Why your relationships matter to our politics

When I was in grad school, I had the pleasure of getting to know a colleague who had an unusual marriage. She and her partner held political views that were 180 degrees opposite. They knew this when they got together, and they still got married. Given the current political climate in the US, you may wonder how they managed to sustain a healthy marriage with such different views of the world.

Although we think of relationships as separate from politics, modern relationships are more democratic. No longer do we have the rigid gender-based roles and rules that defined couples’ relationships in the past. Without these external structures, we need to be able to collaborate, negotiate, and communicate more skillfully than was necessary in the past.

It’s not your fault if you and your partner didn’t come to this party equipped for the adventure. Even in our supposedly democratic nation, we don’t teach these skills. People “fall in love” (with both partners and candidates for office!) and hope those rosy feelings (and the chemical high our bodies create) will carry them through years of the ups and downs of life. (Hint: it won't.)

Aside from school, we don’t learn much about healthy peer-to-peer relationships. If we’re lucky, we manage to develop a good friend group in school. A lot of us, however, struggle with that because we have no models at home on which to build healthy, lasting peer-to-peer relationships. We’re used to one-up one-down relationships: parent-child, teacher-student, boss-employee, but not so much relationships as equals.

If you think about it, our political relationships are also peer relationships. We elect people to office and they hold their position at the grace of those who selected them. It's a bit like a marriage. Both partners have to continue to choose each other for the relationship to continue.

Our relationships are the foundation of our civil society. In personal relationships and in civil discourse, we need to be able to:

•     Create sufficient shared meaning and understanding of events in order to go forward together. Our perception of reality is like the blind researchers and the elephant. One person has a hold of the leg, another the tail and so on. Different people perceive different parts of the "reality elephant". There is too much information for any individual to know the whole. Both healthy couples relationships and democracy require us to be open to learning about other parts of the elephant instead of insisting we have the whole beast.

•     Make and keep agreements. Keeping agreements build trust. We can relax and take our partner, or our political representatives, at their word. In the larger society, we have laws and customs, formal and informal agreements, that provide guardrails on individual’s behavior. We need this in our intimate relationships as well as our public sphere. Sadly at this moment in time, the checks and balances that served US society to prevent politicians worst impulses from being enacted are becoming increasingly eroded.

•     Work together towards shared goals. In an intimate relationship, not only must we make and keep agreements, we both must be able to articulate our individual needs and balance those fairly with the needs of the couple. This means we must learn to live in a "two-self system". The same is also true in our society. We must be able to create a sufficiently shared vision to move towards common beneficial goals. That means we need to care for the whole as well as the needs of our specific group.

We are current experiencing two very different visions of the “reality elephant” of our society. One vision is a nightmare dystopian tragedy where people are being slaughtered as they go to the grocery store and illegal aliens are murdering citizens right and left. Another vision is that society, like most couples’ relationships, is a work in process. It's not perfect, yet with agreements (laws) and processes (customs) in place, that allows us to participate in and shape the direction of our shared social world. If this was a marriage, which vision would you prefer to inhabit?

Finally, we need to have resilience and flexibility when things are difficult. Having a kind positive regard for both yourself and the other person is important to sustaining an intimate relationship or a society over time. Basic kindness and empathy are required to have a two-self system. This may be the most important because it takes effort to consistently maintain a positive view of our very human partner. Our brains are wired to sort for threat, so we veer to the negative if not corrected. The stories we create about one another shape both our personal relationships and our larger social world. This is true in our political realm as well. Like the couple I mentioned at the start of this article, a deep respect for the integrity and well-meaning of the other person enabled them to work across the divide and create a vital and juicy relationship.