This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Married, with children
As anyone with a couple of young kids knows, marital intimacy is not something that can always be taken for granted. It’s not uncommon for parents to go months on end without getting it on.
Frankly, I think this is one of the main things that scares couples away from having kids to begin with.
Which sucks! Because it doesn’t have to be this way. You just have to do a bit more planning, and maybe make a few sacrifices (like, say just two episodes of The Wire on Thursday night, instead of three).
Anyway, the other day I caught myself looking forward to a Very Special Evening with my wife. We had discussed it earlier that morning, and planned the day accordingly.
Then, the equivalent of a reminder notification popped up in my brain. “Careful,” it said. “Don’t set yourself up for disappointment.”
Who put that there? Well, past experience, obviously. Looking forward to getting laid, something comes up, it doesn’t happen. Queue the frustration, maybe a little resentment, depending on the circumstance.
Solution? Don’t look forward to it so much. “Careful!”
But wait, I thought. Is this a helpful reminder? Certainly my objective is to be able to roll with the punches, exercise radical acceptance, all that. But is that the same thing as lowering expectations to avoid disappointment?
Isn’t that, I don’t know, just another version of cynicism?
Suddenly, I realized how vulnerable it felt to allow myself to look forward to something like this. Even after more than ten years of marriage (with, I’m going to brag here, a not terrible sex life), wanting sex is inherently a vulnerable position.
If ever there was a way to expose the soft underbelly of my emotional equanimity, it’s the anticipation of physical intimacy with my wife, despite the full knowledge than any number of things could keep it from happening.
So, naturally, there’s a temptation to avoid this completely. To mitigate expectations. To protect myself from potential disappointment.
But the flaw in this strategy is the assumption that disappointment is bad. It’s not!
Put another way, it’s good to get your hopes up, actually, because one of two things is going to happen — things will go the way you hope, which feels great! Or they won’t, which is disappointing.
And disappointment is an opportunity to practice resilience and deepen emotional elasticity.
One of the best things you can do for a kid is to let them confront disappointment and learn that they can survive it. And yet, as we get older, we become more and more sophisticated in our tactics to avoid the feeling ourselves.
So I spent the day freely looking forward to the evening we had planned, and guess what.
I’m not telling. Sorry to disappoint you.
Click at least one of these or else…
…termites will eat all the wooden chairs in your house, and you won’t know it until you try to sit down.
Go ahead and get your hopes up