When churches and bowling leagues disappeared, we started asking our jobs and partners to provide everything: friendship, purpose, loyalty, belonging. The speaker argues this is impossible. Thriving relationships and leadership require deliberate effort, a principle we've forgotten in how we treat friendships and community.
Chapters
If you go back to the '50s and '60s, you were in the bowling league and you made friends there. You attended church. You got your sense of belonging from faith. You did actually have barbecues with your neighbors. And work was the place that you— Work. That you worked and made a living and you didn't ask more. The only thing, the relationship to work was, I'll be loyal to you and you'll be loyal to me. I'll give you my whole career and you take care of me and I'll get a gold watch at the end. And so over the course of time, church membership declined, the bowling leagues disappeared, we don't have barbecues with our neighbors anymore, and so what we started asking, we started asking work to fill all the gaps. We said, "Okay, work, I want my friendships, I want my relationships at work, I want my social life at work, I want a sense of purpose and belonging at work. Oh, and by the way, now you have to agree with my politics as well." Right? Oh, and no loyalty to you and no loyalty— Just to me. —from me. Right. There's no loyalty either way. And so we put massive amounts of pressure on work that is impossible. Ironically, we do the same thing to our relationships, you know, which is— and I wonder if it's for similar reasons, which is we're asking our romantic partners to be everything, offer everything, perfect companionship, perfect intellectual compatibility, you know. Everything all the time. It's too much for one person to bear. Like, we don't invest the same attention to friendship that we do to other relationships. When I talk to my favorite, favorite couples, like, there's people, there's couples that I know who are like, when I look at them, I'm like, I want a relationship like that. You're my favorite relationship. Um, if you ask all successful couples, what is your secret? They all say the same thing. It's hard work, and we do the work. It's hard work and we do the work. If you talk to great leaders and you ask them, "What's your secret?" They say, "It's hard work and we do the work." When you talk to friends, nobody says, "It's hard work and I do the work." It just doesn't happen. Now, some people do, but not enough people recognize that maintaining relationships, all relationships, requires effort and it's difficult.
