Synergy

I forget our wedding anniversary, a while back. Totally spaced it. My wife had to (gently) remind me of it.

Stereotypical male, eh? Forgets the anniversary. Luckily, my wife is not the matching stereotypical female, and does not bring retribution into play. She knows that I value and try to celebrate our marriage every day, and doesn't lay a trip on me because I didn't make the connection with the date. (She also knows that I often have an only passing acquaintance with day and date, that if I am not at work with the date in front of me I might have to stop and think what month it is, that I have only a vague idea of when holidays fall, and that I have been known to overlook my own birthday. I deal in seasons, not markings on a calendar.)

Still, I should have twigged to it and made a small fuss. Our partnership is worth celebrating. Sorry, dear.

Thinking of our relationship makes me think about other couples I have known, and what it means to be part of a couple, and how so many societal expectations of couples are carried over from olden times. Being married is a balancing act, not only between the expectations and needs of two people, but between the couple and the expectations of society. The societal "rules" have to be taken into account. And they often have to be overcome.

Another "stereotypical male thing": when people ask how long we have been married, I have to stop and think about it for a while. But my wife often has to do the same thing, because we were together for years before we were married, and "how long have you been married?" is the same question as "how long have you been together?" if you consider the term 'married' by its truest definition of 'joined'. We were a couple, joined, long before the formality which said we were married.

But it's funny - even some people who knew us as a couple before we married starting treating us differently after we got the certificate, as if the ceremony and the piece of paper changed our relationship or who we were. Especially who we were as individuals, as though we could no longer operate independently, as though there had been a dependence shift and some diminution of ourselves.

This has always puzzled me, and I have made a point of watching how other couples interact, and how people treat couples. And I have concluded that many people work from definitions and labels, and once a label has been applied they pop in their expectation tape bearing that label. But those tapes often come from a collection which was handed to them from a previous age, and they have never questioned their content. "So-and-so are now a couple, so they should act in such-and-such a way." The tapes play out, like obsolete software which has never been revised.

There's a hierarchy of relationship, in sociology, which considers the pinnacle of interpersonal relationship as being "interdependence" - a state where the couple is balanced, serving each other's needs, strengths countering each other's weaknesses. I understand what the developers of this theory were trying to achieve. But even when it was presented to me I thought it did not go far enough, and now (more than 20 years later) I feel even more strongly that this is so. "Interdependence" is too close to "codependence", and I have seen enough codependence in others to last a lifetime. I think we should rather speak of "interindependence" as being the pinnacle for relationships in the modern age.

Interdependence is more of a functional consideration, but interindependence verges on the philosophical. To be interdependent is to recognize that each has roles and duties to fulfill in the relationship. But to be interindependent is to recognize that while you are each perfectly capable of being complete people on your own, you are happier and better off in your relationship with your partner. Interdependence smacks of neediness; interindependence implies a judicious choice.

The idea of interdependence arose from an earlier time, when marriage more typically occurred earlier and people did not so often live together before marriage. Too, the average age at time of first marriage has climbed; people have more time to develop themselves as individuals before they marry (or experiment with other relationships first). Thus, interdependence is a carryover from a paradigm which no longer exists. (If it ever existed at all - did anyone ever marry their highschool sweetheart right after graduation and live happily ever after, except in Ozzie-and-Harriet Land?)

People who come from the framework of interdependence are often confused and sometimes challenged by interindependence they witness. It is as though they signed away their individuality when they became part of a couple, and believe that others must inevitably do the same. And they often act as though those who retain their identity as an individual are Breaking The Law. These are the people who are often "joined at the hip" with their couple-other, who are seen without them only in narrowly-defined circumstances. (And even when the couple-other is not present, the tether joining their hips, though invisible, is so evident that one may trip over it.) These are also the people who, if they see a person in public without their couple-other, will often start whisperings that There Must Be Something Wrong.

What these people need (besides a heaping dose of mindyourownbusiness - I have nothing but contempt for busybodies, gossips, and rumormongers) is to be exposed to the concept of synergy:

The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined
effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

It is wonderfully romantic to speak of one's soul-mate, "the one who completes me", someone "without whom I am nothing". But the actuality is that I existed as a person, as a someone, before my marriage and without my partner, and could do so again. And that is true for my wife as well. We are both perfectly capable of being on our own, complete people who can deal with the world as such.

But we are both happier, and better off, and I think have a whole lot more fun, as part of a synergistic couple. Not driven together by feelings of incompleteness, but brought together by a desire to get more out of life than we can get by ourselves. And having someone who helps you experience life more fully, and helping someone else experience life more fully, is the secret ingredient which makes synergy more than simply the sum of the parts.