It's amusing, and telling, that your post doesn't even mention children, when they are obviously the ultimate reason for romantic feelings existing in the first place. Traditionally, the "value proposition" was primarily in the formation of a coherent family unit embedded in the larger clan/tribe, which allowed you to become a fully contributing, high status member of society. Of course, those structures mostly lie in ruins these days, the attendant "crisis of meaning" is vast and multifaceted, and people's struggles with rebuilding the notion of relationships is only a part of it.
Indeed!
This post might (no promises) become the first in a sequence, and a likely theme of one post in that sequence is how this all used to work. Main claim: it is possible to get one's needs for benefits-downstream-of-willingness-to-be-vulnerable met from non-romantic relationships instead, on some axes that is a much better strategy, and I think that's how things mostly worked historically and still work in many places today. The prototypical picture here looks like both romantic partners having their separate tight-knit group of (probably same-sex) friends who they hang out with - he hangs with "the boys", she hangs with "the girls". And to some extent this is probably a necessity, because at the population level there's a pretty severe mismatch between the kinds of benefits-downstream-of-willingness-to-be-vulnerable which men and women want vs can supply each other.
(To be clear, that does not mean I think everyone should pursue that strategy or even that it should necessarily be the default target, but I do think that it should at least be on one's radar as a possibility.)
I am not sure if going back to ancient times is very meaningful though. A lot of things may have biological origins but humans have evolved for a good reason from them.
Not a full response to everything but:
As I mentioned in private correspondence, I think at least the "willingness to be vulnerable" is downstream of a more important thing which is upstream of other important things besides "willingness to be vulnerable." The way I've articulated that node so far is, "A mutual happy promise of, 'I got you' ". (And I still don't think that's quite all of the thing which you quoted me trying to describe.)
Willingness to be vulnerable is a thing that makes people good (or at least comfortable) at performance, public speaking, and truth or dare, but it's missing the expectation/hope that the other will protect and uplift that vulnerable core.
I find the "mutual happy promise of 'I got you'" thing... suspicious.
For starters, I think it's way too male-coded. Like, it's pretty directly evoking a "protector" role. And don't get me wrong, I would strongly prefer a woman who I could see as an equal, someone who would have my back as much as I have hers... but that's not a very standard romantic relationship. If anything, it's a type of relationship one usually finds between two guys, not between a woman and <anyone else her age>. (I do think that's a type of relationship a lot of guys crave, today, but romantic relationships are a relatively difficult place to satisfy that craving.)
And the stereotypes do mostly match the relationships I see around me, in this regard. Even in quite equal happy relationships, like e.g. my parents, even to the extent the woman does sometimes have the man's back she's not very happy about it.
To be comfortable opening up, one does need to at least trust that the other person will not go on the attack, but there's a big gap between that and active protection.
1I see it as a promise of intent on an abstract level moreso than a guarantee of any particular capability. Maybe more like, "I've got you, wherever/however I am able." And that may well look like traditional gendered roles of physical protection on one side and emotional support on the other, but doesn't have to.
I have sometimes tried to point at the core thing by phrasing it, not very romantically, as an adoption of and joint optimization of utility functions. That's what I mean, at least, when I make this "I got you" promise. And depending on the situation and on my or my partner/companion/intimate-other's available actions/capabilities, that manifests in various and possibly-individually-distinct ways.
Also, aside, in practice I really think of it as a commitment to doing one's level best at a much messier process, because there's a delicateness to inferring the other's utility function and also trying to infer your own and jointly optimizing both, with some effective weighting arrived at by a partially opaque process that may not be equal, but not too strongly because you're probably somewhat wrong about everything, and often there are no direct conflicts of values but often enough there are and you need to develop some resolution mechanism for that, probably by pressing the "cooperate" button again and popping up to discuss how to resolve best with partner etc etc.
Also, another aside, I would argue that the standard romantic relationships I see portrayed very often seem lacking in the portrayal. I see lots of infatuation, sexual attraction, and symbols of romance (candles and flowers etc,) but only in the rare depictions that include at least strong hints at the stuff you quoted me saying in the OP do I get a little tug at my heart and believe/believe-in the relationship I'm seeing. This goes for film/TV/prose as well as the people around me, now that I think about it. ...I kind of wonder sometimes if most people (including writers and actors) don't really know what the really good thing consists of, not even intuitively, and only stumble upon it / partial instantiations of it, without full recognition, by chance.
A tangent: Often when prospecting for friendship and always for companionship, I used to say that people either did or did not have any "Peter Pan" in them. I coined it when thinking back at watching Peter Pan as a kid and how immediately afterward I ran around the house pretending to be Peter and trying to believe myself into flying etc.. When talking about this I'm bringing a lot more than the current topic into it because this is also supposed to capture a "named character" energy, and an unbrokeness in terms of will-to-joy and other things I won't get into, but also (relevantly) a "romantic soul." And with that last thing I think I was gesturing at this stuff we're talking about here. Joy and desire at the idea of finding a(t least one!) compatible soul to entwine with and make their happiness yours as they make yours theirs.
Also, another aside, I would argue that the standard romantic relationships I see portrayed very often seem lacking in the portrayal. I see lots of infatuation, sexual attraction, and symbols of romance (candles and flowers etc,)
I think this is evidence that supports the hypothesis that "I got you" is male-coded.
Romantic movies are mostly made for women; it makes sense that they would portray female preferences.
Fair enough, re: romantic movies showing female preferences*. (Though I don't watch many romance movies and would guess my gestalt impression is therefore more made up of romantic elements in the non-romance movies I do watch...)
*...maybe See below.
Two main thoughts:
1) I think I've lost track of what "male-coded" means and am not sure why it matters. I know that the women I'm closest too see it similarly to me. (Obvious selection effects there, of course.)
2) This aside you're replying to is a pet theory I haven't given much thought to that both men and women are frequently confused about what the main value proposition of romantic relationships is, and I think the main value prop is a unified thing (viewed at the appropriate level of abstraction, like higher than laundry vs car-repair) that both are looking for. So, even if romance movies are aimed at women, most writers will be writing the meme of female-romance, and writers of macho-romance movies (were there such a thing) would be writing the meme of male-romance, and those things may well diverge, and both are misrepresenting the thing that is most good about good relationships. That's the pet theory anyway.
I think the stereotypes for choosing a (heterosexual) partner are the following:
- The ideal man is strong, street-smart, agenty, high-status, rich.
- The ideal woman is pretty, emotionally sensitive, sexually inexperienced.
How this relates to supporting each other?
The attributes of the ideal woman are unrelated to needing support. Actually, when a woman needs support, that is a perfect opportunity for a man to demonstrate his strength and resources; this is what the "damsel in distress" trope is about.
But when a man needs support... well, apparently he is not strong/smart/agenty enough to help himself, so it kinda ruins his value on the dating market.
So the situation is not symmetrical. Loyal partners will support each other, but for the man, it has a flavor of "by supporting you, I demonstrate my value, which makes our relationship stronger", while for the woman it has a flavor of "you lost some of your value, but I will support you loyally anyway". (That is the "she's not very happy about it" part. She now has to work harder than before, to get less of what she wanted.)
This is also my experience, so I wonder, the people who downvoted this, is your experience different? Could you tell me more about it? I would like to see what the world is like outside my bubble.
(I suspect that this is easy to dismiss as a "sexist stereotype", but stereotypes are often based on shared information about repeated observations.)
Do you think Thane's value prop identification captures it?
Specifically: both parties start considering each other a central part of each other's lives. They make major decisions about their lives together, they aim to be together as often as possible, they constantly keep each other in mind, they directly incorporate each other in their models of themselves and their relation to the world, et cetera. That is: it's the "life partner" thing.
Seems like two different things, although positively correlated:
- how much you care about the other person
- whether you want to be with them as often as possible
I mean, if you care about someone, you want to spend time with them, maybe regularly, but it does not have to be as much as possible, even if we do not mean that literally.
I don't think it quite does.
"Life partnership", in my characterization, involves "cranking up various positive relationship-variables to the maximum", among which is the ability-to-be-vulnerable. I. e., this type of relationship is distinguished not by having a distinct unique Thing going on, but by a specific extreme parameterization of a whole bunch of Things.
If I understand correctly, David says there's a number of other interesting Things which are ramped up in a(n idealized) romantic relationship, that they form a cluster with the ability-to-be-vulnerable, and that there may be some latent relationship-variable mediating all relationship-variables in this cluster.
I would agree with that. But my definition doesn't really interact with David's search for this "compact generator". There may be some emergent quality that we get as the result of the simultaneous ramp-up (e. g., the "centrality in each other's lives"), but I hadn't attempted to nail that down.
I think that the vulnerability thing is picking up The Thing by the wrong handle. The point is not to drop one's shield, but to be able to do so in the certainty that the other person isn't going to stab you. But no, that's another wrong handle. The common knowledge of the absence of shielding and stabbing still misses the point. It's like defining sight as not being blind.
I think that this grabbed The Thing by the right handle:
Something like a cross between sibling and best friend? Reliably available and excited to spend time with, go on adventures/experiences with, report on adventures/experiences to, share and keep secrets, socially back-up and support, a more or less ever present cognitive circuit that's looking out for the other...
This Thing isn't all-or-nothing. It scales up and down, and at the upper reaches it can bring in the romantic and sexual aspects of A Relationship and lifelong partnership.
why aren’t a-intimates a thing?
Hello? But it's not something I have reason to talk about, unless someone happens to ask that question. So what I've said above is based only on seeing The Thing all around me, and hearing and reading about The Thing[1], not on actual contact with The Thing.
A recurring topic on The Marginalian, a blog I'd recommend to everyone to at least check out. ↩︎
Good post, I think it comprehensively describes an important and real part of the human condition.
That said, I note that it doesn't actually answer the titular question:
What’s the main value proposition of romantic relationships?
The question actually answered is "what is the main value proposition of intimate relationships?", and as the post itself notes, "intimate" and "romantic" are two different things, with neither necessarily implying the other.
What's the main value proposition of romantic relationships, then, in this post's framework? Here's my model.
First, David's description rings true to me:
Reliably available and excited to spend time with, go on adventures/experiences with, report on adventures/experiences to, share and keep secrets, socially back-up and support, a more or less ever present cognitive circuit that's looking out for the other...
But what sets it apart from a very close friendship (with benefits)?
I think it's related to the "ever-present" part. Specifically: both parties start considering each other a central part of each other's lives. They make major decisions about their lives together, they aim to be together as often as possible, they constantly keep each other in mind, they directly incorporate each other in their models of themselves and their relation to the world, et cetera. That is: it's the "life partner" thing.
As part of this centrality, an idealized romantic relationship involves cranking up various positive relationship-variables to the maximum. That includes "the extent to which I can be vulnerable around this person".
So that's a core value proposition: finding the person you can be vulnerable around.
Note that this isn't something that's impossible as part of a sufficiently close friendship. (See: aroace people, who can have life partners too.) But the standard cultural template of even "your very best friend" doesn't incorporate this by default, whereas the standard cultural template of "your romantic partner" does. And much like some friends can be life partners in practice, some romantic relationships in practice don't include life partnership and/or the ability-to-be-vulnerable ramped up to 11.
In this framework, the standard cultural template of "a romantic partner" is just the sum of "life partnership", "limerence and cute-couple stuff", "sex", and "the parent of your children". In practice, though, each component can (and sometimes should) be decoupled from the others.
On the flip side… if asexuals and aromantics are each a thing, why aren’t a-intimates a thing? Where are the healthy relationships with people who just don’t particularly form intimate connections?
Psychopaths, no? Being pathologically unable to feel "The Thing which is supposed to give relationships most of their value" seems to check out, on my model of how (idealized) psychopath psychology is supposed to work.
(A "healthy" relationship like this is certainly possible, as well, inasmuch as "a psychopath" doesn't equal "evil manipulator".)
1If I think about my best, closest relationships, whether friendly or romantic, they are or were all ones where I could just be myself, i.e. I felt safe being vulnerable.
If I think about my worst relationships, like with my ex-wife or toxic frenimies, they were all ones where I had to be on guard because sometimes I'd show something of myself and it'd be used to attack me, so it wasn't safe to be vulnerable.
So your theory passes my smell test!
Perhaps this is a bit of mirror image but accepted even just being myself actually included not opening up about some things so feeling safe not being vulnerable.
why aren’t a-intimates a thing? Where are the healthy relationships with people who just don’t particularly form intimate connections
This is called "casual" when it comes to sex and relationships. Hookups are casual sex. There's twitter gender discourse on casual cuddling. Let's broaden the term.
Porn consumption is casual. Romance fiction consumption is casual. Parasocial idol worship is casual. Usually.
Generally all the ways you work for someone else and buy things from someone else are all casual interactions (generally asexual and aromantic as well). Almost nothing you do to survive and thrive requires trust of others. Goods and services are unconditional on your internal state and therefore you gain very little by relating to them. We call people who live fully through casual relations to be "atomized". Marx calls this "alienation". Not all commerce happens this way though. Like, Japanese business culture relies a lot on personal ties. You can call such activity which relies on vulnerability and faith to be "acasual trade".
1Promise to invest, promise to share resources, mutual insurance/commitment seem like other key elements.
Yeah... I still haven't figured out how to think about that cluster of pieces.
It's certainly a big part of my parents' relationship: my mother's old job put both her and my father through law school, after which he worked while she took care of the kids for a few years, and nowadays they're business partners.
In my own bad relationship, one of the main models which kept me in it for several years was "relationships are a thing you invest in which grow and get better over time". (Think e.g. this old post.) And it was true that the relationship got better over time as I invested effort in it. But the ROI was absolutely abysmal, the investments were never actually worthwhile, they cost far more effort than the improvements they brought.
Looking at the population more generally, it's usually the male who's the breadwinner (data). Mutual insurance doesn't work when only one person makes serious money. And even equal-earning relationships have a reputation of ending when the man hits a hard stretch and can't pay his half.
So I have one data point from my parents in which investment and the like indeed unlocked a lot of value, but based on my own experience and population stats it seems like a narrative which is often bullshit and kind of a trap for guys?
More generally, I'm still not sure how to think about the majority of relationships in which (AFAICT) the guy does most of the overall work. I grew up seeing my parents' relationship, where my mother was the main breadwinner early on and they are proper business partners today. Then I went to a college where 100% of the student body got a STEM degree; every female could pull her weight. More statistically-ordinary relationships still seem very parasitic to me, on a gut level, and I'm not sure how to think about them.
When I say insurance, I don't mean it narrowly in the financial sense. I mean it in the "I'll keep being a part of the relationship even if for some reason you're less able to deliver on your part of it", in this case it could be the non-working spouse not leaving when the breadwinner stops winning bread, or whoever sticking around even when you are ill for a prolonged period and much less fun.
Seems like trusting each other is a high-risk/high-benefit strategy. When it works, it is amazing; but often it does not.
The question is how to best predict which people would be most likely to cooperate in this game. The relevant saying seems to be "past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior", but what kind of past behavior are we talking about? (Probably not the previous relationship, because succeeding at it would make the person unavailable. Unless their former partner was hit by a car.)
My best guess is if the person has a history of taking care of something, e.g. working at a non-profit.
It was meant as a reaction to your parents' relationship. It worked for them, but that's because they both cooperated on the mutual goal. It would fail when only one party tries, and the other does not. And you have no control over what the other person does... expect when you are choosing the other person.
If you want to achieve the same as your parents did, you have two problems to solve:
- how to be the right kind of person
- how to find the right kind of person
The first one seems more important, because if you fail at that, it doesn't matter how many relationships you will try. But the second one is an independent problem, at least as much difficult.
Both insightful and somewhat surprising it wasn't that obvious to you. I really like the search and the frame sexual/romantic/intimate[1].
Amusingly, it seems to me the umbrella term to name "The Thing" is... Trust. This post seems to answer your confusion about the concept of Trust (socially intended), two years ago.
- ^
Maybe it's because I'm French, but I don't think "intimacy" is that confusing.
1"If I’m doing something which is hurting my partner, but my partner isn’t comfortable telling me, then how will it ever get solved? If I want something really important from my partner, but I’m not comfortable asking them or telling them that I need it, then how will they know that it’s especially important to provide?"
You could pay attention to each other and notice, without the other person having to say it explicitly unprompted. Of course if somoene seems concerned you can clarify the issue, they can't read minds. But your partner most certainly can notice comething is wrong and have some idea of whats going on.
Among normies there is a very reasonable norm that "if they aren't paying attention enough attention to even notice a problem, then its not safe to tell them whats going on". It takes two to tango.
1- Unfortunately "love" means a lot of different things. If you answer "what is the best thing about romantic relationships?" with "love" then you haven't done anything to distinguish e.g. "feelings of gooey happiness in one another's presence" from "fierce commitment to giving the other person as good a life as possible" from "accepting the other person no matter what they do or what happens to them" from etc., etc.
- I think it's highly debatable whether what John is describing is "love" in any of the usual senses of that word. It's clearly related to it, just as it's related to (say) trust, but it's not the same thing.
- Even if it is, John has identified (or at least claims to have identified) a very specific thing about the phenomenon that is much more specific than "love".
1As this post was coming together, Duncan fortuitously dropped a List of Truths and Dares which is pretty directly designed around willingness to be vulnerable, in exactly the sense we’re interested in here. Here is his list; consider it a definition-by-examples of willingness to be vulnerable:
I'm pretty sure you're missing something (edit: or rather, you got the thing right but have added some other thing that doesn't belong) because the list in question is about more than just willingness to be vulnerable in the sense that gives value to relationships. (A few examples of the list are fine for definition-by-examples for that purpose, but more than 50% of examples are about something entirely different.) Most of the examples in the list are about comfort zone expansion. Vulnerability in relationships is natural/authentic (which doesn't meant it has to feel easy), while comfort zone expansion exercises are artificial/stilted.
You might reply that the truth-and-dare context of the list means that obviously everything is going to seem a bit artificial, but the thing you were trying to point at is just "vulnerability is about being comfortable being weird with each other." But that defense fails because being comfortable is literally the opposite of pushing your comfort zone.
For illustration, if my wife and I put our faces together and we make silly affectionate noises because somehow we started doing this and we like it and it became a thing we do, that's us being comfortable and a natural expression of playfulness. By contrast, if I were to give people who don't normally feel like doing this the instruction to put their faces together and make silly affectionate noises, probably the last thing they will be is comfortable!
[Edited to add:] From the list, the best examples are the ones that get people to talk about topics they wouldn't normally talk about, because the goal is to say true things that are for some reason difficult to say, which is authentic. By contrast, instructing others to perform actions they wouldn't normally feel like performing (or wouldn't feel like performing in this artificial sort of setting) is not about authenticity.
I'm not saying there's no use to expanding one's comfort zone. Personally, I'd rather spend a day in solitary confinement than whisper in friend's ear for a minute ASMR-syle, but that doesn't mean that my way of being is normatively correct -- I know intellectually that the inner terror of social inhibitions or the intense disdain for performative/fake-feeling social stuff isn't to my advantage in every situation. Still, in the same way, those who've made it a big part of their identity to continuously expand their comfort zones (or maybe see value in helping others come out of their shell) should also keep in mind that not everyone values that sort of thing or needs it in their lives.
Most of the examples in the list are about comfort zone expansion
I don't think that's right/I don't think that's the point of the list, though John's quoting it out of context might've led to losing the point. Duncan's post suggests that different people in the same social context can view exercises from this list either as potentially humiliating comfort-zone-pushing challenges, or as a silly-playful-natural thing to do. Which one it is then depends on whether the given person views the people in that social context as people they can be vulnerable around or not. I. e.: precisely the difference between interacting with your wife vs. random people.
(Duncan's post then goes into more detail about natural personality-clusters which differ by, among other things, whether their strong-default mode is one or the other.)
Thanks, that's helpful context! Yeah, it's worth flagging that I have not read Duncan's post beyond the list.
Duncan's post suggests that different people in the same social context can view exercises from this list either as potentially humiliating comfort-zone-pushing challenges, or as a silly-playful-natural thing to do.
Seems like my reaction proved this part right, at least. I knew some people must find something about it fun, but my model was more like "Some people think comfort/trust zone expansion itself is fun" rather than "Some people with already-wide comfort/trust zones find it fun to do things that other people would only do under the banner of comfort/trust zone expansion."
(Sometimes the truth can be somewhere in the middle, though? I would imagine that the people who would quite like to do most of the things in the list find it appealing that it's about stuff you "don't normally do," that it's "pushing the envelope" a little?)
That said, I don't feel understood by the (fear of) humiliation theme in your summary of Duncan's post. Sure, that's a thing and I have that as well, but the even bigger reason why I wouldn't be comfortable going through a list of "actions to do in the context of a game that's supposed to be fun" is because that entire concept just doesn't do anything for me? It just seems pointless at best plus there's uncomfortableness from the artificiality of it?
As I also wrote in my reply to John:
It's hard to pinpoint why exactly I think many people are highly turned off by this stuff, but I'm pretty sure (based on introspection) that it's not just fear of humiliation or not trusting other people in the room. There's something off-putting to me about the performativeness of it. Something like "If the only reason I'm doing it is because I'm following instructions, not because at least one of us actually likes it and the other person happily consents to it, it feels really weird."
(This actually feels somewhat related to why I don't like small talk -- but that probably can't be the full explanation because my model of most rationalists is that they probably don't like small talk.)
1I think your experience does not generalize to others as far as you think it does. For instance, personally, I would not feel uncomfortable whispering in a friend's ear for a minute ASMR-style; it would feel to me like a usual social restriction has been dropped and I've been freed up to do something fun which I'm not normally allowed to do.
I was initially surprised that you think I was generalizing too far -- because that's what I criticized about your quoting of Duncan's list and in my head I was just pointing to myself as an obviously valid counterexample (because I'm a person who exists, and fwiw many but not all of my friends are similar), not claiming that all other people would be similarly turned off.
But seeing Thane's reply, I think it's fair to say that I'm generalizing too far for using the framing of "comfort zone expansion" for things that some people might legitimately find fun.
As I'm going to also write in my reply to Thane, I knew some people must find something about things like the ASMR exampe fun, but my model was more like "Some people think comfort/trust zone expansion itself is fun" rather than "Some people with already-wide comfort/trust zones find it fun to do things that other people would only do under the banner of comfort/trust zone expansion." Point taken!
Still, I feel like the list could be more representative to humanity in general by not using so many examples that only appeal to people who like things like circling, awkward social games, etc.
It's hard to pinpoint why exactly I think many people are highly turned off by this stuff, but I'm pretty sure (based on introspection) that it's not just fear of humiliation or not trusting other people in the room. There's something off-putting to me about the performativeness of it. Something like "If the only reason I'm doing it is because I'm following instructions, not because at least one of us actually likes it and the other person happily consents to it, it feels really weird."
(This actually feels somewhat related to why I don't like small talk -- but that probably can't be the full explanation because my model of most rationalists is that they probably don't like small talk.)
Just leaving a thank-you note here. This seems broadly right and was a thing I sort of knew but hadn't articulated well. I intend to refer to it in a future conversation with my partner.
1While reading this, I thought "Man, an autistic by default is going to ram through all this social mechanism like a train".
My experience disagrees. I'm probably (diagnosed by my therapist but not a doctor) autistic and I have both a pretty deep intuitive understanding of intimacy as described here, evidenced by writing stories that include it, and little to no bad experience with misunderstanding it - though mostly because I didn't have intimate relationships at all, I was aware enough of what was at stake to not make myself vulnerable.
What’s the main value proposition of romantic relationships?
Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some such, making you as a reader just feel sad and/or enraged. That’s not what this post is about.
So let me start with some more constructive motivations…
First Motivation: Noticing When The Thing Is Missing
I had a 10-year relationship. It had its ups and downs, but it was overall negative for me. And I now think a big part of the problem with that relationship was that it did not have the part which contributes most of the value in most relationships. But I did not know that at the time. Recently, I tried asking people where most of the value in their relationships came from, got an answer, and thought “Wait, that’s supposed to be the big value prop? Not just a marginal value prop along with many others? Well shit, I was indeed largely missing that part!”.
It is not necessarily obvious when one’s own relationships are missing The Thing, if you don’t already have a sense of where most of the value is supposed to come from.
Second Motivation: Selecting For and Cultivating The Thing
Even people who are in great relationships are usually not able to articulate The Thing very well. Some people actively want The Thing to be mysterious; I would advise such people to read Joy In The Merely Real and then return to this post. Others just find it hard to articulate because, well, accurately Naming abstract things is hard.
But if we can point directly at The Thing, then we can optimize for it more directly. When dating, for instance, we can try to induce The Thing with prospective partners quickly, rather than just relying on luck. Or in established relationships, if we understand what The Thing is, we can better nourish it and get more of it. And since The Thing is typically the biggest value proposition, that can hopefully make our relationships - and our lives - a lot better.
So what the heck is The Thing?
Some Pointers To The Thing
Let’s start with a raw quote. When I asked David, here’s how he explained The Thing:
I want to zoom in on that “sharing secrets” part first. Not because it’s a bulk of the value in its own right, but because it will sound very familiar if you know about how social psychologists study relationships.
How To Manufacture Relationships In The Lab
Here’s Claude on the subject[1]:
Back in college, my social psych professor called this sort of thing “manufacturing relationships in the lab”. From the sound of it, the method was sufficiently thoroughly established that social psychologists would use it as a tool in broader experiment designs - e.g. they’d use a “fast friends” procedure to induce a close relationship, and then their actual experiment would involve posing a challenge to the newly bonded pair, or having them go through some other exercise together, or ….
So apparently something in the vicinity of secret-sharing or self-disclosure is basically sufficient to make people feel close. Secret-sharing or self-disclosure probably isn’t exactly The Thing in its own right, but it’s in the right cluster.
Now let’s bookmark that idea, and come at things from another angle.
Ace Aro Relationships
People-who-talk-about-relationships-professionally often distinguish between sexual, romantic, and intimate aspects. “Sexual”, in this context, means what it sounds like - i.e. the physical stuff. “Romantic” also means what it sounds like - i.e. the feeling of limerence and the cute couple stuff. “Intimate” does not mean what it sounds like; people-who-talk-about-relationships-professionally use the term “intimate” in a confusing non-standard way.
Here’s Claude again to explain:
Emotional closeness. Vulnerability. Trust. Sharing personal thoughts, fears, and dreams. Feeling seen and understood. Sure sounds like the same cluster as secret-sharing, huh?
An interesting observation: asexuals and aromantics are both a thing, and common wisdom is that asexual aromantics can have healthy fulfilling relationships[2]. Intimate relationships, presumably, without sex or romance. These are typically described as companionate, like a “best friend” relationship. And indeed, people told me that the main value prop of relationships is the same kind of thing you see between childhood best friends.
On the flip side… if asexuals and aromantics are each a thing, why aren’t a-intimates a thing? Where are the healthy relationships with people who just don’t particularly form intimate connections? Well, insofar as this annoyingly non-standard usage of “intimacy” points at the main value proposition of relationships (or at least a necessary component of the main value prop)... a-intimate relationships just wouldn’t work right? Like, they’d be missing The Thing which is supposed to give relationships most of their value. So it would make sense to not have a term for a-intimate relationships, whereas we do have terms for asexual and aromantic relationships. The “intimacy” is supposed to be, like, the central defining feature of a good relationship; without it, one just doesn’t have much of a relationship at all.
… Unfortunately, “intimate” is still a terrible name for the thing we’re trying to gesture at here, because it does not match standard usage very well. So when I need a short handle, I’m instead going to use “willingness to be vulnerable”. But before we go throwing around an overcompressed label, let’s spell out what we mean by “willingness to be vulnerable” in more depth.
(And to be clear: I do not quite think that willingness to be vulnerable is the whole Thing we’re after in its own right. Rather, it’s a roughly-necessary-and-sufficient generator of The Thing. The rest of The Thing tends to naturally unfold when willingness to be vulnerable is present. But more on that later.)
Some Pointers To “Willingness to Be Vulnerable”
As this post was coming together, Duncan fortuitously dropped a List of Truths and Dares which is pretty directly designed around willingness to be vulnerable, in exactly the sense we’re interested in here. Here is his list; consider it a definition-by-examples of willingness to be vulnerable:
Unfolding The Thing
The Thing we’re after - the main value proposition of relationships - isn’t willingness to be vulnerable itself. Rather, it’s a bunch of nice things which follow from or are unbottlenecked by willingness to be vulnerable. And (I claim) those nice things tend to form one natural cluster in practice, to all be highly correlated with each other, because they’re all unbottlenecked by willingness to be vulnerable.
I’ll talk about a few broad categories, but this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list. Just gesturing at the cluster, some of which might not be obvious if you’re anchored to other parts of the cluster.
Play
You know that thing where young cats, or bears, or whatever, will fight each other but with their claws sheathed and never biting too hard? That’s the instinct for play, an instinct which humans apparently share with lots of other animals.
And if you imagine two young bears fighting with their claws sheathed… willingness to be vulnerable is a necessary precondition for that play. If either bear expects the other to whip out the claws, or to bite for real, then the playing doesn’t work. An inherent part of play is that we let down our metaphorical shields. Even when play-fighting, we play like we’re not actually threatened. When a threat becomes serious, the fighting ceases to be playful.
And this doesn’t just apply to play fighting. Consider the “yes, and” rule in improv: whatever crazy things other people introduce to the scene, you don’t contradict them, you add to them. You say “yes, and” rather than “no”. This is a load-bearing part which makes people feel safer being playful! If people expect their craziest takes to be shot down, or even just expect to be shot down if their idea isn’t quite “right”, then people will not open up their weird and crazy stuff. And improv is all about throwing out that weird and crazy stuff.
Or… a couple years ago, I had a nerf gun fight with my brother, which gradually escalated until it involved an air compressor and a ten foot PVC pipe. Fun times. In order for that to work, we both had to feel like we weren’t in any real danger from a nerf dart flying out of that pipe. And we also both had to feel like we weren’t in any danger of the other person suddenly feeling unsafe and getting angry about being attacked. There needed to be a “willingness to be vulnerable” both to a little physical danger (from the risk of being hit in the eye or something), and a little social danger (from the risk of the other person getting angry about being attacked).
I think for a lot of people (myself included!) play is one of the main ways that willingness to be vulnerable cashes out to actual value. But it definitely seems like people vary a lot on this axis.
Emotional Support
Maybe you feel like shit, you want to cry or rant, but around most people you feel like you need to keep up a positive mask. You’re worried that if you seem sad or angry too often, people won’t want to spend time around you. Dropping the mask requires willingness to be vulnerable. It requires feeling safe and secure, feeling that the people around won’t abandon you because you’re a downer too often.
What you want is for someone to hold you while you cry, or listen to your rant, and empathize. You want to be seen, and reassured that someone else is still there for you.
And of course dropping the mask is necessary for the people around to provide the emotional support you’re craving.
This is another thing which sure seems like one of the main ways that willingness to be vulnerable cashes out to actual value, though again it’s an axis on which people vary a lot.
And on the flip side of emotional support demand, some people want to supply emotional support. People want to help in that way, to feel more connected.
A Tiny High-Trust Community
There are practical benefits to a partner and I having keys to each others’ apartments. It becomes easy to drop things off or pick things up even when the other isn’t home, or feed the cat when she’s on a trip, or arrange fun surprises, or be able to drop in for a cuddle without the other having to get out of bed to open the door. Everyday friction is lowered.
Similarly, it saves a lot of work to not bother tracking who’s paid how much for what. It’s also nice emotionally, to just be in an abundance mindset (assuming one in fact has money abundant relative to everyday expenses).
It’s nice to be able to just be honest about things, without worrying that a partner will blow up in anger or break down crying or go cold and close off. It’s easier, cognitively and emotionally, to just not have to track which things need to be concealed. It’s easier to not need to walk on eggshells.
It’s convenient to share various possessions. Even living next door is enough to share a vacuum, or borrow a rice cooker. Cohabitating of course turns the sharing potential up to 11.
… and that all requires willingness to be vulnerable. Giving a partner a key to my apartment literally allows them to circumvent the main physical defenses of my property. Sharing things or not tracking expenses opens the door to free riding. Honesty risks unhappy responses. All of these are forms of vulnerability.
People talk about “high trust vs low trust communities” - communities where the default assumption is that everyone is out to get everyone else, vs communities where the default assumption is that most people are not out to get most other people. Communities where everyone locks their doors, vs communities where people leave their doors unlocked. (I have lived in both of these.) With a two-person relationship or a few-person relationship, that same kind of trust can be turned up much higher.
Communication
Here are a few specific things which require willingness to be vulnerable:
In general, it very often feels vulnerable to reveal important parts of your desires, needs, values, goals, dreams, etc. Insofar as humans can be said to have a utility function, it feels vulnerable to reveal one’s utility function. After all, if someone knows what's most important to you, they also know what would hurt the most to lose.
… but if two people want to help each other, create value for each other, make each other happier or more fulfilled, then that’s exactly the sort of thing which is most important to communicate! The things my partner wants, or the things which hurt me, or my dreams… these are the things which are most important for my partner to know, in order for my partner to make my life much better.
On the flip side, if one or both people aren’t comfortable opening up about such things, that can become a bottleneck to solving problems. If I’m doing something which is hurting my partner, but my partner isn’t comfortable telling me, then how will it ever get solved? If I want something really important from my partner, but I’m not comfortable asking them or telling them that I need it, then how will they know that it’s especially important to provide?
Looking at my own 10-year relationship, this is the part which feels most bottleneck-y, the part which feels like it blocked the most value. It felt like I always walked on eggshells around her. Like, I couldn’t speak my actual thoughts about her or her behavior without potentially hurting her. And yes, sometimes that kind of hurt can be healthy, but mostly I expect that she’d react by lashing out or denying or just crying a lot, not by growing stronger.
… and that’s very normal for me in most social situations most of the time. I basically always try to conceal my actual opinion of the person I’m talking to, basically always try to dissociate from my actual feelings about the person I’m talking to, because I don’t want to hurt them.
But there are people for whom that’s not the case, even people who I don’t hold in unusually high regard. Ronny Fernandez springs to mind as an example. Around Ronny, I feel more relaxed, more open. I can just say the things I actually think. Ronny generally accepts the actual reality of who he is and isn’t, so I can just speak my actual thoughts about him and he’ll be fine.
And if I imagine a romantic relationship which incorporates that aspect of Ronny… yeah, that would open up a lot of potential value. Even keeping many of the other problems of my past 10-year relationship, fixing that one would make the other problems much more manageable, amplify many of the good parts, and unlock a lot of new positive value on top.
The Obvious Caveat
Willingness to be vulnerable does not go well when it is not actually safe to be vulnerable. Low trust societies and abusive relationships are both a thing. And it’s particularly tricky because making it safe for one’s partner to be vulnerable, in a whole slew of different ways, is a skill which has to be learned, even assuming both people intend well. Not everyone even wants that skill, not everyone who wants that skill has it at all, and people have learned it to different degrees of competency. And while there are core parts which generalize, there are importantly different subskills required to e.g. be a good emotional support partner vs a good play partner.
… but that’s all been said many times before. The only thing this essay might add is that those skills are particularly likely to be the main bottleneck to a higher-value relationship.
Summary
Claim: the main value proposition of intimate relationships is a cluster of benefits downstream of willingness to be vulnerable. Things like play, emotional support, sharing possessions, or comfort talking about one's deepest wants form a single coherent cluster in practice because they’re all mostly bottlenecked on people feeling safe to open up in some way. And that cluster is the defining feature of intimate relationships, it’s The Thing, it’s where the biggest chunk of value is supposed to be.
… and insofar as my understanding is wrong, hopefully half the internet will show up to correct me in its usual polite and constructive fashion.
I am usually annoyed by most quotation of LLM output in posts, but I endorse directly quoting them specifically in cases where one would otherwise e.g. quote from Wikipedia to explain some standard thing
Thank you to yams for the excellent suggestion that I should look at asexual relationships, in my hunt for the mysterious value proposition of relationships.