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.