Why Is Your Partner Brave Where You Are Afraid?

Gautam resigned from a bank at forty to start his own firm. He has never once said the words “I am frightened” to his wife.

Amrita will cry in front of her friends, tell her mother an unwelcome truth, and say “I was wrong” before the other person has finished. Her savings have sat in the same fixed deposit since 2011.

In their worst arguments each uses the same word. “You never take a risk,” he says. “You never risk anything,” she says. Both mean it, and neither is right.

One question from a mentor

Nathan Furr tells a story about himself in The Upside of Uncertainty, the book he wrote with his wife Susannah. As a doctoral student at Stanford, with loans and four small children, he told a mentor, Tina Seelig, that he was simply not a risk-taker.

She asked whether he really thought there was only one kind of risk.

Then she told him what she saw. He avoided financial risk, and as the only earner for a family of six she was glad he did. But he took intellectual and social risks readily.

Six dials

Seelig had developed a tool with colleagues, which she calls a risk-o-meter. It replaces the single question “Am I brave?” with six separate ones. They cover financial, emotional, social, physical, intellectual and political risk.

The Furrs define each in a line. The one that matters most in a marriage is emotional risk, which they describe as the risk we take in our intimate, personal relationships. They note that a person may long for closeness and still be too scared to take it.

That is Gautam. He will stake his income on an idea and will not stake a sentence on being comforted.

Two maps of the same country

Once you see the six, the old quarrel changes shape. Gautam is using the financial dial to measure Amrita and finding her timid. She is using the emotional dial to measure him and finding the same. Each is brave in the place the other is not looking.

The Furrs tried the tool on their own marriage, as their children were starting to leave home. They found that taking more emotional and financial risk than came naturally would bring them closer to those children. I mention it because it was a joint exercise. They did not use it to score points off each other.

Fortify, do not attack

The chapter offers a word I like for the areas where you are averse. You can fortify them. You do not have to cure the aversion or charge at it. You can protect that side with savings, a fallback plan or some training. Or with a partner who happens to be comfortable there.

A couple with opposite maps is well placed for that. He can hold the financial risk that makes her ill. She can go first into the conversation he dreads. It works only if each stops sneering at the other’s low dial.

Small risks train the rest

The Furrs quote a former executive, Piet Coelewij, who defines courage as the ability to confront your fear. He told them it can be built up as a muscle is, and that courage gained in one part of life carries into others.

They also keep a caution in view. An aversion is not a defect. Seelig did not tell a father of four to gamble the rent. Sometimes the low dial is the wise one, and the task is to notice when it is keeping you from something you want.

For Gautam the small risk might be a single sentence said aloud. For Amrita it might be moving a tenth of the deposit.