I am not an advice columnist or couples counselor or relationship guru, but I am firmly convinced that I know the two secrets to a happy relationship. Since I stumbled on them purely by accident and the odds of you doing so as well are slim, this Valentine’s Day I am going to share both of them with you, in the spirit of generosity—which, incidentally, is also helpful to maintaining a happy relationship.
I learned the first secret one evening after dinner, when my partner was sitting on the couch reading and I was sitting on the same couch feeling bored and inclined to pester her. As a rule I love nothing more than to pass the time peacefully reading by her side, but that particular night I was antsy and avoiding my work and just in the mood to talk. Occasionally I would venture a little conversational gambit—“Did you see that story in the Times about earworms?” “There’s something weird going on with my big toe”—to which my partner replied with a distracted mm-hmm. My inability to focus on my own book rendered her own absorption impressive, if also, in the moment, somewhat alarming: since she was seventy pages into a three-volume, two-thousand page history of the Spanish Empire, it seemed possible she could be reading it for the next nine or ten years. In a fit of unpremeditated need, I suddenly exclaimed, “Pay attention to me!”
Thus did the reign of Isabella I end, at least in our household. My partner looked up at me for the first time that evening, put down her book, and laughed. It wasn’t just that my outburst was out of character, although that was part of it, since most of the time I have a very high tolerance for hanging out alone with my thoughts. It was the utter nakedness of the demand, my failure to dress it up in explanation or diplomacy or apology. That made it funny in the way that so many unexpected and abrupt things are funny, like a man looking down at his phone and walking straight into a swimming pool. And it made it effective in a way that my earlier and more subtle efforts had not been. I can’t recall exactly what my partner said in response, but I think it was something along the lines of “Come here, you nut.”
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But here is why “Pay attention to me” is one of the secrets to a happy relationship: although it seems like a childish outburst, it is in fact (if I say so myself) the essence of emotional maturity. To ask for what you need, to say plainly what you feel: even the most sane and stable and loving among us sometimes struggles to achieve that kind of unvarnished honesty in our relationships. Out of the best of intentions, a kind of coyness meant as kindness can creep in. That evening, I wanted to respect my partner’s contentment, I wanted to weigh my needs against hers, I wanted to be thoughtful and supportive of her, as I think of myself being—all admirable and important goals, of course, but what I really wanted, at that precise moment, was to feel the warmth of her focus on me. “Pay attention to me”: what partnered person does not want that with some regularity, since attention and connection is the origin and essence of any happy relationship? I can’t begin to tell you how many times since that night on the couch one of us has deployed that line, when the other has gotten a little too zealous about achieving Inbox Zero or fallen under the spell of a four-hundred season Netflix series or vanished into her phone. It is always said as a joke, it is always meant affectionately, and it always, always works.
The other secret to a happy relationship also came to me via an accidental outburst, this one by my partner. One afternoon during the first year of our marriage, we brought a load of fresh linens up to the bedroom and began making the bed. Both she and I enjoy things like doing the laundry and washing the dishes, so we had never really argued about household chores. But on this occasion, we had washed the comforter cover, thereby setting ourselves up for a domestic task even more annoying than folding a fitted sheet: stuffing the comforter back inside. It turns out that we have very different theories about how best to accomplish this. Mine involves carefully inching the comforter from one end of the cover to the other, like a technical challenge involving puff pastry on the Great British Bakeoff. Hers involves standing on the bed and shaking the comforter madly, like a daredevil tourist during the Running of the Bulls. Needless to say, these two methods are not compatible. We had started to debate, in increasingly testy tones, the relative virtues of each one when my partner, in a fit of exasperation, said, “Just do it my way!”
I don’t remember which of us started laughing first. Has anyone ever invented, on the fly, a better strategy for diffusing conflict in a relationship? Contained in her plea was an acknowledgment that there was nothing objectively better about her solution to the comforter-cover problem, and therefore no reason at all why I should defer to her instead of her deferring to me—except that she wanted me to. But once that reason was stated plainly, it was perfectly sufficient. I married her because I adore her, after all, so why not do what makes her happy? Something about “Just do it my way!” reminded us both of how silly the dispute was in the first place, and how even sillier it would be to let it cause any friction between us. We finished making the bed in high spirits, and that phrase, too, entered our shared vocabulary. These days, when confronted with any of the countless situations couples must negotiate together in which compromise simply isn’t an option, we now do it her way and do it my way with about equal frequency.
