What If You Cannot Control How It Ends?

My wife and I have been in counselling for a year. Some weeks I think we will come through. Some weeks I am sure we will not.

A friend asked me last month what happens if I do all this and she leaves anyway. I had no answer. If it ends, I will have failed, and I will have wasted a year of both our lives.

Farhan, your friend asked a fair question. I think you have accepted a premise inside it that you need not accept. The premise is that the year is to be judged by how it ends.

What you can and cannot deliver

Nathan and Susannah Furr wrote The Upside of Uncertainty mostly about work and ventures. One distinction in it fits a marriage just as well. It is between goals and values.

A goal, as they use the word, is tied to an outcome. Their examples are money and recognition, but a saved marriage is the same kind of thing. Whether you reach it depends partly on forces you do not command. In your case one of those forces is another person’s heart.

A value is something you can live out whatever happens. It might be learning, or doing the work well, or treating people decently. Nobody can prevent you from doing those.

Their claim is that when you take on an uncertain project for the sake of values, you cannot fail in the way that matters. Their word for this is failure-proof. They add that hanging everything on the outcome exposes you to more of the anxiety and pressure that come with not knowing.

What old people say

The Furrs lean on two pieces of research about what a good life turns out to be.

One is a long-running Harvard project, the Study of Adult Development. It has tracked over seven hundred people for most of their lives. Its director, Robert Waldinger, sums up the clearest finding in a sentence: “good relationships keep us happier and healthier.” The authors set this beside a figure they also report. Eighty per cent of young people name getting rich as a life goal.

The other is the work of the sociologist Karl Pillemer, who interviewed a thousand older Americans about what they had learnt. Not one of them, he reported, said that the way to be happy was to work as hard as you can for money.

These studies are about relationships, and you are fighting for one, so I do not want to misuse them. They do not show that outcomes are unimportant. They show that when people look back, what they count is how they were with one another.

Famous for what?

The chapter takes an idea from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, which gives the word famous a new meaning. In her sense you are famous to the few people and things you matter to.

The Furrs turn it into an exercise. List the ways you would like to be famous in that sense. Their examples include being the quickest to forgive and the most thoughtful giver of gifts.

What would you want to be known for in your own house? I would guess at being the one who listens without preparing a defence, and who tells the truth in the counsellor’s room. A third might be that your children can count on you whichever address you live at.

Each of those can be done this week. None of them waits on her decision.

What they are careful to say

The Furrs do not say goals are bad, and they do not say this is easy. Nathan writes that he has struggled all through his career with wanting his work to be bigger and better known.

They also decline to promise that living by your values will produce the result you want. I will not promise it either. You may do all of this and she may still leave.

If she does, the year will not have been a failed attempt to hold on to her. It will have been the year you became someone you can respect, and whom your children can go on trusting. That is not wasted, and it does not depend on her answer.