Another part of being an adult is building relationships. When you’re a kid, you just sort of hang out with your parents’ friends’ kids, or the neighbors, or anyone who has a pool in their backyard. As you get older and your peer group diversifies, you start to make more concrete decisions about who you want to spend your time with, and why. By the time adulthood fully sets in, you’re embroiled in a host of complex relationships—many by choice, others… not so much.
Whether with a friend, family member, or romantic liaison, relationships fall into three categories:
Maintain
Improve
Dissolve
Maintaining or improving requires some effort. For example, if you’re meeting up with a buddy, leave your phone in your pocket. Live-tweeting your drinks date is distracting to both of you. If you’re on the phone with your grandmother, she shouldn’t have to hear Sirius XM playing in the background. Listen to her, not Howard Stern.
Single-tasking shows you care.
Of course, you can’t focus on or commit to anybody if you’re never available, which is why you have to prioritize seeing and talking to these folks in the first place.
We’ve discussed being “too busy” to “do everything,” and this is an excuse that is constantly leveled when we can’t manage to get together with friends as often as we might like.
It’s tough, for example, when you’re just out of college and flung halfway across the country (or the globe) from people you used to fall asleep on at parties. You’re starting a new life and suddenly have to worry about things like “jobs” and “rent” and you have neither the free time nor the credit card limit to be jaunting off to Norman, Oklahoma, to visit your old roommate who inexplicably decided to go to grad school there. You have Facebook, so you can overtly or covertly spy on each other (plus on the guy who nearly came between you sophomore year), and you still text a lot, but it’s not the same.
Alas, it doesn’t get any easier as you progress through your twenties, making new friends in a new city and at a new job, trying to fit them in too. Plus, if you have a significant other, his or her friends start encroaching on your nights and weekends like groupies on the Jonas brothers (mostly Nick, let’s be real). You might even like a lot of those people, but they don’t necessarily mix with your other friends, and then you and your paramour have to make difficult decisions about whose party to start with on Saturday night and where you want to end up—aka decide whose friends throw better parties. Relationships are hard.
After ten years of this, maybe in multiple cities and after multiple significant others, you’ve collected a few dozen more friends (and at least 200 Facebook friends), and now they’re all getting married on the same weekend. Fuuuuuck.
Fast-forward another ten years, and most of your friends have kids—maybe you do too—and somehow even getting together for dinner with people who live in the same town as you involves a strategy worthy of the Lord of Catan. Slowly but surely, you fall out of touch. What was your college roommate’s last name again? Miller?
Or maybe the “falling out of touch” happens once you take the last exit to Empty Nestville and realize it was all your kids’ soccer games and bar mitzvahs and graduations and weddings that were keeping you in touch with friends. Now you’re driving through unfamiliar territory with only a beat-up issue of AARP magazine as your guide.
It’s perfectly natural for some friendships to fall by the wayside, at any stage of life. The challenge is maintaining (or improving) the ones that are really important to you. The ones that are worth the distance, the scheduling difficulties, the new kind of parties that start at noon and by 3:00 PM your friend’s kid falls asleep on you.
The first step is to be honest with yourself about whether this friendship IS worth it. If not, I refer you to a different book entirely.* But if you decide it is, then you can set a goal to maintain or improve it, and lay out a strategy for doing so.
For example, when I’m writing to a strict deadline, my priorities shift from “hang out with friends” to “get work done.” I become a bit of a hermit, which is fine in shortish bursts, but I don’t want to let it get out of hand, because that’s how valued friends disappear from your life. It’s like celebrity couples who are always breaking up because the distance between their fancy film sets is too much for true love (and apparently, private planes) to overcome.
So, my strategy has been to make a running list—shocker, I know—of all the fine peeps I’ve been putting off since I started writing Get Your Shit Together. It’s the “People to See” entry in my AnyList app, under “Things We Should Probably Get Rid Of” and above “New Travel Toiletries.”
I did this not because I wouldn’t remember my friends’ names otherwise, but as a visual reminder that not only do I want to see them, I need to make the time for it (i.e., focus) as soon as I’m out of Deadline Mode. And then I commit to an interim “Hey, just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you and really looking forward to cocktails when I come up for air” email.
Who doesn’t like to get a nice email saying they’re being thought of? A one-line note can really reset the clock on “Maybe this person doesn’t value my friendship.”
One line. It takes very little focus and commitment to type a one-line email.
So is your friendship worth it, or not?
With family, things might be a little more complicated. Just a touch. A hint. A smidge.
Perhaps you have a sibling or parent whom you don’t feel (or want to feel) very close to, but for whatever reason, you do give a fuck about maintaining the relationship. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em—I totally get it. Well, presumably you perform maintenance on other shit all the time, right? Like brushing your teeth, taking allergy medication, or shaving your legs. These tasks don’t take long, and they contribute to your overall goals of remaining minty fresh, sneeze-free, and smooth like Santana.
In such cases, you could think of your relationship to your family member like you think of your relationship to your leg hair. You don’t want things to get all prickly, so every few days you take a razor to it for ten minutes (a light email or quick call), or once a month you visit a stern Polish lady who spends a half hour ripping it out from the follicles (Skype).
Then there are family members you simply don’t know very well, like faraway cousins or little kids. You may not give a fuck about attending a wedding in Nova Scotia (though you hear it’s beautiful) or sitting through a middle school production of Guys and Dolls, but you still feel it’s important to show, somehow, that you care.
Time to strategize, focus, and commit.
Want to honor your cousin Deborah’s nuptials? Decide on your budget, take ten minutes to peruse her online registry, and let your Amex do the talking. If Debbie doesn’t have a registry (or you don’t have a computer), nothing says “Congrats” like a nice Best Buy gift card.
Want to make your nephew’s day? Sending a “Break a leg” text (or even a Snapchat, if you have any idea what that is) would show you were thinking of him—and both of those take a lot less time and energy than keeping a straight face while watching a horde of tone-deaf twelve-year-olds perform “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.”
One thing I did not address in The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck was romantic relationships, and this omission becomes more glaring every time I get a Facebook message from a reader asking me how to stop giving a fuck about the stupid things her husband does.* Maybe I need to write The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck for Newlyweds and/or Couples Living in Sin, but for now you’re just going to have to get your shit together and make it work—if, that is, you want to maintain or improve your romantic union.
Did you know that the Chipmunks have girlfriends? The Chipettes. Frustratingly heteronormative, perhaps, but useful for the purposes of this extended metaphor.
As do any romantic partners, Alvin and Brittany, Simon and Jeanette, and Theodore and Eleanor have their ups and downs. It’s all pretty tame—these are cartoon chipmunks, after all—but sometimes they’re supersweet, and other times they’re plotting to beat each other’s asses in a hot-air balloon race around the world.
Tapping into your inner competitor is useful for obvious things like winning hot-air balloon races, but it can improve your love life, too. It’s true, and I speak from experience. (This is not to say that I would ever compete in an actual sport with my husband; if we got recruited for, say, doubles beach volleyball, we’d have to repair our marriage plus my sprained ankle long after I caused us to lose by virtue of being almost unfathomably uncoordinated.)
But I have found a different way to make competition—within a relationship—fun and rewarding. It’s all about being the best partner you can be, back and forth, in perpetuity. Like a relationship relay. Who can be nicer, more helpful, or more loving on any given day? Who can come up with the perfect gift or the perfectly timed surprise? In a competition like this, everybody wins! And not that kind of “everybody wins” like in kindergarten when teachers hand out blue ribbons for not pooping in the sandbox two days running.
Some days are better than others. I’m not always my best self, and neither is he, but the very fact that we have this ongoing rivalry that involves doing nice things for each other puts us way ahead of the game when times are tough. It’s hard to stay mad at someone who spontaneously rubs your feet twice a week.
(By the way, the general concept works wonders even if you’re the only one playing. Fewer foot rubs for you, though.)
Whether you’re in the puppy love stage or the golden years, injecting some healthy competition into your relationship is, well, healthy. And it bleeds into other aspects of your life. Suddenly taking out the trash is a favor you’re doing for your girlfriend, as opposed to an annoying chore. Isn’t that a nicer way to look at it? And the note she slipped inside your lunch put a smile on your face during the shittiest of workdays. (Why yes, your boss should suck a hard-boiled egg not unlike the ones used to make this sandwich.)
If your goal is happiness and harmony, just keep your keys, phone, and wallet in sight at all times.
Strategize: Devise ways to make your significant other feel good. Some of these could be extravagant—if/when you’re feeling flush—but most can and should be as simple as keeping an emergency pint of Ben & Jerry’s Bourbon Brown Butter in the freezer at all times. Or just a bottle of bourbon. Make a list and refer to it for inspiration as needed.
Focus: A small kindness worked in every day is better than one big “Ah, shit, I’ve been ignoring you” gift. (But those have their place too. See above: Some of these could be extravagant.)
Commitment: Say the words, do the deeds, and when in doubt, splurge on hugs.
Relationships need time and energy in order to thrive—this is not a package of sea monkeys you’re raising in an old mayonnaise jar. But if you put more of that time and energy into doing nice things for each other, you waste less on petty arguments and competitive sulking. They don’t give out trophies for that shit.
As I have demonstrated time and again, not giving a fuck goes a long way toward eliminating any number of people from your life. It’s definitely possible to passively dissolve a relationship by slowly starving it of interaction—no name-calling or disinheriting necessary.
Actively dissolving a relationship is another matter, though you still needn’t resort to name-calling. What you can resort to—or, rather, what you should embrace with the zeal of a thousand Bachelor contestants let loose in Tiffany’s—is getting your shit together to extricate yourself from a toxic or simply unwanted bond.
There are a million-and-seven reasons a relationship—whether romantic, platonic, or familial—can go south. Distance, betrayal, or simply chronic incompatibility. Wanting things the other person can’t or won’t give. One of you is a Trump supporter and the other one isn’t a fan of bigoted narcissists who do teeny-weeny fist bumps over the prospect of nuclear war. These things happen.
If they happen to YOU, then I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s going to be okay.
If the relationship is with someone with whom you thought you were going to spend your life (or at least every Christmas), the goal to dissolve it might be tough to set. Meeting it might be tough too, but there are ways to mitigate the level of toughness, and make things easier on yourself. Like, it’s definitely going to hurt when you get that IUD put in, but swallowing four Advil beforehand and arranging to take the rest of the day off from work will help. You just gotta think ahead or, hmmmm… what’s that word…
Strategize!
What does getting out of this relationship look like? After the first difficult conversation, how many logistics will there be between you and never dealing with this person again—or in arranging the coparenting of your children or cats? Are you going to have to pack your things and go, or do you just never have to go anywhere at all, i.e., to their house for the holidays?
I don’t mean to treat the dissolution of a lifelong or even five-year-long relationship as some kind of petty nuisance. That’s not fair to you, or your Republican uncle. But summoning my best Scarlett O’Hara, I do declare that however complex the situation is, it can always be broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Next, set yourself a time frame and focus on each chunk as it comes. Then, commit.
Or decommit, as the case may be.
Oh, and here’s a novel idea: How about not committing at all (to a romantic relationship)? That’s okay too! You can be hot shit all by yourself, no matter what big old box of “should” your family, friends, or society in general may be trying to stuff you into. Being single is fine. Dating around is fine. YOU CAN EVEN ALTERNATE. And while I’m at it, here’s a list of other stuff you don’t have to do just because other people think you should:
Be heterosexual
Be gender-conforming
Get married
Register for monogrammed towels
Have 2.5 children
Own a house
Get rid of your Hotmail address
You should, however, take my advice. All of it. No exceptions.