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To Stay in Love, Sign on the Dotted Line
- enthalpyx 9y agoBetter title: "To stay in love, communicate honestly and openly" | these guys just happened to find a way to do that in writing
- nf05papsjfVbc 9y ago"Trust" also happens to be the foundation for a good relationship.
- taneq 9y agoIt took me nearly 10 years to understand the line "I believe that trust is more important than monogamy" in that old Savage Garden song. It took an ex who was (I think) physically faithful (at that point) while completely dismantling my faith in humanity to figure that one out.
- kibwen 9y agoThough that's usually easier said than done. Communicating openly and honestly is something that a lot of couples think they do, but it's hard to tell the difference between a partner that isn't communicative (or was once communicative, but stopped), and a partner that has nothing to communicate. It's trusting communicativeness to self-perpetuate. In an ideal relationship we could have faith in such implicit self-perpetuation, but humans aren't always perfect, and having an explicit and expected opportunity to communicate new expectations (in the OP's case, via a (perhaps deliberately ridiculous) contract negotiation) might be all it takes to keep communication on track. If it keeps them happy, then good for them!
- djcjr 9y agoIn my experience, writing things down brings additional insight, more than an accident. When I first heard Leslie Lamport say “If you think without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”, I thought it was a bit much, but now I suspect he's right.
- WalterSear 9y agoI have a deal with my SO, that, if at any time, I feel that either of us is too overcome by emotion to discuss something rationally, we get to say so, the other person gets to say their piece (without lecturing or railing) and then the discussion is tabled. If either of us feel it is important, then it's up to them to bring it up at a later, calmer time. Otherwise, it wasn't actually that important. This rule has saved us from all sorts of pointless strife.
- _RPM 9y agoSounds strange, and horrible. A relationship isn't a business.`
- Xero 9y agoMy thoughts exactly. The language used and driving idea were so clinical and robotic that I couldn't tell if this article was satire or not.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoSure, it's not. But what they've found is a way to communicate openly and honestly; ultimately, if this approach helps to further that, then why's it horrible?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoBut business is a relationship and there are economic aspects to some relationships (eg, cohabitation or marriage). If writing it down is a way for them to communicate and negotiate openly, that sounds reasonable and healthy. From the joking clauses, it sounds more like a framework to ensure people have similar expectations and needs are addressed than some kind of binding document. I don't find it particularly shocking that a tool meant for one kind of relationship with economic dimensions can be used as a template for a tool in another kind of relationship with economic dimensions.
- onion2k 9y agoA relationship is whatever the people involved want it to be. If they want to run their relationship like a business that's OK, and to be honest I think it's good to read about people who are enjoying alternative ways of living when a 'normal' way doesn't suit them; it can help other people see that they can live how they want, even if other people see it as "strange, and horrible".
- dsp1234 9y agoIf each person in a relationship is happier because they treat their relationship as a business, then it's pure hubris to suggest they should be less happy because it does not match your notion of what a relationship should be.
- goseeastarwar 9y agoThe author is happier in this new relationship and it has absolutely nothing to do with the contract. Her last boyfriend didn't respect her, and the new one does. The end.
- simonsarris 9y ago> We were together for almost a decade, and in that time I somehow lost track of my own habits and preferences. If I wanted to split the grocery bill, he suggested I buy only things we both liked. If I wanted to spend weekends together, I could go skiing with him and his friends. And so I did. I made my life look like his. > It wasn’t until I moved out that I began to see that there hadn’t been room for me in my relationship. And not merely because my ex hadn’t offered it — it had never occurred to me to ask. This happened to an ex of mine. I think the success of her next relationship was not the contract per se, but internalizing this epiphany. The contract is her specific implementation of how to deal with it, but the important thing for everyone, I think, is the quoted portion above. I would not be so quick to scoff at the writing part either. For a lot of people I know (many of them journal-keepers), physically writing something out is the most meaningful part of completing and internalizing a thought.
- iagreeentirely 9y agoI've long felt that those of us with odd relationship needs had a leg-up here. The fact that the sort of things I find sexually fulfilling aren't what you should spring on someone mid-coitus has made necessary my whole adult life a level of candidness that I don't see in the romantic relationships of my friends. The fact that I need to have those conversations early makes a lot of other conversations very easy to have; any relationship I'm in started with one of those discussions going well.
- acjohnson55 9y agoIf it works for them, more power to them! And as they say, there's someone out there for everyone. I personally react poorly to the idea that I--along with my relationships--am this computer that must be programmed by my intellectual self. I connect this with the overall trend of lifehacking. That said, I still learn from people who take such an explicit approach, and just try to find more organic ways to apply some of these things to my own life. It lets me feel like I'm striking the right balance of spontaneity and intention.
- louithethrid 9y ago>There's someone out there for everyone. Sorry, wrong.
- kibwen 9y agoOne may not necessarily need to go as far as signing a physical contract (which I'm sure many will find aromantic), but the sentiment is absolutely true. Everyone has different expectations of what they want out of a relationship, all guaranteed to deviate more-or-less from the stereotypical date-cohabitate-marriage-kids script, and being open and honest about your expectations before embarking on a long-term relationship is the best way to avoid heartache. And this is scary! It takes a certain level of emotional maturity and courage to sit down with someone you may have only recently met and have this sort of conversation, but even if you mutually decide that your long-term interests aren't compatible that doesn't mean that you can't continue having a casual relationship (or even "just" a friendship).
- non_sequitur 9y agoCan't wait until they have to litigate this one!
- atemerev 9y agoIt is probably unerforceable. It is a peer agreement, not a legally binding contract, with opt-out provisions. Still, immensely useful.
- pmarreck 9y agoIntimidated by divorce statistics (a $50 billion industry in the US alone, 30-50% chance, etc.) and by a spate of divorces among my friends whose weddings I attended, Stephanie and I decided to do a domestic partnership. So far so good.
- creepydata 9y agoWhat's a "domestic partnership?" Is it a legal term?
- schreiaj 9y agoIt is, for example here's Tampa's definition: https://www.tampagov.net/city-clerk/programs/domestic-partnership-faqs https://www.tampagov.net/city-clerk/programs/domestic-partne... Prior to the Supreme Court decision some employers (including my own) extended health insurance benefits to same sex domestic partnerships (but it was not required) but did not extend them to different sex partnerships. Since that decision my employer has ceased providing benefits for partnerships at all regardless of genders. There's reasons folks would do this over a marriage including, like a friend of mine, simply not believing that marriage should be a thing the government should be involved in.
- pmarreck 9y agoYes. Ironically it was created as a "fallback position" to full-on marriage for non-straight people. For the sake of equality it had to apply to everyone of course, though. You get many of the rights of marriage such as mutual health coverage, visitation rights etc... But without all the cruft.
- creepydata 9y agoIn what jurisdiction is this? How do you enter such a relationship? How does dissolution work in such a relationship? What sort of "cruft" does marriage have that a "domestic partnership" lack? Also does this "legal arrangement" carry over to other jurisdictions? And assuming we are talking about the US isn't "mutual health coverage" decided by the employer or plan administrator? I know Tricare does not allow sponsors to enroll non-married partners, for example.
- rayiner 9y agoI'm surprised there is so much resistance to this idea on this site of all places. The fact is that in real life (unlike in TV and movies) few people have the emotional intelligence to divine their partner's wants and needs from subtle cues. It may be somewhat unromantic (what does that even mean?) to sit down and write things out, but explicit communication about expectations, boundaries, and priorities can make a relationship function much more smoothly.
- jccc 9y agoI wonder if some of that resistance comes from people here taking the idea too seriously. Doing a renewable "contract" is just a fun way to be clear about what you want and to track changes over time. We don't even necessarily know everything we want without going through it clearly and out loud. Doing it like this is not some kind of demand but a fun way for people to discover each other and themselves.
- danbolt 9y agoWe should rewrite the article with the same core ideas, but make it about communicating in a tech workplace and see how people respond to it.
- psyc 9y agoOr let it be about relationships, but implemented with Ethereum.
- specialist 9y agoIt's relationship technology. It's one of the recent developments that has made me an optimist (recovering cynic). An ex-gf and I did the gottman.com stuff. Read the books together, did a weekend workshop. It's brilliant. Our relationship was already all-but-over, but we both wanted to learn from the experience, hopefully do better with our future relationships. A post-mortem of sorts. We compared notes a year later. My ex-gf said something remarkable, insightful. She consciously applied the gottman.com lessons, strategies to all her relationships, including her job. She said all those relationships got much better. I've since (consciously) followed her example and have concluded that I agree. I'm now totally onboard with emotional intelligence themed stuff.
- monksy 9y agoI believe that this is a concerning side effect of the increasing inability for people to communicate and to trust others. A contract is just to re-enforce an insecurity on both parties in a relationship. I'm all for discussing things even in that great detail to avoid conflict before hand. But a contract seems excessive and will probably be thrown away anyways. [Soapbox] I'm convinced that most people are completely disconnected to others, and lack the skills to meet new people, handle rejection, and come down from overly high expectations. Just seems like narcissism and the lack of flexibility.
- maxander 9y agoWhat exactly is the important difference between "discussing things in great detail to avoid conflict" and "having a contract"? When problems come up, is a contract more likely to be disregarded because it is written down? Is half an hour on a laptop an "excessive" cost? I don't understand your argument in the slightest. It may, of course, be true that a contract is only a good idea due to insufficient communication and trust. But, for this to be an increasing problem presupposes that people were ever better communicators and trust-ers than we are today; I think it more likely that people of previous eras were simply better at doing without. Before a couple generations ago, romantic love was a radical idea and nearly all relationship decisions were resolved by deferring to the male's preference. Such simpler times certainly don't require complicated contracts, but these days we're likely to think that that kind of relationship is missing something important.
- rayiner 9y agoNote that we did have contracts in the past. Marriage was a contractual relationship--quite a specific one, with the law defining many sorts of obligations--long before it was recast in modern ideas of romantic love.
- rayiner 9y agoPeople weren't able to better intuit the private minds of others back in the day. Instead, what's changed is that expectations used to be externally (socially, legally) imposed in the past, and now they are not. What was the expectation regarding marriage? You were going to get married before you had sex. What was the expectation regarding kids? You were going to have kids soon after you got married. What was the expectation regarding monogamy (see the author's point)? Not being monogamous was not an option. What should you do with your extra time/money? You didn't have any so it was a moot point. All that is up for negotiation now. The contract just makes that explicit instead of pretending that all those points of agreement can be achieved without formal discussion.
- dreamdu5t 9y agoWhy is this allowed on HN? It's not tech, startups or anything in between. Is there a website like HN that's actually focused/moderated and doesn't mix Cosmo type clickbait with actual news?
- 18nleung 9y agoThere are quite a few submissions on here that aren't tech or startups but still can have value to the HN audience.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rfrey 9y ago>Is there a website like HN that's actually focused/moderated and doesn't mix Cosmo type clickbait with actual news? There probably isn't one that will never, ever, ever include a link that you're not interested in.
- toddan 9y agoThis feels like something only a woman could put forward or demand in a relationship based on their value in the dating market. A man would be in a much higher risk of being left with the same arrangement.
- kibwen 9y agoMan here. Before getting serious in my current relationship, I sat down with my girlfriend and gently initiated a frank conversation about about what each of us expect out of a relationship and what our short-term and long-term priorities are, not just in terms of relationship goals, but also in terms of general life goals to see whether or not a relationship would hinder or help those goals. As someone who's experienced, not one, but two traumatic parental divorces in my life, the last thing I want is to get ten years into a relationship before discovering that our goals are incompatible. This isn't anything exclusive to women.
- empath75 9y agoWomen and men have roughly the same value overall in the dating market. The guys who say this kind of thing tend to have a narrow view of what kind of woman makes an acceptable relationship partner, and ignore a whole lot of women that are available and aren't nearly as well valued by 'the market'.
- baybal2 9y agoDoesn't looks like a universal solution to me. It looks that this particular solution works for them. I know god knows how much families in my home country (Russia) who had no problems living together to old age without having to do anything special. I also know god knows how much dysfunctional families as well. I knew quite a few oddbals too, a couple that were still lovey dovey and dating casually for close to 12 years since their mid-teens. I knew a married couple that everybody suspected to be "mutually-infidel," yet they had a really strong bond. It is all luck and compatibility/synergies of individual differences
- Jimmy 9y ago>We spent weeks anxiously enumerating the pros and cons of cohabitation. The older I get, the more I come around to the conclusion that thought is bad.
- devuo 9y agoWhich part of it is bad, thinking about cohabitation, or cohabitation itself?
- Jimmy 9y agoOh, now I see how my sentence was ambiguous. The "anxiously enumerating pros and cons part" is bad. Cohabitation is fine.
- creepydata 9y agoWhy is that?
- ashark 9y agoThe older I get, the wiser the conclusions of Vonnegut's Galapagos seem. Shamelessly stealing from Goodreads, which shamelessly stole from the book itself: “Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilogrammes! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute. So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?” “Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.” “That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality." And perhaps most appropriately for this thread: “What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch from one opinion or subject to another one so quickly, that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates.”
- creepydata 9y agoI don't get it. The title of the article is "To Stay in Love, Sign on the Dotted Line," but there's absolutely nothing in it that supports the title. All it is is about an unmarried woman whose been in a relationship for only 3 years saying a scheduled conversations and paper an pen (or keyboard in this case) helps her have relationship communication. The title should really be "communication is helpful for my new relationship." It's misguided at best to conclude every couple should create this sort of formal contract. Every couple communicates differently.
- farnsworth 9y agoIt's also a reference to the author's article, To Fall in Love, Do This [0] which I remember as being extremely popular and shared all over social media when it was published. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html?action=click&contentCollection=Style&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fa...
- gnicholas 9y agoPrecisely. I kept waiting for a paragraph beginning: "and now, ten years into our marriage..." But it never came, since this couple isn't married and hasn't even been dating that long. Clickbait titles like this are common on the internet, but I expect better from the New York Times. This article is bereft of anything remotely newsworthy. Perhaps their new slogan should be "All the news that's fit to print, plus some vapid millennial musings".
- creepydata 9y agoNot even are they not married they seem to have a commitment phobia.
- creepydata 9y agoI actually wouldn't mind it if it was an op-ed with a title such as "how I learned effective relationship communication." But with that title I am expecting something of substance. Also saying they were drinking beers while doing it has the implication that they needed alcohol to be able to have such important conversations. Not saying that's the case, I'm saying it gives the impression.
- nolepointer 9y agoMid thirties, unmarried, only "kid" is a dog ... this is amusing to me. It describes the average, self-important, liberal-voting person today.
- creepydata 9y agoWhat? BTW, being into your mid 30s unmarried and without children is a very liberal lifestyle.
- ksml 9y agoThis is terribly unhelpful. Can you at least elaborate on what you mean?
- nolepointer 9y agoIt wasn't meant to be helpful. It was just an observation of a certain kind of person.
- samirillian 9y agoI guess I wouldn't have a problem with drafting such a contract in concept, but I think it would be nice to have some slightly sappier stuff mixed in with it. Even with the touch about the dog, it comes off as super formal to me. Like, their sole goal is to make each other more ethical? I mean that's the definition of a platonic, not an erotic relationship. I have plenty of friends who I already relate to in that way. What about, even, a word like "nurturing"? Much less "spending time lost in one another's eyes"? Boundaries make a loving relationship _functional_ but they don't make a relationship loving.
- danieljohnson 9y agoI wish that I had done this in my previous relationship. We were young, and we talked a lot, but I didn't realize what was really important to her (travelling, saving money). So when we'd talk about goals, I'd never realize how much things meant to her. A contract may have helped us define our goals, and what we wanted, and make things a little easier for dense ol' me.
- zzalpha 9y agoYou know, I went into this article skeptical, but I'm now a believer if it works for this couple. Solid relationships are built on communication that enables conscious compromises and deliberate decisions to accommodate one another while ensuring one's own needs are met. For this couple, putting those needs, compromises, and decisions in writing is what facilitates that communication. Pretty brilliant idea if you ask me! That said: Speaking for myself, going into marriage I thought "How will this change anything?" But, for me, it changed a lot. It's not about the legal commitment... that's just a technicality. Rather, it's the conscious decision to truly commit before friends and family that changed the way I thought and felt about my wife... it's hard to put into words, but at least for me, it was absolutely different.