Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Building and Entertaining Couples, published by Jacob Falkovich on February 22, 2023 on LessWrong.

Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.

A friend told me recently that she’s looking for a husband to settle have kids, but she’s facing a problem: most of the men she goes on dates with fail to excite her intellectually in the first hour of conversation. They’re not totally boring — my friend is interesting enough to meet interesting men — but if she’s going to settle down for life shouldn’t she wait for the most exhilarating guy she knows?

No, I don’t think she necessarily should. Especially not if her goal is to have the best husband to build a family with. And it’s not because interesting men make for bad fathers due to some law of conservation of husbandly quality. I think it’s couples who tend to be of one kind or another: a couple that builds together, or a couple that entertains each other.

Before giving more detail on those, it’s interesting that most people intuitively get it. It’s a rare Twitter poll that doesn’t have several people in the comments complaining that the given four choices don’t capture the full gamut of human experience, yet over 90% of respondents in a relationship picked one of the two choices.

I suspect that this dichotomy is much less salient for people not currently in a relationship. They often imagine their future partner being anything and everything for them, a questionable hope that I discussed at length before. But the longer people spend in a relationship the more it tends to become oriented towards one or another.

Characteristics

“Entertaining” couples measure the relationship by the quality of time spent together. The most important aspect of their partner is that their company is always better than being alone, and these couples spend more time together and do more fun things together like date nights and vacations. People in these relationships focus more on their appearance, humor, conversation skills, and sex. They prefer quick conflict resolution, agreeing to disagree, and make-up sex. These relationships work better for partners who share similar sensibilities and enjoy the same lifestyle and roles.

The quintessential examples of this are two high-powered career individualists, think Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The failure mode for “entertainment” relationships is lack of commitment leading to frequent breakups, as each partner chases the next exciting thing. The success mode is the party-throwing couple at the center of all their friends’ social life, never failing to delight everyone but mostly each other.

“Building” couples measure the relationship by the fruits of its enterprise, whether it’s happy children, a successful business, or a lovely house. They care about commitment and contribution first and foremost, and are happy knowing that their partner is committed and contributing even if they’re not in their immediate presence. People in these relationships focus on cultivating skills and long-term projects. They value reaching a consensus and hashing issues out thoroughly. These relationships can work for two very different people whose strengths and preferred roles cover for their partner, like a stay-at-home parent and a wage earner.

The failure mode for “building” couples is being stuck in boring drudgery, slowly building resentment without the courage to disrupt their routine. The successful exemplar is the couple whose house all their children’s friends want to have play dates and sleepovers in. These couples are often respected locally, almost never famous globally.

An Aside on Cucumbers and Grapes

There’s a concept in polyamory literature of “relationship cucumbers” and “relationship grapes” inspired by the famous video about monkeys and fairness. Cucumbers are the mundane day-to-day acts of ma...