399 - Love Won't Make You Happy with Carrie Jenkins
The relationship between love and happiness
The last time Carrie Jenkins was on our show was six years ago for episode 113, where she discussed her book What Love Is and What It Could Be. Today, she’s back to talk about her newest book, Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning and to enlighten us about her analysis of the relationship between love and happiness.
Throughout this episode, Carrie goes over the following topics:
Eudaimonic love: what it is and how she developed/identified it as a way to express what love could be.
The Happiness and Romantic Paradoxes: what they are and how they relate to each other.
Western notions of love and why we should move away from definitions of love that only focus on feelings.
How New Relationship Energy (NRE) relates to Western ideas of romantic love.
“Love crafting,” or the practice of making relationships meaningful for the people in them, rather than creating nuclear families that function as units of consumption.
Find more from Carrie at her website along with all the books she has written, and be sure to pick up a copy of Sad Love!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are back with author and philosophy professor Carrie Jenkins, to discuss her new book, Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning. Now, this was surprising to me to find out but it has been six years since Carrie was on our show last. If you want to check out that episode, it is Multiamory, episode 113 versus this one which is 399, so just to show how long ago that was.
Dedeker: Now Carrie, you're here on the cusp of almost 400 episodes in six years. Six years plus the 200 years that has been the pandemic.
Emily: I was going to say, yes, that counts for at least 200 years.
Carrie: Indeed. Yes, absolutely.
Jase: Well, Carrie, thank you so much for joining us again.
Carrie: It's a pleasure to be here. I can't believe it's been six years.
Emily: Yes. First off, I just wanted to ask in that time, just how have you been, have there been any huge updates in your life or changes in the work that you do and also because you write about love and you write about so many things that we talk about on this show, do you think that the landscape of love and relationships have changed in the six years since we last spoke to you?
Carrie: Oh, wow. Yes. Everything has changed. The book that I just published, I took years longer to write it than I wanted to and originally planned to because the world just kept changing and I couldn't really write at the beginning of the pandemic. I just stopped. I couldn't see what the world I was trying to talk into was going to be, so how do you talk to a future that you are so radically unsure about? How I've been I mean, I’ve been all over this, y’all.
I had a long period of depression after my first book came out and that's partly what the second book is about among other things, and how that impacted my relationships and how it made me think about relationships and happiness and romance and the happy ever after myth and all of those things. The book ended up being not bigger in the sense of a huge weighty to or anything but the ideas got bigger. I ended up having a much bigger scope than I had in the first book and I think bigger than I had intended when I started writing the second book. I think that had a lot to do with the Pandemic, honestly. It just forced people to get some perspective that we didn't have before.
Dedeker: Oh, yes, definitely. I feel like you could talk about that for several hours straight at this point. I want to rewind talking about the way you felt after the first book came out and it's funny because I think I went through that after my book came out. I have other author friends who've gone through that. Do you mind sharing a little bit about that process? Like going through that dark valley and coming out of it?
Emily: We're all about to publish a book Jase-
Dedeker: Emily and Jase days are about to be first time authors, so you all got to get ready for that for the postpartum.
Jase: No one told me about this part. Geez.
Emily: I know, right?
Carrie: It's a thing. Absolutely it's a thing, and a lot of it depends on what kind of book you publish and what response you get from the world but in my case, the experience was of being not unprepared in the sense that I didn't know it was coming but unprepared in the sense that I didn't know what it would be like to go through. Having a little bit more of a public profile and just really getting waves and waves of hateful feedback. Every time I would be in a more high visibility interview or press coverage.
People would mention that I was polyamorous and I was in more than one relationship, and I would get this just waves of slat shaming and horrible stuff and lots of it was also racist which was really upsetting to being a white woman. Then having had that privilege of largely having racism hidden from my view for most of my life, it was just horrific to see what people were saying about my partners and knowing that it was because of their association with me that they were being exposed to that.
All of this was swirling around and I had other things going on in my life too. It wasn't just about that, but that was a big part of it and yes, I think I spent maybe a good couple of years going through some pretty rough times.
I was very lucky I had support all the way through from partners, family, friends, and a very good medical team. Most people I know who've had to go through something like that have had to do it with less help than I had and so I'm just eternally grateful for having had that.
In this book, I end up talking about basically some of the forms that gratitude takes and my understanding of what it is that I'm grateful for out of that process and just trying to think about how to expand from that experience into a board of view about love itself.
Dedeker: Yes, so I would say that I think the three of us can definitely resonate with that experience. Anytime the three of us together or individually have done interviews and it's even slightly more mainstream leaning media or shows or whatever, that it is like this big slap in the face of like, "Oh, right, there is this whole mainstream current of thought that's so disgusted and so scared by thinking about love in these particular terms."
In your newest book you shared this story of giving this philosophy presentation and it was supposed to be about all the things you write about in your book about the ways that we view love and relationship and everybody glommed onto the whole polyamory thing and then people are asking you questions about how you manage STIs and things like that. I was wondering, like in the world that you move in around philosophers, do you think that this is a subculture that brings with it its own slightly conservative bent, or do you think that just like philosophers, like everyone else are subject to the same mainstream messaging around relationships and reinforcing that stigma of people who are non-normative? What's your take on that?
Carrie: It's a weird one but I feel like academics and maybe even especially academic philosophers who you might think would be some of the most open-minded critical thinking people it can really go the in the opposite direction sometimes and around certain kinds of issues. Academia can be a really horrible place. Sometimes there's a lot of systemic racism. There's a lot of misogyny, there's a lot of transphobia, especially in academic philosophy and especially in the UK in fact, for whatever reason, that seems to have really focused around the academic philosophy and there are the arguments of a few people.
I don't know exactly why it is but one of my theories is it has to do with that phenomenon that's sometimes called self-licensing, where if you tell yourself you are good in some way, you've given yourself permission actually to be not so good in that way. People before they have to do some job evaluations or something that, if they tell themselves before doing it that they are very objective and unbiased, they're actually slightly more likely to be biased in how they rank the applications for the job.
It's like if you are academic philosopher and you go around all the time congratulating yourself on how very rational and clever and critical you are, then maybe that licenses you a little bit to be a little less those things than might be ideal. I don't know, but academia can be for all, it gets this weird press as a hot bit of radical left-wing thinking. It can be really surprisingly unprogressive about a lot of stuff. That caricature doesn't ring at all true to my experience. I think it is quite a conservative, quite stuffy place at times.
Dedeker: I think it makes sense. Yes, I was just going to make the comment, I think it makes sense how that also layers on top of the fact that even just a very common cognitive bias for all human beings is to think that we're less biased in the average person. I'm sure-
Carrie: I think we great that-
Jase: What did you say this concept was called? Is licensing?
Carrie: Self-licensing, sometimes called moral licensing or moral self-licensing.
Jase: Wow. I feel like we could do a whole episode just right now talking about that, which is reminding me of six years ago where it's just like, I just want to keep talking about all the things you bring on. I love that, but I am going to bring us back to the book though because that is what we're here to talk about. You start off the book Sad Love by interrogating the relationship between happiness and love. Could you start out by telling us a little bit about what did you find when you looked at that relationship and the ideological role of happiness and how we think about that in relation to love?
Carrie: Yes, it all got started with just thinking about how often we hear the phrase, or hear phrases that assume that love and romantic love in particular should make you happy if successful, if it's going well. We ask, are you happy with this person? Are you happy together to ask, is the relationship good? We talk about obviously the happy ever after. One thing I noticed was that this seems to track a much bigger situation which is this emphasis on positive emotion more generally, especially in North American culture.
This is something that I talk about a little bit in detail in the first chapter or so of the book. The idea that really happiness is like emotional success and that each person is responsible for their own emotional success. You have to become happy, and that's how you'll prove that you are emotionally successful person. It's a bit like the American dream idea that to become rich is to be successful and everyone can succeed financially in America. That's the idea.
Dedeker: I don't know if you've been to America, Carrie, but it's true, it's a fact.
Carrie: Oh yes, this is what I hear. Every time I've been there it seems exactly like that. I just assume that's completely true, and then overlaid on that, you get this what's sometimes called toxic positivity, which is the idea that happiness and good vibes are the only acceptable emotional states. Anything anger or sadness is a sign of failure or a sign that you're just not a good person to be around, and complaining and so on you shouldn't be around complains.
I put a bunch of these thoughts together, and associate them it's the platitudes that we tend to exchange when we're talking about what a good life is. We say things like, "Well, good life is one that's full of love, good life is one that's full of happiness." Again, those two things taken as almost the same goal, the same end states for in good life. Then we say things like, "The best things in life are free so love and happiness those are supposed to be free. I.e everybody should be able to succeed on those terms however rich or poor you are when you're starting out."
Then we start to build around that the idea that a good life is going to be aiming at certain kind of love, the kind that is associated with that happy ever after, the romantic dream. This becomes, or is I should say, a normative status, a normative goal for everybody, whether or not we buy into it because of course lots of us are, or where that's not the ideal live condition for everybody. I'm using scare quotes here, the traditional nuclear family shape of romantic relationship is not everybody's life goal, but everybody is still subject to it as a bar that they can be measured against and found wanting if they're not meeting that condition.
Dedeker: Yes. I think what you're touching on about positive emotions being weighed a little bit too heavily in a lot of western northwestern cultures, does strike me that on the underside of that as yes. This idea that instead of suffering just being a part of life, that suffering is a failure of some kind. If you're suffering, you're failing in some way, you're failing either materially or you just don't have the right attitude.
Carrie: Yes and that somehow it's your job to fix that. You are not grateful enough, you're not journaling enough, you're not doing enough yoga, you're not eating the right foods. I'm not knocking any of those things and I know they can help people, but if we only look at the individualistic level, it's like trying to understand why some people are poor by just looking at how hard they work and not at the social circumstances that they find themselves in.
I think the exact same conditions should be taken into account and we're trying to think about why some people are struggling in love, why some people are struggling to experience happiness.
Instead of understanding that those things are actually part of a complicated, and dynamic, social structure, we have a tendency to think of them as purely individual and private things. Completely nothing to do with political, nothing to do with any social prejudices, nothing to do with privilege, et cetera. That's part of what's saying that the best things in life are free, thus prove us nothing to see here.
Jase: Erases all that other context around it. It's all your own fault, whichever way it goes. I think also on the other side is that thing that we see come up with money and career success and things like that. If I'm successful, it's all because of how hard I worked or how smart I was, or how clever I was, or something. Totally discounting luck, privilege, billion other factors that went into that and with love is the same thing.
Carrie: Very much so. Of course, you can't literally buy love in the sense of walking into a store and being like, yes, one, love, please but if you are too poor to go out on dates and if you can't afford, it's very stressful trying to keep a happy romantic relationship together when you're under permanent financial stress. It's a lot harder than if you can afford to pay someone to take care of all the dishes and the kids. There's so so many ways in which it's misleading to say that love and money have nothing to do with each other. They have a lot to do with each other.
Dedeker: Yes. I want to bring us around to this concept that you talk about in the book quite a bit, which is eudaimonic love. Now, I was first introduced to this concept when you included it in part of a quote for our book, which through all of us for a loop and our copy editor for a loop as well, for our listeners at home, I'll spell it out for you. E-U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-C love, eudaimonic love. This is the main principle of the book. Can you in a nutshell tell us what this is? Also, you set this up as a counterpoint to romantic love.
Carrie: Yes. The way that I see it, romantic love, and not the love part, but the romanticness part, is really defined by this normative fairytale and it's monogamous, it's permanent, it's happy ever after. It's all of those things. Eudaimonic love is not defined by any of that at all. Eudaimonia is an ancient Greek word and it's quite often associated with the philosopher Aristotle, because he talked about eudaimonia. He used it to mean something like human flourishing or flourishing in general, but for humans, it would be a particularly instinctively human flourishing. I don't really care for Aristotle's theory of what that amounts to, so I'm just going to leave him there.
Before Aristotle got his hands on the word, the original meaning of it was, good-spirited. In eu at the beginning, there is the same eu that you find in euphoria. it means good, and then the daimonia, that word daimo means any kind of supernatural entity spirit, maybe a God or demi demigod or something that could intercede or intervene for you and help you out. Eudaimonia originally would've been talking about living a life that was good-spirited and was benefiting from the interventions of benevolent deities and supernatural forces and all of that thing. That's the meaning I'm entrusted in, not that you necessarily have to interpret it in any supernatural way. What I want to think about is all of the ways in which any relationship is always subject to the diamons, the spirits around it. To be eudaimonic, to have good spirits a relationship doesn't just need for the people in it to be good-spirited people for one another and in general, and it's also going to be impacted by the community, the vibe, the time, and the place, the politics, the state of the world, the support of friends and family, things like that can really make or break love relationship.
I was trying to make room for the role of all of those different kinds of good spirits in supporting and making love possible, and making it something that is creative, that is collaborative, that looks beyond just the role of individuals in this world into something that has a bigger goal. Eudaimonic love doesn't have to be a romantic love, so it doesn't have to be between a romantic couple as we might think about. Eudaimonic love could be between friends, it could be between family members.
What I want to do is say we've put romance and romantic love on a pedestal, and we've associated it, and happiness that goes along with it as the best things in life and that everyone should aim at those things. Eudaimonia and eudaimonic love in my view, are not defined by any emotion. In fact, they have room for all of the human emotions. The full range of human experience and emotion can be part of a good-spirited love.
Instead of aiming at happiness, what I say a eudaimonic love would aim at is more like a creative work of art.
Something collaborative, some meaningful project that the people who are in the loving relationship undertake together. Whether that's to raise kids or paint a great mural on the walls of the city or really anything to discover the fundamental physics of the universe. It doesn't matter what it is that makes people's lives and lives meaningful.
The point is to look for those things that make your experience of life meaningful and stop thinking about what makes you happy because there's another part of this, which is-- this is not a new point that I'm making. A lot of philosophers have been saying this for a very long time. Aiming at happiness doesn't work, trying to make yourself happy actually doesn't tend to make people very happy. I think the same is true for trying to make yourself happy ever after in a romantic sense, it doesn't actually work.
It's not going to lead to happy ever after for the majority of people. I draw on the work of Victor Frankel who was really influential in seeing that if you are going after happiness you're unlikely to succeed but what you need to do is go after what makes your life meaningful, what has me for you. That's actually why the book has the subtitle, Romance and Research for Meaning to nod to fit to Frankl's book, Man Search for Meaning.
Jase: Okay. All right. It's interesting as we bring up that topic a lot, anytime we talk about positive psychology stuff on our podcast. Is that idea that contrary to what you might think from its name, it's not all about being happy all the time. It's about that wellness, of finding meaning and something deeper than just being happy all the time because that's not realistic and it's not achievable actually.
Carrie: Yes, exactly. There's a little part of the book where I talk about the positive psychology wars. How that segment of academic research has flowed into popular culture and how it's uptake has sometimes been seen as born in toxic positivity, but I don't actually end up taking-- I don't have a horse in that race. I think what I do think is there's a lot that goes on under the ages of positive psychology that looks at what does in fact lead to the things I would call eudaimonic.
That has a lot to do with things like slow states practicing projects that take you a long time to accomplish and require you to be fully immersed and engaged. Are in that respect pretty different from pinging on Netflix or spending money on Amazon or whatever the other things are that we tend to do when we're tired after a long day at work for a quick hit of happiness. That research I think is really useful for understanding what eudaimonia is and how it works, and indeed it tends to back up some of what those much earlier philosophers were saying about the pure best pursuit of happiness or pleasure for its own sake, is really a pretty futile enterprise. You have to aim at something else and you will become happy in the pursuit of that, hopefully, if it goes well.
Emily: I guess. Yes. This leads into our next question which you've talked about both a bit already but you discussed the happiness paradox and the romantic paradox throughout the course of the book, so you have already a touch but can you walk us through what both of those things are so that our audience knows if they were to pick up the book beforehand?
Carrie: Yes. The paradox of happiness or sometimes called the paradox of hedonism is just that idea that chasing your own happiness or your own pleasure tends not to make you happy in the long run or even at all. The romantic paradox, and that's an old problem like people have known about that for at least hundreds of years, maybe longer. My contribution is to add to this idea of a romantic paradox which is that in just the same way, the pursuit of happy ever after the romantic goal is not likely to lead to being happy ever after.
In fact, it can have the opposite kinds of results, and that's part of my critique of romantic love or the romantic ideology of love, and the idea that in the pursuit of it we should really focus on the thought that love is a positive feeling or a happy state, or that it should result in a positive feeling or a happy state. Think much more about how love can be active, so not just a passive feeling that you have but maybe something you do. Maybe it's about your actions that you might undertake towards another person or that you might undertake with another person in the service of a community or larger goals.
Dedeker: I already, okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate because I think that-- yes, so thinking about the happiness paradox and this idea of like, "Okay, well, you pursue something that gives your life meaning and value instead of just trying to find the things that make you feel good and make you feel happy," I feel like that's easier to swallow than telling someone, "Oh, you shouldn't be searching for happily ever after," because then I could see the reaction that being like, "Well, what do you mean? Do you mean I just need to date someone who's like and that I'm not attracted to and that I don't care and I don't have any feelings for." In a realistic sense, how do you see that playing out?
Carrie: Yes. I wouldn't recommend any of those things. No, so this is where the love part is still love. When we think about romantic love, we're encouraged to package love in a certain way, in a certain relationship structure, but it's still got to be love, otherwise, it's not romantic love. It's not any kind of love. Eudaimonic love is still love and if you are not feeling it for someone, then you're not feeling it for that pressure. What I mean by that is if you're not doing the things that we would normally take love to consist in. If you are not treating somebody well, let's say, if you're being abusive in a relationship that's not going to be a loving relationship of any kind.
It's certainly not going to be a eudaimonic love relationship. In saying that some love relationships are eudaimonic, what I'm really talking about is, has a lot more to do with what it is that makes-- really what it is that makes a life meaningful, and what it is that makes our loves feel meaningful to us. It's very possible to be in a love relationship that is, let's say, subject to being dismissed, being belittled, being hidden away, and being stifled in every way possible. It's still love but it's not going to be eudaimonic love because it's not being supported by good spirits. It's not able to grow, it's not able to exist. Eudaimonic love it's not about being sad but it has room for sadness. It's not about having a miserable time, but if you are having a miserable time, it doesn't mean your love is failure as long as you're still engaged in these eudaimonic projects, then your love may well be exactly what you need when you're going through this miserable time. The point of eudaimonic love is not to say suffer but to say humans sometimes suffer, and that too is part of love sometimes.
Jase: That's great. Something we talk a lot about to each other, I actually don't know how often we talk about this on the show, but is-- in Buddhism, there's the concept of the second arrow of like, sometimes we suffer and that's the first arrow that you couldn't prevent. Then when we beat ourselves up for the fact that we're suffering, or we dwell on that, that's the second arrow that we're stabbing in ourselves, and that's the one we could avoid. You can't avoid that first one. It just happens.
There's that second one and what you've been talking about reminds me of that idea of, I'm sad for whatever reason, and then I also feel bad that I'm sad because it means I'm a failure. Now I'm suffering a second time. I'm suffering extra, possibly even more than I was suffering already from the first reason I was sad. That makes a lot of sense to think of it that way.
Carrie: That's it. If you didn't think that suffering in the first place was a failure condition because you didn't have happiness as your be and end all life goal, then the second arrow wouldn't have any grounds to hit home. You'd just be like, "Well, my day sucked."
Jase: All right. We're going to take a quick break to talk to our listeners about some ways that they can support this show so that we can keep this content coming to everybody out there for free every week. It's something that we really value a lot, and an easy way that you can help support this show is just by taking some time to listen to our advertisers on this, if any are interesting to you, go check them out. It does directly help our show. If not, that's cool too. We're just happy that you're here.
Dedeker: We are back. I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier, which is this very Western notion of love is a feeling, or love is about our feelings. Is so interesting to me because especially as you're talking about this idea of sad love, which makes room for sadness and all these other emotions. I often struggle when talking about this sometimes with clients or with listeners, that we have these weird almost competing narratives about negative feelings within the context of romantic love.
That on the one hand there's the school of thought of, "Oh, if you're feeling bad in a relationship it's not meant to be. If you're not feeling happy all the time, or most of the time you should break up, you should end the relationship. It's not the relationship for you." Then also almost on the other side of the same coin, we have this narrative around, but relationships are hard work. They are struggle. You got to struggle through it.
Carrie: It's the work.
Dedeker: You got to keep fighting, marriage is not sexy or really glorifying sometimes the negative emotions within the context of romantic love. You make this argument that like, "We shouldn't be focusing on it being feeling based at all." Can you talk about that a little bit more?
Carrie: It's true. You do sometimes get this narrative that, marriage is hard work and you don't get to give 50% and receive 50%. You both give a 100% and then that's 150%. It's like, "Well, I don't know." None of that really sounds like, I don't recognize that experience of romantic relationships particularly, and I get that it's a different experience for everybody, but I think part of what's really important to me is this idea of collaboration.
When I talk about your eudaimonic love I try to shift away from some of the romantic metaphors of love being either this kind of dream state or perhaps sometimes it's represented as a battlefield or the side of-- I try to get away from those kinds of metaphors and get into this idea that it's a collaborative work of art.
The idea that it's got something to do with creativity and that it's got something to do with being active, doing something in the world and that idea what I'm hoping to speak back to, is this attempt to place feelings at the center of love whether they're good feelings or bad feelings. What I'm saying is that if you think of love as being ideally eudaimonically a pursuit of an activity, then it doesn't have to be about struggle. It doesn't have to be about the waking up every morning singing that the hills are alive with the sound of music either. It's not about either of those things. Those things may both occur and probably will at some point occur. It's about what makes that thing meaningful for you. That's the point of doing it.
I hope for nobody was the point of doing it the struggle part, because like why? That really does seem like suffering for its own sake. I get that for a lot of people the idea that the point of a romantic relationship would be to have the hills are alive with the sound of music feeling. What I'm suggesting is that actually, that's not stable either. If we aim ourselves at that, we are setting ourselves up to fail and not just to fail ourselves, but to fail our partners as well, and to make unreasonable demands for other people.
It's not anybody's job to make me happy. It's not possible to make me happy a lot of the time when I'm experiencing depression, I'm not going to be happy. That's just not a thing that's going to happen. Doesn't mean I'm not in love, it doesn't mean I'm unlovable or that I can't be engaged in the projects that make my life meaningful. When I'm talking about eudaimonic love, I'm trying to talk about the ways that say, when I experience depression I was very aware of the role that my partners were playing in supporting me, keeping me on an even keel, making sure I was eating.
Keeping the idea alive in me that the work I was doing was worth something, because-- I say this too, I think a lot of people might have seen that the work was making me sad and said, "Give up because you're sad." That would've been to place happiness as the goal of my work or my life, and it isn't. Happiness is not the goal of my life for me personally, it's not the goal of my work to make myself happy. My part is being able to see that and say, "Okay, so yes, this work makes you sad. I still see why it's important and I will still support you to do it, and I will make sure that it's possible for you."
That was when I saw eudaimonic love happening. That was what inspired me to try to get this theory together that talked about what that value was about that collaboration in the project of the work that I was doing and that we were doing together. Even though the emotional side of things was honestly pretty dire, that didn't make it less eudaimonic.
Dedeker: I appreciate that real-world example. I'm here thinking about my own relationships. If I use my relationships with like, Jase and Emily as an example. It's like, Oh, well very clearly we've had an eight-year-long project, multiple projects that we've been working on together that's really kept us going, and I think really has been part of the very fundamental glue in our relationship as business owners and in our individual relationships and so on and so forth.
I'm also thinking of people who are listening to this and having that question of, what's the project that I'm sharing with my partner? Especially if we're not necessarily wanting to raise a child together, or not necessarily aiming to buy a home together, something like that. I think this also intersects with a lot of people who are not in escalator relationships and are wondering, but what are we working towards? I guess I'm wondering from a real-world perspective, it's like, do you have more examples of that or ways that you think people can help to start determining that for themselves?
Carrie: I think that's a great question. Really, all the examples are potentially misleading because everyone's answer has to be really very unique and tailored to them and their situations. That said, not every goal is a huge goal. Sometimes the goal is breakfast, that's good. Some days that's it, you're good if you get that far you're doing really well. I'm not meaning to suggest that this has to be you're going to write an opera or paint the Sistine chapel it can be literally anything as long as it means something to you. For a lot of people, it can be something like artistic meditative practice where they just have to get a paintbrush out and put it on the paper once a day.
For some people the goal of a relationship could be as simple as keeping a garden going, making something beautiful happen in your backyard or on your window box. It doesn't need to be anything grand, it doesn't have to be a great contribution to the world. It just has to be something that means something to you. It could be that you support other people who are going through a rough time in small personal ways but that mean something.
There's a inspiration for this comes partly out of business ethics and management studies. This idea of job crafting, where people who are in employment are given a job description but then they craft it to make it coherent more with their values and what makes the work feel meaningful to them, not everybody does this but some people do it. One of the original inspirations for this theory was a janitor in a hospital who would move the paintings around on the walls to help prompt patient recovery. It was not part of her job description but she'd say well no, that's part of me to do something like that.
I think of love that way. I talk about love crafting meaning you'd take this job description of romantic partner or whatever and then you tweak it to make it into something that means something to you and whatever it is that makes you feel that. We all get it from something this click of a feeling of satisfaction that you've contributed something, you've made a difference to someone. It might be that you've made a successful business happen for years and years and years or it might be that you've gotten breakfast. It's size doesn't matter here, it's not about that.
Emily: As it were.
Dedeker: Yes, so it's really striking me and I feel like I learned this from this podcast and having so many conversations about this topic and conversations with wonderful guests like you. How important it is to connect to your values as an individual and together with your partners as well connecting to what is actually meaningful here. As we talked about that a lot, if people go back and listen to episode 319 that was all about that. That came up in our interview with Lola Phoenix in 378 about finding your anchor. As you're sharing that it's striking me how important that work is.
Carrie: That's the part that everybody is different on. This is why the one size fits all idea about relationships is such a disaster. Especially the one size fits all and that one size is the happy ever aftermath. It's like that size fits almost nobody, I'm not sure if it fits anyone at all but when you come to this question about what do you replace it with then, then we get this almost like an existential panic about what do we replace it with. It is a scary moment when you realize no one is going to tell me what to do with my life, what to do in my relationships, what we should do with our lives.
It's the same question as what should I do with my life? What should we do with our time together? It doesn't have to be that it's a whole life it might be shorter period of time. It might not be a grand project, it might just be what does it mean to be in this connection, in this relationship, and to be good diamonds, be good-spirited.
Jase: Just a quick question because you call it love crafting, I assume there's also some ancient tomes or pacts you're making with elder gods.
Emily: Witchcrafting, yes.
Carrie: I wasn't going to mention those and there's a lot of spooky stuff. Certain amount of tentacle action is involved.
Jase: Okay, good.
Emily: Amazing. Well, I feel like we could continue this conversation forever. I was so struck by the beauty of this idea of creating a project with your partner, and how-- immediately my mind was like, "Wait, what does she mean by project, like doing some science project or something," but it could literally mean anything whatever that is.
It is this idea of life's work and how lovely that is that we can undertake that with a variety of people and that that will because it is work be challenging and be emotionally fraught at times. Also, be wonderful and fill one with happiness and also sadness and it was .
Dedeker: It means you have people on your team for whatever happens in that process.
Carrie: Absolutely, and how wonderful that is as well. Did either of the two of you have anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up?
Dedeker: I don't know Carrie, you got to come back on our show more frequently than or maybe it's your fault you need to put out a book more often .
Carrie: If I had done this one in three years I would have that because I think honestly it took that long for these ideas to settle properly sometimes that's how it goes.
Jase: We do want to say to our audience that in addition to just all these great ideas and the fact that Carrie's thinking about all of these things, she's also a really great writer. The writing in the book itself is also fantastic and sorry to compliment you so much right in front of you here . Really truly just beautiful writing as well so definitely recommend this to everyone.
Carrie: Thank you that means a lot.
Emily: Just before you go what's next on the horizon for you and where can people find more of you and your work-
Jase: And this book.
Emily: Where can they purchase this book?
Carrie: The book should be available wherever.
Emily: Where books are sold.
Carrie: Whichever fine local independent bookstore you choose to go to is good for me, it's pretty much available in all usual places. My website is carriejenkins.net and I'm Carrie Jenkins on Twitter as well. What's next for me? I'm in the early stages of planning a second novel. I've published one and I'm co-authoring a second novel about academia and academic life. I have another short book on non-monogamy and happiness in the works that's under contract now and hopefully should be appearing on my screen any minute now. Anytime it felt like showing up there would be great. Hopefully, that one would be hitting the presses in the next year or two as well.
Emily: Wonderful. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening our question of the week which will be on our Instagram stories is what projects do you want to undertake with your partner or partners?