Static and Dynamic Models of Relationships

Steady-state makes for easier math and fewer growth opportunities

Something that often strikes me in reading male perspectives on dating and marriage is that they tend to model relationships as succeeding or failing based on certain static inputs from the beginning of the relationship.

Women - and the relationship media that they overwhelmingly consume - tend to talk about the relationship as a dynamic organism - one requiring consistent monitoring, process engineering, and thoughtful adjustments to keep it functional.

I’m not really sure why this dichotomy exists, although I could put forth assumptions - men are motivated by sex, and marriage gives the illusion of having sexual needs met due to a connection with an established supplier. Women tend to have more opinions than men do about what’s necessary to live a good and comfortable life, and they’re in my experience more likely to voice them.

In the last few weeks, Drunk Wisconsin posted some great relationship advice that, while it doesn’t explicitly engage with a dynamic framing, strongly suggests that growing together is desirable. There’s no way out of marriage that requires growth from you - whether you have kids or don’t, no matter what you do in your career, your marriage will to some degree succeed or fail based on how well you adapt to new challenges and turn toward each other and grow up to meet new demands. Change is the only thing you can count on, which means that anything you intend to keep - including a marriage - must be actively buttressed against entropy.

There’s more to explore here than the necessity of changing yourself over time, a glimmer of hope in a series of life demands that can sometimes look intimidating: people with well-managed expectations about a partner with potential tend to be people with expectations for meeting that potential. It is only a dynamic model of relationships that allows for you to choose to get married as a not-yet-formed individual. If you want to be accepted for being imperfect, flawed, and especially for having as-yet-unrealized possibilities, you must then go on to expect that what you offer is growth, development, and change - you do not get to choose to be part of a marriage where you secure a spouse and then stop growing, changing, striving, and working on yourself first and your marriage second.

One of the most unignorable facets of how marriage cannot be treated as a static entity is sex. Sex requires effort and intention to maintain across physiological changes like childbirth, aging, illness, and more. I’ve talked at length about how women as well as men make the mistake of treating libido like a static character trait, then find themselves blindsided when it wanes on a predictable time scale in particular contexts:

If you as a woman think that your horniness will never change under any circumstances, you either haven’t experienced significant biological or logistical life changes, or you’re labeling something that isn’t horniness as horniness (and your sex life is probably paying for the difference).

To treat libido, sexual skill, relationships, and people as static is to consign your sex life to the whims of time and entropy, where decay is the primary law of the land. None of these aspects are static, which is just as much good news as it is reason for intention and effort. You can improve at sex, particularly with one specific person over time, to a great extent.

Men stop trying to please their wives because they enter this static model of marriage - a place to relax - and then find themselves sad and confused when their wives no longer find it rewarding to put effort into pleasing them sexually. That makes sense, because doing something for someone that you feel isn’t reciprocated drives resentment, a marital killer.