On Giving, Teamwork, and the Future of Marriage: A Conversation with Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson
Peter opened with a line he remembered from the TV show Mad Men. A man tells his fiancée, "Of course I love you. I am giving up my life to be with you." He let the absurdity sit for a second before asking what anyone could expect to go wrong with a sentiment like that.
Ellyn picked up the thread. A good relationship, she said, leans far more toward giving and gratitude than toward taking. The trouble is how many people walk in asking what they stand to gain.
Peter named it the Cinderella problem. We marry believing we've located the one person built to suit us, and the whole thing becomes about receiving rather than offering something when offering is a hassle. Giving when it's inconvenient is exactly the moment a couple begins to stretch and grow.
From there Ellyn wanted to talk about teamwork. Think about where most of us actually spend our lives, she said: inside hierarchies, not partnerships of equals. Teachers hand down instructions. Parents do the same. We almost never land in a genuinely interdependent arrangement where two people have to negotiate their differences and settle conflicts between them. That takes real skill, and there are a lot of skills folded into working as a team.
She reached for an image she uses with couples often: a disco ball. Each of us is like that, she explained, with every little mirror on the surface standing for a different side of who we are. In a relationship that keeps developing, the ball goes on turning, and we keep revealing new parts of ourselves to a partner. That's part of what keeps things alive and charged. It also means the odds of friction climb, because the more of you that shows up, the more there is to collide over. So a couple needs some method, one that actually fits the two of them, for handling the strain that builds whenever both people want different things in the same moment.
Erik liked that and turned to a broader question. Everyone knows divorce rates jumped sharply starting in the 1960s, he said, and that they've eased off somewhat since roughly the 1990s. Given how ordinary divorce has become across the United States and Europe, did they think marriage still had a future? Would it last, might it come back, and what would it look like if it did?