It may astonish you, but the overwhelming majority of the minutes and hours we spend in the company of our romantic partner do not take place in the bedroom.
This piece is not here to talk to you about sex. It is here to prepare you, intellectually, to build a relationship.
I think a relationship ought to be an upgraded friendship, and here are four reasons why.
One. There is no real connection between the quality of a couple's sex life and how happy that couple is.
Not none at all, and I am not recommending indifference to it. But it is a far weaker predictor than almost anybody expects, and it is nowhere near strong enough to carry the weight people place on it when deciding whether to stay.
Two. A contract of friendship lets you bring out your better sides.
Friendship operates on a default of goodwill that nobody has to declare. That default makes it easy and unstressful to produce the more generous, more invested and frankly more attractive versions of yourself — and it is then a great deal easier to love you.
Three. In a good relationship, as in a friendship, you do a lot of things together.
A relationship is supposed to be a site of activity. Not only of words. Incidentally, most people who believe that our main problem is communication are probably mistaken.
Good friends who meet, meet in order to do something. The upgrade a relationship offers over a friendship is that the shared doing is aimed at joint projects of larger scope and greater meaning over the long term — buying a house, having a child, getting a business off the ground.
Four. If you want a relationship, do not think about orgasms. Think about the electricity bill.
If the previous clause dealt with the large things, this last one is devoted to the real glue: the small, grey, daily things.
If you are over thirty-five and married, let me make a wild guess about your life. The number of people you have shared an electricity bill with is significantly lower than the number of people you have been to bed with.
That is not a joke about domesticity. It is the actual measure. The rare and difficult thing — the thing that almost nobody has done more than a handful of times — is the administration of an ordinary shared life. That is the scarce commodity, and we have somehow arranged our entire romantic imagination around the abundant one.