About two weeks after we went on our first “official” date, Haley asked if she could call herself my girlfriend. I thought that was moving a bit quick, but decided fuck it, might as well get the show on the road, and replied, “You can. In fact, I encourage it”.
A month later, she wanted to start having sex, but I hadn’t really thought about if I was ready yet. Heck, the first time I had ever grabbed a boob was just a month before. But then I thought about it for a bit and realized I didn’t really need much persuasion.
Haley has always been great at driving our relationship, proactively pushing us along towards our goals. We both wanted to see if we had long-term potential together as well as connect physically and emotionally, and instead of being passive and letting things take longer than they needed, we dove right in. Of course, I’m not suggesting rushing things before you are ready, but I see no reason to just stand around waiting for the constellations to align.
I tell how I needed my own advice on driving my relationship
As time passed and we got more comfortable with each other, we started letting parts of our relationship slip a little, and stopped pushing as much. It may have just been the honeymoon period after we started dating, or too much really good sex, or watching too many TV shows and movies, but at some point we realized that we had stopped growing together and moving forward as much as we felt like we had in the beginning of our relationship. Some form of this is inevitable and happens to all couples —and it is important to work hard to counteract it. I have found that being too comfortable can really start to kill a relationship. Because in my experience, being too comfortable makes you complacent, predictable, and worst of all, passive.
I think passiveness is the most dangerous attitude for the health of a relationship. In her book The Defining Decade, Dr. Meg Jay talks about how many of her patients are struggling in their thirties because they let things slide in their twenties, assuming they had all kinds of time to figure life out.
A woman stays with a total loser of a guy for years because sometimes he does something nice, and it is easy and comfortable even though he can be a total dick to her. She then suddenly realizes that she wants a family and panics because he is definitely not the man to have it with. A guy wants a committed relationship but is scared to try, so he sleeps around with numerous women and never tries to emotionally connect with them.
How to avoid a slow, painful death to your relationship
Once you’ve let something slide downhill, you have to push it back uphill just to get back to where you were. In her incredible book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown warns against disengagement, which is born from being passive. She writes, “The first form of trust betrayal is disengagement — we stop paying attention, caring, investing our time, showing that we are there to someone.”
Shit starts to go wrong really fast if you don’t stay on top of it. Being passive breeds being reactive rather than proactive.
I know it sounds like I’m some kind of hard-ass football coach or body-builder who is wearing a blood, sweat, and tears shirt. But what I’ve come to realize is that being passive and not making decisions or actions is just as much of a decision as being active and going out and getting shit done.
Being passive is when I don’t say the first words to start a difficult conversation with Haley because I want to avoid feeling sad. Being passive is enjoying how things are now at the expense of not creating an even better future. Of course it’s a balance — I don’t condone getting up at 4 a.m. to work on your relationship like a body-builder hitting the gym for 5 hours. But I’ve basically never found myself being too proactive, or making sure that Haley and I are too on the same page.
And I have learned to not be too passive the hard way.
I once did every one of the things I just warned not to do, and it sucked
A little less than a year into dating, Haley’s and my separate leases were both expiring, and we started discussing the possibility of living together. Haley was really pushing for it, as we had been more or less spending most all of our time together by the end of my senior year of college. It was very convenient to sleep at the same address and really easy to spend time together when living under the same roof.
I hemmed and hawed at the idea for a while, and truthfully, I was scared to let Haley down and have a tough conversation about what that would actually mean to both of us. So I gave her a generally positive impression about the idea of living together, and put off making a commitment for a few days. And then a few weeks. And then a few months.
Had I simply manned up, started a conversation, and driven our growth, I could have avoided the ensuing world of hurt. The thing that finally ended my passiveness and procrastination was that my remarkable parents took me out to dinner, sat me down, and asked about my living arrangement plans for the next year. A few hours of talking later, I realized two things: I needed to talk to Haley about what it would really mean to both of us relationship-wise to live together, and that I had already messed up in a big way.
The week that Haley and I had a real conversation about living together was probably the worst week of our relationship. We made mistakes left and right. We handled our emotions poorly. We had collectively failed to communicate well about living together for months, and we paid the price. Haley expressed that for her, living together would feel like a step towards marriage and another level of commitment to a future together. For me, living together was more about convenience and opportunity to grow — but not a deeper commitment and far less of a significant step than Haley felt like it was. By the end of the week we had wisely decided that we should wait to live together until we were at the same level of commitment.
A procrastinator admits that it feels a lot better when he doesn’t procrastinate
Remember that book The Defining Decade I talked about earlier? Apparently we lived out an extremely common mistake that people in their early twenties make, as explained by Dr. Jay in her work that I read a few months too late.
The one thing we did handle well coming out of this debacle was to make sure we continuously worked to make damn sure we never screwed up that badly again.
The really good news is that like everything else in your relationship, the more you practice, the easier it gets, and the better at it you will be. And then being proactive becomes a habit, and it stops feeling like nearly as much work as it once did.
Having the hard conversations before it’s too late still can suck, but suddenly the conversation is the hardest part. There is no blow up or fight later about the thing you never talked about, because it is already hashed out. If I could have a conversation before shit hits the fan, or in the midst/after when we’re trying to pick up the pieces, I’d sure as hell prefer to have it before.
Study habits gained from large monetary investments in my education make life a lot easier
It’s a lot like studying for a test in college. I spent the first 3 years cramming the night before, but then once I finally got smart and distributed my studying over the week before the test, things went a lot more smoothly and I spent less time overall on studying.
Haley and I will often bring up a topic before it becomes a problem and spend some time discussing our initial feelings about it. Then a week or two later we will come back to it, having thought more about it on our own and better understanding how we feel about it. Because we already laid the foundation for the conversation, it is incredibly easy to come back to the topic and discuss it productively.
My final thoughts on driving the relationship are that it has to be a joint effort by both of you in the relationship. You need to be driving towards the same goals and with a similar intensity. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do it in the same way or in the same areas. Haley and I certainly don’t — we try to play to our strengths. Haley is great at driving our emotional and physical connection. She is always wanting to share our feelings and always wanting to have sex with me. (What a chore.) I, on the other hand, tend to drive our intellectual connection and challenge us to grow our independence.
We both naturally drive different, important parts of our relationship, and by being proactive, we stagnate less and less often.