Matthew and Stephen Hussey explain what makes someone relationship material: how you act at a party. They use Chris Rock's tambourine story as a metaphor for the balance between supporting your partner and maintaining your own presence in a crowd.
When you first start dating someone, what I find is there's always this moment when you're going to take them into a crowd of people. You've done all your time in your little bubble of love together and you decide, hey, we should probably go and actually interact with the rest of the world now. And you take them to a party or some event and there's such a wonderful moment if you see that they just hold their own in that event and they, you know, obviously you want them to also show they're with you and, hey, I'm proud with this person. And, you know, we've got that, you know, we're showing each other off sort of thing. But there's that kind. I feel like it's a perfect simulacrum, if you will, of the idea of, like, dependence and Independence. together.
Well, I think that the competence that's needed for that is the ability to hold your own in conversation, make conversation with someone nearby, be comfortable just chilling in a room. But the deeper, the deeper reason for that is that you're good at paying attention to your partner's needs, that you can go in a room and recognize the moment when your partner needs help and needs you to be by their side because they're a little nervous. Moments when they need saving from a conversation and moments where they need to be left to a conversation. And where the best gift you could give them in that moment is to make yourself busy. That, to me, is another way of paying attention. not what do I need to feel comfortable right now in this room, but what does my partner need right now to have the best time? And then, of course, the ability to be on your own and not have a babysitter is really handy when you recognize that your partner happens to be all right at the moment and in a, you know, conversation or a story or whatever that doesn't need us or sometimes like, is having a conversation with a friend that they're catching up with where they actually could use a few minutes of space.
Yeah. And it can be like a beautiful unspoken gift. And in some ways it's like that is the it seems small, but it's like that is the stuff of relationships, right, that makes them work. It's like when, you know, the Chris Rock special that's called Tambourine and the whole you know, crux of that one point rests on this story he tells of that he wanted to, you know, at one point in his marriage before he divorced, it was like he thought, well, I make all the money and I'm like the, you know, I'm the alpha in this and it's about me and I'm the star sort of thing. And he realized that would, that just doesn't work. And you, you have to at some point, you have to play the tambourine at some point for someone else. And the tambourine being the person who sometimes is in the back just doing their thing and cheering the other on or supporting the other main act. And I feel like those acts are the moment where you think, ah, I've got someone I can, this works.
