Hello, loyal reader(s)!

I know it’s been ages since we posted anything – it turns out the three of us simultaneously and nonverbally decided to take a hiatus for the winter months so that we could spend time with family and friends around a wood-burning stove, trying to stave off the icy hands of midwestern winter. For me, the highlight of the cold months was probably the time my boyfriend and I dragged my bed onto my living room floor during a snowstorm so we could watch Killing Eve in bed by the warm fireplace. Remember to unplug sometimes.

Anyway, now that going outside brings less Dickensian misery, I think we’re just about ready to come off our hiatus and continue inflicting our thoughts and feelings on our adoring populace. Please contain your excitement.

I thought we could kick off our spring season with a new FHTB series: controversial opinions. I want it on the record that I love, love, love controversial opinions. For me, they’re one of the most interesting prospective topics of conversation. Any old asshole can rattle off conventional wisdom; being able to present an idea contrary to mainstream beliefs and being able to defend its logic is a great way to exchange ideas. It’s also a great way to question your own biases and establish where people around you may disagree with you. Example: once I asked a colleague for a controversial political opinion, and he responded “the Democrats should have moved right on immigration in 2016.” Fascinating answer. Do I agree with it? Not really. But it made me question immigration policy, party platforms, the sociology of voting blocs, etc.

Of course, controversial ideas don’t necessarily have to be political (it’s just that I gravitate toward those ideas because in addition to being very interesting and unique™, I am a pedantic asshole). As such, I wanted to discuss one of my (thousands of) controversial opinions: love is not enough to sustain relationships, and unconditional love can often lead to unhappy and unfulfilling relationships (be they family, friend, or romantic relationships).

I know that that flies in the face of dozens of movies and books and songs, but bear with me. Artistic impressions of love and relationships writ large are not necessarily accurate portrayals of reality. That couple from The Notebook had a terrible relationship; they spend half of that fucking movie yelling at each other, and they’re supposed to be this paragon of romance. Twilight is famously abusive. Even movies like Grease teach us to “give up everything about yourself to be what your man wants.” Girl, bye. The love relationships in these are an abstracted version of romance, with little to no practical backing. Can you picture any of these couples grocery shopping together? Is there a scene in any of these movies where one person explains that they are not in the mood for sex because they overindulged on Indian food, and the other says that that’s fine? Can any movie demonstrate how satisfying it is to have your partner get you your preferred drink from the bar without being asked? No. Because they’re not real, and are not a role model for healthy relationships.

Real life is far murkier, far more mundane, and far more satisfying, than your typical movie. We must bear in mind that the very goal of romance movies is to give you that dramatic swelling in your chest à la the Grinch breaking that heart measuring device. For the writers and directors and producers, giving you that emotional satisfaction is more important than demonstrating how to have critical discussions with your partner. That’s their job. So let’s first eject the idea of “movie love” from our minds; let’s talk about real life, and real ways that people relate to one another.

Imagine that you have a wonderful relationship with a great person who makes you laugh and has a stable job and fucks you right. And you are absolutely in love with one another. But there’s a problem: your partner cannot, at all, save money. As soon as they see that direct deposit, they go shopping. Or book an expensive vacation. Or they lend money to their least reliable friend who will certainly not repay the debt.

To be in a long-term relationship with someone where money is consistently a problem is to live life constantly looking over your shoulder. You have to ask yourself: are there ways that my partner can learn to save? Can we use an app to budget? Are they spending  money that I have earmarked for my own personal needs? What are the long-term effects of this kind of spending? Money is a crucial allegory for power in many relationships (not to mention our society), and if you grow paranoid of financial instability, that could tear your relationship apart. It’s hard to be happily in love if your debts put you on the brink of financial ruin.

Here’s another example. Say you have that same strong, mutually loving relationship. Say your partner is financially responsible. BUT their sibling, whom they love very much, has a horrible addiction, is always in some kind of crisis, and is constantly bringing your partner into increasingly difficult situations. Maybe they have spells where they have no place to stay, and they move in with you for weeks at a time. Maybe they constantly ask your partner for money. Maybe they frequently need your partner to pick them up from dangerous/potentially life-threatening situations.

It can be incredibly hard on a relationship to introduce a third person who codepends with one partner. If that third person is monopolizing on time, energy, and resources, that can introduce friction and damage the romantic dynamics in the relationship. At some point you have to ask – is that sibling taking steps to get better, or are they using your partner to continue a precarious lifestyle? Is everything “just this once”? Is your partner in danger – or could they be?

Or, say your partner is living with bipolar disorder, and refuses to use medication. You love them, they love you, and you have so many times when you feel happy together. But when they’re in the higher emotional state characteristic of bipolar disorder, they act erratically, spending money and staying out late and putting themselves in difficult or dangerous situations. When they’re low, they refuse to leave the house, cook, or clean.

Mental illness is not a fucking joke, despite the existential dispair of millenial humor. And it’s  n e v e r  okay to stigmatize or leave someone just because of their diagnosis. That said, partnerships require balance, and if a person with mental illness refuses to seek treatment, that can create a dynamic in which the other partner is constantly trying to fill in the gaps, becoming a kind of de facto servant who works to maintain a semblance of normalcy in a volatile relationship.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any of the three above examples are inherent deal-breakers. All of them exhibit room for improvement. You can have conversations and set goals for financial responsibility; you can set boundaries for copdependent siblings; you can develop a strategy for counseling and medication. Everyone has different thresholds for different pressures in their relationships, and there is no one formula that ends with “that’s enough, honey, leave his ass.” Usually, only your close friends can give advice like that.

But there has to be a will to change, to adjust, to find a more stable and happy balance, and that comes from more than just love. It comes from healthy people having healthy communication. If not that, it comes from people who are working to be healthy together having healthy communication. But without those things, you’re living with a person who makes you happy while traversing a myriad of situations that make you miserable. Every relationship may have its ups and downs, but your relationship is bad if it is a recurring cause of your downs. It’s hurting your long-term happiness. Love is not enough – you have to work, too.

This, I think, brings us to the final point, the point that makes all of the above so controversial – it’s fucking hard to set boundaries with people we love, or to tell them we’re frustrated with them. It’s hard to have that healthy discourse, to engage in those uncomfortable conversations. It makes us feel like the bad guy, or the controlling partner, or the needy one. But there is nothing wrong with having your needs. There is nothing wrong with wanting stability and communication – yes, even when the communication is hard. (I feel compelled to add here that ultimatums and tantrums are not healthy communication, and are not a substitute for good-faith conversations about your relationship.) Movie love – remember that awful trope we jettisoned earlier? – has led us to believe that all loving relationships that are “meant to be” are effortless. Fate. But that’s not how real life goes. Real life has ups and downs, fights and arguments and compromises. On the whole, though, when relationships dip into those unsustainable and unhealthy patterns, they often cease to make you happy and leave you fulfilled. And if you aren’t happy and fulfilled, what’s the point of being in a relationship to begin with?