This past weekend, I heard an interesting - and potentially very helpful - tip about marriage: If you and your spouse have a problem with your marriage, try to figure out how to fix it. You and your spouse are a team working to solve the problem instead of being at odds with one another. This is, of course, standard fare for marriage advice. The fascinating way is how it was phrased: Treat the marriage as a third entity. Sit down - you, your spouse and the marriage - and figure out how to fix the problem in the marriage.
Well, let's think about this. Before they met, the two partners in the marriage certainly didn't constitute a separate entity. After they met and formed a relationship, and especially after they were married, they had responsibilities to each other. But these responsibilities can be seen from a different perspective: The commitments involved are not to the partner, per se, but to the health of the relationship itself. This is a more succinct and, to be frank, much more elegant way of looking at relationships, not in terms of individual responsibilities to others, but in terms of individual responsibilities to the relationship.
This chain of reasoning doesn't apply just to relationships; it generalizes to any situation where individuals work together. Whenever humans interact, there is an implied (or, as the case may be, explicit) standard of behavior (i.e., each human has responsibilities to every other human with whom he interacts). As with the two-person relationship, this set of responsibilities can be seen as commitments to the body of people as a whole with whom a given person may interact.
In some sense, a relationship involves a contract between two people. Marriage makes this contract explicit, of course, but a certain standard of behavior is generally assumed, married or unmarried: don't cheat, don't lie, don't be abusive, etc. Similarly, a certain standard of behavior is generally assumed in a person's relationship with all the humans in the society. This is what is known as the "social contract."
Consequently, we all have responsibilities to each other, whether we've met or not. From a different perspective, because we all form the society, we have responsibilities to the society as a whole. These responsibilities include paying taxes, voting, driving on the right side of the road and not killing people. It would be difficult to list them all, because they're almost unconsciously imbued within us from the day we're born. In fact, people who don't recognize this commitment to society give normal people a sense of vague horror; they're known as sociopaths.
So the next time you fight with your significant other, ask her (or him, as the case may be), "What can we do to solve this problem in our relationship?" And the next time you think about a political, social or economic issue, ask, "What can we do to solve this problem with our society?" As inherently social animals, we would all do well to recognize our responsibilities to the social entities we form through our relationships.
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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