My wife is my best friend. She's the most incredibly complex and interesting individual I know, and I can say that with certainty because she's the only person on the planet I've cared enough to spend almost a decade trying to learn.
Our one year anniversary of our marriage passed early last month and I thought it would be a good idea to offer a narrative of what marriage looks like from the inside.
It's funny to think of the term newlywed as applying to myself. I've spent the majority of my adult life with Oge. So after almost a decade of trying to get to know someone, "new" doesn't seem to fit the bill.
Some things are absolutely new though. The home we live in, the rings we wear, and the commitments we made to each other at the altar all feel super recent, but they reflect a more long term understanding that we've been building for years.
One of my favorite learnings in this first year came during a discussion with other married couples. The open question of the day was "If you had to match an educational level to your understanding of your partner, what degree would you say you have?". Do you have your high school diploma in Ogenomics? What about a bachelors in Ogenometry? Truly, could you say you have a doctorate in Ogelosiphy? I know call me corny.
And while the point isn't to nail the exact degree perfectly, it does offer an interesting lens in thinking about how much you know about your partner. I probably got my high school diploma in the first 2 years of our relationship. (I like to think I was gifted and talented). To graduate from high school, you need both a solid foundation of general principles, plus the ability to apply those principles in very clear and deterministic ways. The basic principle is that she loves a clean environment. The application meant that I would clean before she arrived.
But as we all know, high school can be somewhat of a terminal educational point. Sufficient enough to begin to join the workforce, but insufficient for gaining access to some of the more prestigious and "high value" areas of the economy. So what did it look like to get my bachelors?
It started with acknowledging the unknown.
Relationships, much like the early days of college are about the constant tension between exploration and exploitation.
By exploration, I simply mean the act of trying different things. Going on dates, playing games together, asking all kinds of questions, and anything else that allows you to see a different angle to the individual in front of you. By exploitation, I mean doubling down on some set of experiences in a way that is more intentional and less surface level. Listening to an album together and intentionally looking for artists of the same genre to share. Watching a show together, doing "research" on reddit to find out what the community thinks about your favorite characters. Going back to the same restaurant over and over again with the goal of eating the entire menu.
In college, you need to see enough of the way things work in different disciplines, so that you can make an educated guess about what thing to pursue. Similarly in relationships, you need to spend enough time with your partner trying different ways of being, before finding the ones that you'll ultimately use to carry your relationship forward through the years.
These two ways of working are often at odds though. If you spend too much time exploring, you never get an opportunity to exploit the areas of your relationship that bring the two of you the most joy. Spend too much time exploiting, and you risk missing out on some set of experiences that could make your relationship more fruitful.
It's a balance.
To be clear, this analogy isn't perfect, and I think the educational narrative applied to relationships breaks in two distinct ways. The first is that it assumes completion, for a process that will last a lifetime. The second, is that our current educational system assumes specialization, while the ultimate goal is generalization of understanding in a partner.
As you climb the ranks in education, the set of problems you're asked to solve get deeper, but often more narrow in scope. That's intentional because often, in order to make progress in any meaningful sense, you often need to look in small corners others haven't. And while the same is true in some sense in a relationship, the ultimate goal is to find the connection between solutions to different problems you've solved in the past in such a way that it gives you a more general understanding of who your partner really is. My PhD (if i'm ever lucky enough to be awarded one) won't come from being able to tell you her exact ice cream order. It won't come from being able to tell you the history of her ice cream consumption history. It won't even come from being able to tell you about the change over time of her ice cream eating preferences while considering seasonal factors like weather, or temperament. Instead, it might come from being able to draw conclusions about her current mood based on which ice cream she orders today, while also being able to make predictions about her future interests based on the last book she read.
What's nice about this framing is that it always leaves room for better. In fact, I think this is what people mean when they say that marriage has no end. Humans have such complex histories. The story is constantly being written in real time. Your job is to find the common links between those events that helps craft the right narrative of your partner. And at the same time, you should be learning them well enough to retell the most interesting parts over and over again with increasing color.
And really, another way to view this dynamic is that one leads to another. In other words, the relationship between exploration and exploitation is cyclical.
So maybe that explains why this first year of marriage has felt so much like what we've always done. We're in a season of exploitation. We've found what works and we're following the rabbit holes that these experiences lead us down.
But as time goes on, I won't be able to start writing my PhD thesis "On all things Oge" until we've had a chance to see what "new" angles exist. But that's a topic we'll explore at some other time.