Relationship Known Issues

You don’t have to fix everything all at once, which is good, because you can’t

Therapist as Sapience Reliability Engineer

I worked in tech before I was a relationship therapist, and sometimes concepts from one world leak into the other. Things I have actually said to some of my techier clients:

“What’s your SLA on answering each other’s texts?”

“Have you tried having a weekly stand-up with your wife to talk about the upcoming calendar?”

“With four kids, what’s the mean time to failure? That is, how often are they all in a good mood at the same time? And then how long does that last?”

I’m very lucky to live in a world where I get to cross the streams like this and get paid for it!

Relationship Known Issues

One of my better crossovers is Relationship Known Issues.

In software, a Known Issue is a flaw or a defect in the software that the development team already knows about, and may or may not have any immediate plans to fix. I ran a search just now on [microsoft word known issues] and clicked the first link that came up, and discovered that “Office documents open slower after Windows 10 Fall Creators Update” because the antivirus software gets a little too aggressive. Microsoft has known about this issue for almost three years at the time of this writing and they don’t seem to have fixed it yet. Either it’s hard to fix or it just doesn’t matter that much - but they get enough complaints about it that it’s listed on the Known Issues site.

Relationships have Known Issues too!

One of my partners likes to hang out with me in the kitchen when I’m cooking or cleaning in there. We’ll get to talking as I work, and he’ll sort of mill around, blocking where I need to go next. I don’t know how he does it. It’s uncanny how well he can predict where I want to go and then use that information in the opposite of the way I would prefer. He’s not doing it on purpose, I think?

We laugh about it. We both know it keeps happening, it’s much more funny than irritating, and it doesn’t feel hurtful or personal. I doubt we’ll ever adopt a better way to co-exist in the kitchen, this is probably just the way it is. It’s a Known Issue.

That example is pretty innocuous, but there are tougher ones.

The couple who has agreed not to have a child, but one partner continues to grieve the loss of that possibility. The decision is made, but the grief is a Known Issue.

The couple who lives in a one-bedroom apartment, and one can’t sleep because the other one snores. None of the easy fixes have worked. The snoring is a Known Issue.

The couple with mismatched libidos. One person just wants a lot more sex than the other one does, and managing the difference is hard. The desire discrepancy is a Known Issue. (I have a lot more to say about this particular issue - I have a podcast coming out in the spring about it.)

Can you Ship with Known Issues?

A lot of people implicitly believe that a good relationship shouldn’t have any Known Issues, that all problems are solvable, that there’s always a way to compromise, and that once you’ve found the right compromise, the problem will truly be gone, fixed, cleared away.

That mindset is helpful, at first - because many problems can actually be solved! My kitchen opens out onto another room. Maybe my partner could learn to mill around outside my work area and not get in my way! (Huh. We should probably actually try that.) Striving for better is good!

But people run into trouble when they expect a solution, feel entitled to a solution, and don’t notice that there just isn’t one within reach. (Related essay by Duncan Sabien: Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options)

Take the case of the couple with snoring. The quieter sleeper wants two things that don’t go together: she wants to sleep next to her partner in the only bedroom in their home, and she wants it to be tranquil in their bedroom. This couple already did the striving part and exhausted (pun intended) the easy fixes. They can think of trickier fixes: Sinus surgery! CPAP machine! Bigger apartment with separate bedrooms! But for this couple, none of those fixes are within financial reach. Now what?

A lot of people start to slip into anger, resentment, rage, guilt, and animosity over issues like this. The quieter sleeper just wants her partner to be different, and is angry that he’s not. Her gentle nudges to roll over become pokes and then shoves as she gets more and more sleep-deprived. The snorer might get angry in response, he might feel guilt and then shame that he’s causing such a big problem for his partner, or he might vacillate between anger and shame. Both people begin to take it personally, as if the existence of the Snoring Problem implies that someone here doesn’t care, is slacking, is doing it wrong, and is generally a fuck-up.

I can’t fix their snoring any better than they can. But I can help them look at it in a better way.

When you look at a problem as a Known Issue, as something both of you have already strived about but haven’t been able to budge, it gets less personal. The problem becomes external to the two of you rather than a flaw in one of you. It is still very much a problem. The quieter sleeper is still exhausted, and that needs to be addressed somehow. But it’s something the couple can tackle together without animosity or blame. When you take the judgment out of it, the problem gets easier to talk about and work with.

You can also triage your Known Issues, because you probably have a lot of them. Most people do. It’s not a red flag, it’s not a sign that you can’t be happy together. It’s just… stuff that doesn’t work quite as well as you wish. Maybe as circumstances change, you’ll have the resources to fix some of the Known Issues after all, or maybe some of them will fall by the wayside as your priorities change.

And with the issues triaged, you can learn to co-exist, you can learn to cope, you can learn to be flexible and do the best you can with what you’ve got. You can learn to work on one or two things at a time and let the rest ride for now. You can learn to be okay even though not everything is ideal. What a relief for both of you, to stay in connection with each other despite the ways you don’t match perfectly.

What About Showstoppers?

In software, a showstopper is a flaw so bad, you can’t ship that software. If it’s already in production, you need to roll it back. Your service is crashing and your uptime doesn’t have even a single 9 and all the rest of the KPIs are tanking too and you’re not going to hit any of your OKRs for the quarter and you’re hosed.

(Side note: if you want help figuring out how to get more 9s of uptime for your relationship, email me, I’m the therapist for you.)

Relationships have showstoppers too! They’re more often called “dealbreakers,” but same idea.)

When a Known Issue is bad enough, it might be time to break up. It’s certainly worth checking. But if you value your partner as a human, if you have mutual respect, if you truly want the best for each other, but you’re just not sure if you actually work as a couple, looking at problems as Known Issues can help. As often as possible, try to look at differences as incompatibilities, as places you don’t mesh with each other, rather than as character flaws.

Thinking back to the couple who were torn about whether to have a child: if the one who yearned to be a parent finds they can’t move past their grief, this couple may be better off breaking up. But if they can do that without blame, if they can support each other in pursuing different paths, that’s a kinder and gentler way to be.

Appendix: More Things I’ve Actually Said to Therapy Clients

“Before you start trying to date again, maybe you should do some formal requirements gathering about what you want in a girlfriend.”

“Your system is underprovisioned.”

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Don’t try to solve her problem yet, listen more first.”

“Communication is hard. When she said that, you could barely even tokenize it, much less interpret it.”

“Consider that other people might be optimizing a different function than you are.”