Enjoy your friends – love them riotously – but keep your eye on the horizon: They are navigating the same shoals as you, and you should be learning from their successes.
In the West we celebrate outliers – people who betray the family paradigm like DaVinci – and even what we celebrate about normal family men is very far removed from their families. Accordingly, while books written prior to Reagan’s catastrophic initiation of no-fault divorce will assume normal, healthy families, good luck catching sight of them: It’s been on no-one’s radar for centuries.
I’m a big fan of therapy couples. Not “Couples’ Therapy” – commie crap confabulated by crazy Karens – but, rather, making a habit of objectively observing other people’s marriages and families – taking account of what they’re getting wrong, of course, but making special note of everything they seem to be doing better than y’all have done, so far.
That’s graduated sociopathy – “We’re enjoying our time together, but we’re both also secretly studying you to perfect our own family’s praxis” – but I don’t know what to say about that; it’s what we all do all the time, but with a shared, acknowledged agenda and with your eyes wide open.
Couples dating is dating and is therefore inherently dishonest. If you must, longer is better – the farmer’s market, a day at the beach – because masks will have had time to slip. Accordingly, weekend visits are even better: You want to see your therapy couples living their real lives as their true selves, so you need time for the make-up to wear off.
We are what we do, not what we say we do, so by simple observation you discover who people really are, how they choose to make their choices. You see their interactions, you hear their stories – taking note, thereby, of what does and does not matter to them – and you learn in time who they really are and how they really behave with each other.
You two discuss all this when? Never before the drive home, and never among others. Your marriage makes you a team – us before anyone, us against everything – but your family’s business is nobody else’s business. But you talk about what you saw and what you think it means, and that conversation alone will make your marriage stronger, with your vision of what makes a family work more aligned by the experience.
So: Rinse and repeat. Good families make good families better. When we had fathers at home, we had neighborhoods full of good families, each cheerfully competing with each other to be better at being families – better at raising great kids who would in their turn be even better at raising great kids. That used to be next door and across the street and everywhere. Now you have to go out and find it.
So do go out and find it. Bad marriages will set your teeth on edge, but they’re worth studying, anyway. But the good families will inspire and delight you – and bring you back for more. We live and die by theory, and practice is the best teacher, but there is nothing to keep you on the path of bliss like knowing what you love and loathe in other peoples’ families.
