On being married to Gena

A little over seven years ago, Gena and I were both at a conference, and her outbound flight was cancelled. I was hiding alone in my two-bed hotel room with an acute case of pink eye. She needed a place to crash before her flight the next morning.

Despite my highly contagious, overtly diseased visage, Gena deigned to stay in the other bed. We stayed up all night talking—about work, about people we both knew, about psychology and philosophy. A few months later we were dating, and a year and change later we were married.

This March marks our sixth wedding anniversary. Our marriage not infrequently leaks onto Twitter. We both “Work in Public”, and also Parent in Public—we have two small children. Marriage in Public happens as a matter of course. Here follows a more considered, essay length treatment On Being Married to Gena, a circumstance as wonderful as it is rare.

There’s “good with people”, and then there’s Gena

In that all-night conversation, what most struck me were Gena’s deep insights about people. That initial impression has endured. I am often quite opinionated about people; I consider myself an astute judge of human character, motivations, and needs. Gena not infrequently disagrees with me on these fronts. She is almost always correct.

She’s in a league of her own. It’s not just that she has good judgment, though she does. It’s not just that she has great diagnostic and interventive instincts, though she does—she’s a stellar therapist. It’s not just that she genuinely loves people, though she absolutely does.

On top of all of that, Gena is attuned to the human condition, in the manner of a novelist. She is specially attuned to the elements of the human condition that bear on happiness, on greatness, on lust for life, on ambition. This attunement is the result of a mixture of lifelong interest, extensive and diverse formal education and clinical experience, and a generous splash of romantic folly that she was seemingly doused with in the womb.

Gena developed her tremendous empathy over decades while always centered on the grand, on ambition. That combination—a master therapist’s skill and interest in the subtleties of people, and a romantic’s captivation by human ambition—makes her insights unique, and uniquely accurate. It turns out that human grandeur in the spirit of the 19^th century isn’t merely awesome, but also probative.

Gena is profoundly interested in the challenges that people face in living up to their most exciting life quests, up to and including skepticism, confusion, or demoralization about those quests. Whether it’s literal war trauma, run-of-the-mill anti-patterns, or insufficient social skills to kickstart one’s love life—whether it’s imperceptible traces of self-doubt or raging metastatic self-doubt—Gena can see it, understand it, articulate it, and find real paths forward. The paths she sees are always aesthetically rich, blessed by her unwavering belief in adventure, in redemption so swashbuckling that the need for redemption is obviated. These paths are real, and not easy for others to see, even when she is pointing right at them.

This is all obvious in the context of amelioration of various woes, but it’s ever-present in all social contexts. Gena is preternaturally good at understanding and connecting with people generally. Imagine you were instantly 10x better at evaluating a teacher or babysitter for your children. Or imagine you were 10x better at sowing and reaping social value at parties. Or imagine you were 10x better at hanging out with your friends. Being married to Gena is having a live-in social multiplier.

Contrary to the adage “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”, great minds discuss—and consider and interact with—all these things, especially people. Marriage is a social affair; two people’s interpersonal relationships are interpolated. You jointly share many friendships and communities, jointly attend social occasions, jointly help people and are jointly helped by people. It is a superpower to be married to a person who is more right about and better with people than you are.

A marriage of ambition

When we started dating, Gena was at the very tail end of a very long course of education and training in clinical psychology. She had worked with postpartum mothers, veterans, couples, teenagers, and more. She took a tenure-track research position. Gena loved this work and was great at it, but she was boxed in by the typical career container and orthodox clinical approaches. The proper scope of psychology was, for her, more ethical, more characterological, and more agential than could be captured with standard methods of research and approaches to therapy.

She started seeking out clients who were struggling to be more ambitious, or with the challenges of ambition. Many of these were startup founders or founder-adjacent types. Working with these clients has more resonance for Gena. They have more resonance, not because they are exceptionally untroubled (they aren’t) or elite or accomplished (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t), but because their ambitiousness represents what Gena sees as the universal human condition.

Being married to Gena has meant the gift of watching her blossom even further as this career transition unfolded. Ambition is in fact at the heart of moral psychology, and I feel like I am married to the one person who sees this. Who really, fully sees it. Who has spent her life practicing seeing it, in every aspect of every life she encounters: in people in the wider world, in her clients, in her friends, in her family, even in fictional characters.

Her special insight is at the heart of our marriage. Not just in the sense of being a power couple with increasingly successful careers or increasingly more influence. It may sometimes look that way! But the main career ambition Gena encourages in both of us is to be less standard, to be ambitious, not primarily in the direction of more success or impact or influence, but in the direction of being more creative and principled about work and life projects. E.g.: Gena left her tenure-track job and swapped social science research with philosophical writing on the internet. I left my startup to write a book. Gena romanticized both leaps; both involved significant changes for both of us; they are now part of the story of our marriage.

But career encouragement isn’t even the paradigmatic case of how she brings ambition into our marriage. It’s more like: We critique each other’s parenting, sharply, but always on the exciting premise of raising the ceiling for our children. Or, almost without thinking about it—just as a matter of course in interaction and conversation—Gena spiritualizes our life together energetically and creatively. She competes over shows of affection, over writing poetry, over enjoying our children together fully and in the present. Thanks to Gena, these are fundamentally solved problems; the question is now how high we can raise the ceiling.

Our marriage itself is an object of ambition, and at least one participant in the marriage is ridiculously, unfairly expert at the psychic architecture of ambition.

Aesthetometry

If you’re a novelist or a filmmaker, Gena is your ideal audience. She will immediately and completely suspend her disbelief, fully invest herself in the characters’ motivations and struggles, and intensely feel every emotional beat in the story arc.

She is unsullied by acclimation to convention or genre savvy; if the literature is competently executed, she will experience each trope, no matter how predictable, as if for the first time. Gena is devastated when the teacher in October Sky gets cancer; Gena is shocked when Schwarzenegger’s Terminator is, the second time around, the good guy; Gena is overjoyed when Hatteberg hits a home run.

On our honeymoon in France and Italy, I teased Gena for running up to every sculpture she saw in the manner that a friendly dog runs up to other potentially friendly dogs. Gena actually does treat figural sculptures as potential friends: they are ensouled, and it is always worth investigating souls for possible affinity. Years ago, we happened upon a set of small bronze sculptures for sale. It was a series of figures, portraying a woman’s progress from hunkered misery to expansive serenity. Bronze sculptures cost tens of thousands of dollars. We had no money. Gena, who is disposed to extreme frugality: “We should buy them.”

Gena with her bff Reading Girl

Gena is hungry for art. She is starving to surrender herself to a small exhibit of paintings in a museum or an hour of a serial on her living room TV. She is too good of an aesthetometer to, in moments of aesthetic appreciation, descend to analysis or other modes of cerebration. She simply experiences the metaphysical emotions, raw and unfiltered.

Her capacity in this regard extends beyond art. She is ecstatic when the lights on the Empire State Building dance on the hour; she is wrenched when hearing about new calamities, be they personal or world-historical; when someone announces an engagement or shuts down their company or shares a cute experience of their toddler, I suspect Gena often experiences it more acutely than her interlocutor.

When we first started dating, I had mixed feelings about these patterns. They were cute, but I felt they had a detached, manic pixie dream girl vibe. But I quickly came to see that the connection was superficial, or, even inverted: that the manic pixie dream girl vibe was a fuzzy simulacrum of what people like Gena have, an aesthetic enthusiasm that is in fact grounded, by an infinite aesthetic sensitivity.

Now, seven years in, I actually think of Gena as an aesthetometer, as (amongst other things) an instrument. I am loath to watch films without her, to go to museums without her, even, as mentioned, to hang out with friends without her. If you had a high-quality aesthetometer—a gauge exquisitely sensitive to, and adept at displaying, the meanings of things—why would you leave it at home? Imagine creating a home and raising children with such a person. My baseline experience of family life is that the deepest significance of pretty much everything is continuously distilled into a clear emotional signal.

Marry your best frenemy

Gena and I have a marriage centered around talking, and it is almost always in at least a mildly adversarial mode. We riff, we debate, we bicker, we rib, we retort. (One reason to write and publish this essay, on her Substack no less, is to generate in her an amusing mixture of affirmation and discomfort. Happy anniversary babe.)

I didn’t know, before I got together with Gena, that I wanted a relationship dynamic that had the flavor of an episode of Frasier. But now it’s the salt of my life. Benefits:

1. It’s constant flirtation, a constant escalation of romantic tension.

2. Amongst the things we rib are our insecurities; we habitually emphasize our security and tremendous confidence in the relationship. We don’t tiptoe around our issues, we laugh at them, together.

3. Comedy turns out to be a great way to develop insights about ordinary things, which are replete in married life.

4. Both of us have predominantly intellectual interests, which get natural uptake, and then sharpening, in an adversarial mode.

5. It requires, and naturally brings about, fresh material from both of us; boredom and stagnation are utterly alien to our marriage.

Before Gena, my mental model of healthy relationships was that they needed to be basically agreeable. With hindsight, this was, for me at least, a relationship killer. Now I operate on the opposite model: Gena and I do agree on most things, but its preferable that we agree in a disagreeable way.

I’m not completely clear on how this dynamic developed, but I do know that it is not incidental to Gena’s person. She’s a dancer. That’s literally true, she’s a phenomenal Lindy dancer. But I mean more metaphorically. She, more than anyone else I know, is perpetually putting herself out there: her insecurities, her confusions, her struggles, her half-baked hypotheses. I don’t like the term “vulnerable”, especially not for her—these behaviors are precisely what make her invulnerable—but what that term is gesturing at is characteristic of Gena. She’s never holding back, and her intent and hope in never holding back is to be always engaging. She yearns in all things for the back and forth; she has no notion that there might be something to “protect” from a back and forth.

I am not naturally like this, at least not nearly to this extent. Being married to Gena brings it out of me, especially regarding the marriage itself. I don’t know how legible our marriage is to outsiders, but within the marriage, it’s maximally legible. Not in a boring, analytic, direct way, but in a fun, roundabout, romantically combative way. There’s constant back and forth. Through (deliberately manufactured) adversity, strength.

Typical, really

Gena is an exceptional person. Our marriage is, I not-so-humbly believe, exceptionally good. But, as a concluding thought: our relationship is in many ways almost comically normal.

Gena and I are opposites in a standard “opposites attract” sort of way. She’s outgoing, loud, and enthusiastic; I’m introverted, quiet, and grumpy. (This is true in a stereotypical enough manner that one of our wedding toasters roasted us for it.) She’s the warmer parent; I’m the firmer parent. (Our children roast us for this.) She’s mildly anxious; I’m mildly avoidant. (On such matters, we, as implied above, roast each other.)

One of the keys to happiness that I did not learn until too late in life, and have learned primarily by being married to Gena, is that greatness can come from intentionally leaning way into a conventional pattern. Ambition is more obvious when it’s breaking dramatically with the status quo, but it’s no less real when it’s according with it.

One of the best things I can say about being married to Gena is just that it’s a marriage. We spend a lot of time together, we love each other, we share chores and finances and friends, we have children. Our joint life together is more than the sum of its separate parts. The unique idiosyncrasies of our marriage matter tremendously to me, but it also matters tremendously that the generalities of marriage are perfectly accurate.

Hopefully, with good fortune and health, we can, over the coming decades, continue to pattern-match on all the clichéd stereotypes of a long, happy romance.