Where the Grass is Really Greener
Where the Grass is Really Greener
Don't be too Quick to Move from a Nice, Green Spot
Over the course of my life, I’ve run across three married couples that have made me think, “Wow, they are just perfectly matched! It’s like hand and glove! What a great couple!”
Two of those couples have since gotten divorced, which is both a bit scary and depressing.
In any case, recently, I heard one of the women from those divorced couples actually say, “The grass is greener where you water it.” It was kind of interesting that she said that, since, as far as I know, she was the one who filed for divorce in her marriage – and yes, there were kids involved. So naturally, I was thinking, “Why weren’t you watering your grass in that marriage that looked so good from the outside then?”
Who can say for sure, right? She still seems to be in contact with her ex and relatively friendly with him, which is an indication that he probably wasn’t some secret monster. Certainly, I don’t know either her or her husband well enough to ask the hard questions needed to get to the bottom of that, but I couldn’t help but think about something relationship expert Esther Perel likes to say about how modern relationships are different from the ones people had a few decades ago:
“Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?” - Mating in Captivity
Our expectations of our partners have never been so high. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, and respectability—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We want to “marry our best friend,” our confidant on all matters, someone to whom we should be able to tell everything. And, for that matter, they should not only be a stellar co-parent, they should also be a savvy co-decorator, a skilled sous chef, a financial whiz, a motivated jogging partner, and a devilishly funny gossip—depending on what we need that day. But, why are we relying on one person to fill so many roles?
Getting away from any specific cases, how many divorces today are purely a case of, “The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence?” In other words, they’re just a case of that tension a lot of people feel between the delights and obligations of marriage and the freedom and wants of being single.
If things are boring at home and there’s some beautiful secretary or attractive tennis instructor making goo-goo eyes at you, it can be easy to imagine something different. Of course, maybe it’s not even that.
Maybe it’s just that a lot of people get tired of the flaws their partner has, the never-ending compromises it requires to make things work, or things they feel obligated to do. “Is this really what I signed up for? Doing the laundry for a husband and two kids who don’t even say thank you when I wash their clothes?” Certainly, trivialities like that are far from the cause of all divorces, but is it really at the root of a lot of them? You have to think so, right?
Similarly, how many people have been fired, gone somewhere else, and then started doing all the work in the new place that they had stopped doing before? Maybe it wasn’t the job, maybe it was your attitude about the job. If you had worked like that in your old job, you wouldn’t have gotten fired.
In politics, I always think about this principle whenever I hear a conservative say, “We need a conservative third party!” Why would anyone think that would help? If you’re not willing to show up for the boring, local political meetings, knock on doors, fundraise, and do all the other tedious grunt work it takes to get control of the Republican Party, why would you think creating a new party would do the trick?
At the end of the day, it’s the people watering the grass who end up making the decisions. You might think that’s not fair. “I don’t have 40 hours a week to dedicate to this” or “I don’t have the big money to donate to get these politicians to pay attention,” but the people that do would show up and take over the new party as well.
How many people’s friendships have disintegrated not because of any big thing, but because they stopped doing the basic maintenance to keep it going? You have some minor fight, or you just get distracted and suddenly it has been a few months since you’ve connected and even if you do call at that late date, things feel awkward. What do you do next? You do all the work you weren’t doing on that friendship in a NEW friendship to replace the friendship you let lapse. Who’s done that before? I certainly have.
Along similar lines, how many times have all of us tried to pick up some new skill, realized it’s hard because “duh,” it’s new, and next thing you know, it has fallen by the wayside? Yet, when you think about the things you’re genuinely good at, how much time and effort did you put into them? Typically, an awful lot. Then, it’s “Gee, why wasn’t I able to learn to build a computer? How come I’m so bad at tennis? Why is it I freeze up every time I try to have a conversation with a girl I like?” Because you’re not watering your grass. You spent five minutes doing it, it got hard, and you gave up.
Meanwhile, if you want to get better at something, hold on to a relationship, or create something new, you’re going to have to water that grass with no guarantee it will all work out. After all, sometimes you do water the grass, but the soil is too rocky or your dog looks at all the nice, fresh grass seed and decides that’s a great place to dig.
Yet and still, once you pick a nice green spot you want to be, don’t be too quick to change to another spot. Often, you’ll grow a lot more green grass by staying in place and watering than you will chasing the phantom of green grass somewhere else.