"Relationship Science"

Yesterday, I read The New York Times Magazine's feature on marriage.

In line with the thinking of my previous post about cities, the salient question for me is, What kind of a problem is a relationship?

With language reminiscent of that used in The Corrections (Franzen), Elizabeth Weil describes her marriage variously through the lens of economics, psychoanalysis and military strategy.

Economics:

[Marriage is] an environment of scarcity, it's "a barbaric competition over whose needs get met"; it's "two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one."

Psychoanalysis:

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir.

Military strategy/Politics:

...I began seeing Dan as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives.

Perhaps we'd been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. (emphases mine)

The problem to me seems to be that Weil approaches her marriage much as she would other facets of her life, that is, with the same industry and the same resources at her disposal. She says as much: "...I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseum, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this."

In regarding her role in her marriage as a "project," Weil tries to dissect her marriage and analyze it as she would other problems. She tests hypothesizes. She gives herself exercises and homework assignments. She appeals to expert advice: marriage counselors, sex therapists, psychoanalysts, relationship scientists. There is even mention in the article of a "Love Lab," where one purported expert claims 94 percent accuracy in predicting whether a married couple will last longer than six years.

Absurdity in my ears. Management consultants get assigned to "projects," not life partners. Being in a relationship is fundamentally a different kind of problem than a work project, an investment decision, a weight-loss plan or an international treaty. It is an area of life in which our maximizing tendencies come up against a wall and our typical modes of thinking meet their limits. Thinking otherwise can be of real detriment.

I think Weil's efforts to grow in her marriage are admirable. But something about the way she sets out to improve her marriage strikes me as deeply wrong. Something in my gut tells me that we need to draw upon a different set of resources when thinking about matters of the heart. As a culture, we have let the language of economics and politics infiltrate our thinking about relationships. We increasingly regard love as something that can be demystified with the right application of analytical tools. Despite our best efforts, relationships resist demystification, rightfully so in my mind.

What kind of a problem is a relationship? What are the implications of how we choose to answer that question?