Oh, I know. It’s Valentine’s Day.
It’s one of those “peg” dates publishers love. Over the years, I have seen books on how to train your mate like a killer whale (
Pause here for a sigh.
It’s hard not to feel a little sad about all the reductive self-help instruction on how to love. This is the frenetic click-for-information world we live in. Instruction in love is like being told how to eat or how to sleep or how to breathe. Isn’t it innate?
Well, it should be, but it often isn’t. Or it was, at one point in childhood, and then somehow it got squished out of you. (Just ask any therapist worth her $200-an-hour fee for that little insight.) Or maybe, like the authors of Spousonomics, you’re newly married, career-oriented and popping babies – in what Ms. Anderson, a New York Times reporter and mother of two, calls the “rush hour of life” – and you’re thinking how this marriage thing, so rich with promise, is no cake walk; a study, should you see it that way, in the allocation of scarce resources. How much love and time do you have to give to your husband, to your kids and to your job?
“We’re not touchy-feely types,” Ms. Anderson says of herself and her co-author, Ms. Szuchman, also in the early years of her marriage, a mother and a journalist. “It’s an unromantic look at marriage.”
Economics (including charts, mathematical formulas and graphs) can be applied to many marital issues, they show, including division of labour, frequency of sex, trade-offs, incentives to get him to do what you want, and that niggling feeling that your life is just not as much fun as it used to be.
Feel a little pissed off that your new domestic life involves Ambien rather than an all-night sexathon? It can all be boiled down to the behavioural economic principle of loss aversion and status quo bias. Most people gauge happiness on how they felt in the past compared to the present. The solution? Acknowledge the principle, make adjustments, and otherwise, just realize that with the loss of some things comes the gain of others.
Well, duh, if you ask this been-around-the-block midlife woman.
Ironically, Spousonomics is proof of the problem it sets out to solve. Marriage may have begun as an economic deal of chattel exchange, but if we thought we had evolved beyond that, think again. Love is still transactional. Or as Leonard Cohen once lamented to me about contemporary love: “[It’s] the old horror story...You know, I’ll give you this if you give me that. You know, sealing the deal. What do I get? What do you get? It’s a contract.”
Make the case for considerate romantic intimacy, I say. The breath in the house, the warmth of demands of someone who needs you, because no one else will do, is our buffer against an insensitive world full of little treacheries. Like many people, who have been divorced and found love again, I realize how rare it is, and how important it is to treasure when you have it.
Smooch your guy. Rub his back. Lose your gonzo individualism and fry him an egg and some bacon even if you’ve gone a little vegan.
