David Herz, Coach

The working title:

A Philosophy of Relationship: Family as Civilization at Human Scale

Introduction: The Thing Worth Building

There is this one thing that makes me particularly sad.

It is the young professional, late twenties, early thirties, whose longest emotional attachment is to his dog. He might have a carefully curated apartment, or an expensive coffee habit. He could be constantly optimizing and self-optimizing, traveling, engaging in extreme sports. Whatever the experience, I see an independence that somehow still leaves him profoundly alone.

Maybe he's become very good at managing his life, but quietly, imperceptibly sometimes, he is losing contact with why life was meant to be lived in the first place.

This is not an attack on pets. I like dogs. I understand companionship. In many ways, I understand loneliness too.

This is a very opinionated book.

We have forgotten a matter once taken for granted. It's apparent in this line from Bob Dylan's Masters of War (1963):

We have gone from taking continuity for granted to treating it as optional.. There is no other animal that, when given the right conditions to reproduce, chooses not to.

Something has shifted in our civilization when so many intelligent, capable, educated young adults increasingly organize their emotional lives around weak substitutes for family rather than family itself. We have built a culture extraordinarily skilled at helping people avoid risk, avoid dependence, avoid permanence, avoid obligation, and yet increasingly incapable of helping them build meaningful attachment, the foundation of a meaningful life.

For years, I have watched the drift happen around us.

For those in this drift, the people for whom this was written, I would ask you to consider a possibility.

Think back to childhood. A day spent completely. You ran, explored, imagined, built, laughed, and finally collapsed into bed exhausted and content. Tomorrow was coming. Of course it was. And tomorrow would bring another adventure.

I maintain that that you is still there.

But we'll need to take a small leap of faith to access it: that it is possible, that it is worth it, and that it is still yours for the taking.

I am a lawyer, a husband, a father. Over the last ten years, I have answered thousands of questions for those trying to make relationship work, for those untethered despite doing everything modern life told them would make them fulfilled.

And I have come to believe that many of our deepest modern miseries are not random.

They are downstream from drift.

We have slowly severed freedom from responsibility, sex from continuity, adulthood from obligation, achievement from belonging, and human beings from the structures that once taught them how to carry life forward together.

This book is my attempt to think honestly about that.

I would like to say that this is not political, but I am a highly political creature. This is not a nostalgic walk: the past was not perfect. Pretending otherwise is childish. This is not intended as some simplistic moral commandment that every human life must unfold identically.

Rather, this is my philosophy of relationship. This is how human beings flourish. This is how we carry the world forward.

And I suppose before I ask anyone else to think honestly about these questions, I should begin with myself.

I have thought about whether I am the person to write this book.

I am not always happy. I don't know how I get out of bed some mornings. I am not always as honest as I ask you to be. As I write this, I am struggling deeply with one of my children. There are days I feel like I have failed more than I have succeeded. There are days loneliness still visits me. There are times I just start sobbing. I wonder whether I carried certain burdens properly. I replay conversations in my mind and wish I had been wiser, calmer, kinder, stronger, fearless.

I know enough about human beings to distrust anyone presenting himself as having mastered life.

And yet.

There are moments I think about what my life would have looked like had I never taken the leap into family, had I stayed perpetually free, had I protected myself from responsibility, from vulnerability, from the possibility of heartbreak and disappointment and sacrifice.

And I cannot imagine choosing that life instead.

Not because family is easy. It is not.

Family wounds you. Marriage exposes you. Children humble you. Love requires you to become larger than your selfishness. Responsibility can exhaust you. Continuity demands sacrifice.

But even with the tears and scars and failures and uncertainty, I cannot imagine my life without the laughter that filled my home, without the absurd moments, without the feeling that my life belonged not merely to my own appetites but to something continuing beyond me.

I cannot imagine my life without the buy-in to a future world that family represents.

That phrase matters to me: buy-in to a future world.

Because civilization itself depends on people willing to love the future enough to build it.

• Marriage is good.
• Family is good.
• Children are good.

Not because every marriage succeeds. Not because every family is healthy. Not because people become perfected through love. Human beings remain gloriously and painfully imperfect.

The point is not perfection.

The point is participation.

Participation in life. Participation in continuity. Participation in creation itself.

From my Orthodox Jewish perspective, this is not merely sociology. Human beings are meant to become partners with G-d in carrying creation forward. Men and women are not interchangeable economic units floating through a marketplace of self-interest. We are builders of continuity. Builders of belonging. Builders of small civilizations called families.

And family is civilization at human scale.

Inside family we first learn sacrifice, forgiveness, restraint, trust, loyalty, responsibility, duty, humor, patience, and love. Long before governments matter to us, family matters to us. Long before politics, there is belonging.

This is why I increasingly believe many modern people are not suffering from too much family obligation, but from too little meaningful attachment altogether.

We are living through a strange experiment in radical individualism, much of this embedded in deeply disturbing post-modern and critical ideologies. We have spent decades teaching people to remain unbound, endlessly flexible, permanently self-creating, careful never to need anyone too deeply. We have taught women to fear dependence and men to fear responsibility. We have slowly transformed commitment itself into something many people experience less as meaning and more as threat.

We have taken on finding ourselves before we find a mate, not realizing that we can not truly find ourselves without one. 

And we wonder why so many people are lonely.

We wonder why anxiety and depression rise even amid abundance. We wonder why so many adults drift through years of relationships that never become anything durable. We see fertility collapse, and civilizations following. Trust erodes. People increasingly seem exhausted by freedom itself.

The modern world aggressively dismisses the sacrifices of marriage and children while ignoring the effects of drift.

Drift sacrifices things too.

Time. Continuity. Belonging. Stability. Shared memory. Intergenerational meaning. The chance to become woven into the life of another human being deeply enough that your identities become inseparable from the story you are building together.

This book is not an argument against ambition, achievement, freedom, or excellence. In fact, I believe deeply in human excellence. I believe in building. I believe in accomplishment. I believe in purpose. I believe human beings are capable of extraordinary things.

But I also believe many people discover too late that achievement without belonging becomes strangely hollow.

Some of the most extraordinary women in modern life built families and then went on to become doctors, lawyers, executives, politicians, creators, and leaders. They did this not despite family, but often strengthened by the emotional and structural foundation family provided. The right marriage does not shrink people. It steadies them. It expands them. It gives them somewhere meaningful from which to launch.

The same is true for men. Many men do not rise to their potential until they need to be strong for someone else.  I am pretty clear that we don't grow up until we have children, but it is only when we see the world again through the eyes of a two year old that we can finally become the (mature) child we were always intended to be

Healthy interdependence is not weakness.

It is civilization.

The atomized model of adulthood imagines human beings strongest when they stand entirely alone. This is a lie. We are strongest when we willingly bind ourselves to meaningful responsibilities and trustworthy people.

Not perfectly.

But courageously.

The goal is not to build a perfect family.

The goal is to build a real one: a life shared with imperfect people imperfectly over long periods of time; a life rooted deeply enough that joy and grief alike actually matter; a life that carries the world forward a little farther than it found it.

That is what this book is about.

Ben suggests some of us are playing the lottery. Instead of having a plan, and doing the things that bring business, and knowing what's necessary, we keep stabbing at items hoping something will click.

So sometimes things do, but they don't hold, because there is no plan. So if you want your business to thrive this year, and it works for your life too, maybe with a little tweaking, here are the steps:

Read more »

Q: Why do I feel like I regret being in my relationship?

Because you have given up something to be there, whether your freedom, time with your friends, family, hobbies, religion, etc.

What you want to do is look to see if you actually negotiated any of this, or just did it because you thought you had to, or if he demanded it.

You should make a list of the things that are important to you (including future kids, relationship to money, religion, whose family to spend the holidays with), that fill your soul, that give you meaning in the world, that worry you, that make you sad, etc.

Then you should ask yourself if you can even share these with him, or if you would to make the relationship work. If you can't do that (to most of it anyway), you're still wearing a mask and the relationship has barely begun.

If you can, then start talking to him about the things you need to structure back in to make it work, and figure out how to honor yourself while you honor the relationship.

And if he can't or won't, or makes what you think is important small, then get out and find someone who is more willing to partner with you.

Asked on Quora: What should a person do when they are unsure of what they want in a relationship, and are not sure if it is worth continuing their current relationship?

Maybe start by looking at what you want inside what the younger version of you wanted.

If you go there, it's usually a spouse, a house, a few kids, maybe a dog. Heck, that's what nature wants for us.

And if that's what you want, you might want to start looking realistically at what is necessary to have those things there: shared family values, a shared religion, a similar outlook on life, a similar ethic as to money, family, etc.

Then when you have all that down, look at your current relationship, maybe ask if that's where he sees it going. What are his dreams? Where does he see himself in five years. Are you in the picture, or were you just a station along the way.

And if that doesn't jive with where you are and what you want, then move on and find someone willing to be the partner you deserve.

Quora Question: How do you end and stay away from a toxic relationship?

You make a clear set of red-line rules that you commit to keeping and walking away the minute any of those lines is crossed. Here are some I would suggest:

• He is unkind to people, waiters, clerks, support staff, people he doesn't owe anything to, like that.
• He tries to put a wedge between you and your family and friends.
• He pushes you to be someone you don't want to be or do things you don't want to do.
• He causes you to question your reason or sanity.
• He makes you feel small, or ugly, or unworthy.
• He talks about how lucky you are to have him, rather than the other way around.

If you are in one of these already, you develop an exit plan. If there is any fear he might get violent, you make sure you have the right support around.

Obviously, you can swap the sexes. It goes both ways.