Knowable Again

Part One

Many of the senior people I work with describe, at some point in our first few conversations, a version of the same relationship.

It is not a bad relationship. That is the part that makes it hard to name. If it were a bad relationship, they would know what to do, because the culture around them has a whole vocabulary for bad relationships, and they are intelligent and capable people who would deploy it. They would see someone. They would have a conversation. They would make a decision. They would act.

This is not that. This is a relationship that is entirely intact on the surface and quietly stopped being a place of discovery at some point they cannot exactly identify. They both know where the lines are, which subjects go unmentioned, and which arguments are not worth having because they have already been had without resolution. The relationship runs on rails. It runs efficiently. It runs, in many ways, beautifully.

What it does not do any more is surprise either of them.

The thing neither of them is saying is that they can no longer tell the difference between loving their partner and being familiar with their partner. The two have blurred. Love, in the early years, involved wanting to know the other person more. Over time, the wanting-to-know has been replaced by knowing, and the knowing has been replaced by assuming, and the assuming has slowly been replaced by something harder to name. It is a kind of mutual administration, in which two capable people run a complex joint operation whose core function used to be each other and is now the operation itself.

Neither of them is the villain here. Both of them love each other, often deeply. Neither of them is leaving. What has happened is not a breakdown. It is a slow, sophisticated adaptation that has worked so well it has replaced the thing it was meant to protect.

Part Two

What goes missing, when two intelligent people settle into a long relationship, is the specific experience of being knowable.

Being known is easy, and it accumulates naturally over the years. Your partner knows your order at the restaurant and your pattern when a trip is tiring. Being known is an accumulation of data about you that builds with time. It is useful, and it is often loving. It is not the same thing as being knowable.

Knowable is a present-tense capacity. It is the ongoing willingness to let the person next to you encounter a version of you they have not met before. It requires that there be a version of you they have not met, which in turn requires that you are still moving, still noticing, still being surprised by what is going on inside yourself, and still bringing it to them while it is alive rather than reporting on it later, edited, after the fact.

What most senior people lose, in the long grind of running a high-performing life, is their own knowability. It is not that they are hiding. It is that there is nothing live to bring. They are running on rails too. The inside has gone quiet, and you cannot be knowable when the inside has gone quiet, because there is nothing new to be known.

I have seen this happen in the work in a way that is almost undramatic. Nothing visible to anyone outside the relationship changes. What changes is that two people in a long relationship, after several months of one of them doing internal work, start to be slightly surprising to each other again. That slow return of surprise is something many people in long relationships genuinely want and have not been able to name.

Continue reading: You Are the Ceiling →

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