependence, which can form a great basis for closeness. I think it’s harder to keep a relationship strong when we have no pragmatic need for each other. As well, I amazed at the different perspectives my wife can bring to topics I believed I understood completely. Our differential perspectives round each of us out and add depth and significance to our conversations. Thus, there is more interest and incentive for having these conversations in the first place. Of course, this doesn’t deny your basic point that we must have some shared information as well.
2. Because we’re not exact opposites, we need to work at filling the roles that fall to us, as some roles aren’t a great fit for either of us. So despite my focus on efficiency ( a word that comes off much colder than how I feel about the process in actual practice), there’s a lot of stretching or, better– investment in the relationship. And once the investment pays off by way of a smooth-running unit, we become all the more committed to the intimacy of the marriage.
Brilliant post Ryan.
Sometimes, my wife and I see the same things and take action in a situation, but each of us has a different approach.
For example, at the restaurant we went to for Mother’s Day, we had the best wait service we have experienced in years. We both remarked on it, and took our own actions. I left a larger-than-normal tip, and my wife hunted down the manager and told her what a great job the waitress did.
Melissa, I think you dismissed what Ryan wrote way too quickly.
He never said that having efficiency in his marraige is the best or most important part, only that he and Macy have achieved a certain level of harmonious efficiency.
Perhaps the most meaningful sacrifices in marraige relationships are the kind where we have to change who we naturally are (make are weaknesses strengths) in order for the relationship to progress. There are plenty of opportunitites for this kind of service and growth.
However, there are also opportunities we have to perform some of the things that do come easily for us for our spouse’s benefit. It may be less meaningful, but I don’t think it’s meaningless either. I think that’s what Ryan wrote about — how pleasant it can be to give and receive the kind of service that comes so naturally to us or our spouse.
holy crap, what is your problem melissa?
My first reaction to this post was close to Melissa’s. I don’t think that she mischaracterizes Ryan’s emphasis, and I was glad to see that Ryan seems to have moderated his point a bit in his recapitulation. Maybe I just disagree with my wife on this because it is indicative of our differing specialties.
So, along this thread is it safe to say that my husband is making me stupid? (j/k)
Seriously though, sometimes the codependence can be a bad thing. example – I don’t memorize enough facts in scripture because I’m used to having the wealth of information available at any time from my husband, why learn it if I can just ask him? Isn’t that sometimes the attitude we take too?
Emily, our husbands make a lot of us stupid. (j/k)
Melissa, I agree with you 100%. Adam Smith made some good points about specialization of labor in industry, and we see them put together in modern industry with things like the assembly line. Marriage is not an assembly line where each partner performs his or her own, mutually exclusive task.
Miranda, DKL, Emily, etc:
Perhaps my post was left out a few disclaimers and premises that I think should be obvious: I do not think the main purpose of marriage is to allow to stop working on my weaknesses, and I don’t think the main objective of a good marriage is efficiency. What I am trying to say is that it’s beautiful that we can, along with out spouses, be so much more of a complete person together, than apart.
My use of the word efficiency probably sent you all down the wrong path, evoking economics, rationality, and lack of emotion. That’s the opposite of how I feel about this process. Love increases when my wife offers gifts to me that I do not have myself. Contra Emily, often this encourages, rather than discourages, me to develop in that direction. Nonetheless, I have all kinds of skills that I didn’t have when I was single, because I married a wonderful woman.
Of course there are more important functions for a spouse then doubling the size of your mental library. The beauty is not in the significance of this contribution, it’s in how endearing it is. It makes me love her. I think the same is very true in almost all marriages. The laziness Emily warns of, and the sanitized coldness Miranda suggests are completely off the table as realistic downsides here.