My family never liked "we enjoyed it" couples, who used the royal "we" as if their partnership were a fiefdom.
For instance, the husband who says, “Oh, we liked it,” when asked about the show.
My siblings and I had to wait until one of these couples arrived on the front walk before we started eating.
I've been teased a lot lately.
Or myself and my husband, David, who have occasionally spoken like the king and queen of Genovia in our half-decade partnership.
"We liked it" has identity issues.
No matter how fantastic your relationship is, you probably disagree sometimes.
As a group, you either don't know what your spouse believes or are bragging about how much you're alike.
Many factors have changed my mind in recent years.
Few are as profound as my U-turn on relationships, identity, and the "we" with all its implications.
American secular society prioritizes self-fulfillment.
By the 1960s and '70s, that emphasis was everywhere, and it's now hard to make a public case without citing one's own happiness.
We've lost the romantic ideal of marriage by perceiving couplehood as a means for individual self-fulfillment.
Every relationship has a rut.
In our early years, David and I argued individually, whether about where we would reside or the filthy dishes growing skins in the sink.
I especially saw our debates as zero-sum.
I won East Coast, David West Coast.
“We're on the same team!” David would shout in rage during these years.
Theoretically, I agreed.
(Sounds wonderful.)
That theory didn't affect my view of couplehood.
I compared relationships to markets.
Loving couples display care, service, and thoughtfulness, but each person must look out for her own interests.
Especially—cue my mother's voice—the woman.
This is unromantic.
In a "pure connection," as British sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote in the 1990s, it makes sense.
A genuine relationship exists just as long as it meets both parties' requirements.
You can leave if your requirements aren't met or the tradeoffs are too much.
Compare this to the romantic ideal of finding your soul mate and vowing to love them for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Divorce narratives begin where the pure relationship model ends.
The educated, employed lady narrator explains why she divorced.
The decision appears unrelated to abuse, infidelity, money, or children.
Not even love.
The relationship was "destroying my spirit," writes Lara Bazelon.
“How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its core, my soul, my mind—had I created around my husband?” wonders Honor Jones in another.
“Who am I without him?”
In these stories, marriage and childbirth colonize the woman's identity.
These stories can be read as feminist, empowered divorces.
(Their narrators think so.)
This divorce narrative and the emergence of the pure relationship are both symptoms of a society that is extremely wary of, even allergic to, any style of interaction that undermines the individual.
Self is America's last holy cow.
Self-care is good.
Check what threatens the self—marriage, motherhood, friendship, or family.
Twins—especially identical twins—offer an intriguing contrast.
Their similarity challenges our concern with identity.
Alessandra Piontelli's book "Twins in the World" includes psychologists' twin parenting tips.
The list recommends sleeping in separate rooms, dressing differently, and never calling identical twins twins. The sociologists Florence Chiew and Ashley Barnwell say that allowing twins to consider themselves as a duo is a "dangerous intimacy" that robs them of their individuality in a society that values individuality.
My spouse is twin.
Twins.
Contrary to psychological advice, a twin whose identity is twinness.
David and his brother shared classes, group projects, and argument partners throughout childhood and adolescence.
They competed, but largely for their two-person squad.
Their high school anecdotes are the best of their cooperation.
Scott Stanley describes "we-ness" as a profound connection that strengthens shared identity.
If you feel we-ness, your partner's happiness and sadness become yours.
Your ambitions altered too. “A noncompetitive partnership that may optimize joint outcomes” replaces “an exchange market where two individuals were competitors,” he says.
Life is now about contributing to the team. My husband learnt early how to foster individualism, common identity, and a shared future.
(We joke that David envisions himself sitting on a porch with me and his twin in his dotage.
It's serious. He grasps something I still struggle to comprehend: that loving someone for better or worse, for all your days, requires a certain type of sacrificing of the "I" for the sake of the "us."
It means letting someone else shape our identity and values. Yes, overidentification can lead to codependence.
Overidentification and losing one's individual aspirations in the couple's new future are risks.
Fear of this extreme often leads to overcorrection in the opposite way, toward solitude, complete independence, and contingency.
When did David and I become a "we"?
No enlightenment, ego death, or final knowledge that the borders between us are gone occurred.
We-ness is intermittent, living in perpetual confrontation with our separate I's—especially mine—sometimes subservient to them, sometimes elevated above them.
David believes that marriage caused a psychological buy-in.
Our "we" is rather a collection of tiny moments.
The table tilts, you enter another frame, and everything seems the same but different.
Sacrifice language is illogical.
Self-sacrifice is impossible.
You care about his happiness because of him.
Your delight.
Porous boundaries don't dissolve....
