Love’s habit of derailing healthy habits
The other night I woke up around 2 a.m. to throw up. I either had food poisoning or was rejecting the drive-thru nonfood that I’d eaten 12 hours before. It was the first day of a delayed summer vacation and I had just broken a super-restrictive anti-anxiety diet that limited caffeine and sugar and some less-obvious nutritional boogiemen.
It was a gross and perfect demonstration of the cycle that I find myself in, where I carefully consider what I want, and what I need, and build a suite of lifestyle habits that will give it to me.
I wake up early — right now my alarm is set for 5 a.m., but at one point it’s been set for 4 a.m. — I drink lemon water, meditate, eat 30 grams of protein, take supplements in pill and powder form. Then there is nail care, skin care, hair care and flossing. Next it’s yoga, and apple-cider vinegar, no phones in the bedroom, and remembering that everyone I meet is fighting a great battle. And that’s all theoretical, most days, because doing your best is doing a lot.
All of the habits I’m working on are curated from my own experience and personal investigations — self-tracking and biohacking, as per the new world — and whatever my naturopath tells me to do. They aren’t goop-inspired aspira- tions (uh, mostly) but the settled science of myself. I maybe get it half-right, or a quarter, most of the time.
The way people tell it, relationships are about supporting each other. Before even “fun” and “sex” and “sharing the enormous financial and logisti- cal burden of adult life,” it seems like people want someone to just do life with. I do.
Relationships, then, should be set up to prioritize our chosen habits: like, shouldn’t my husband — who like every good partner wants his partner to be happy and well — meditate with me instead of semi-sweetly bringing home tabloids and tacos when I’ve had a bad day?
Like, never, and it’s because we don’t necessarily agree on what healthy habits are, or on their relative value, or on the relative value of abandoning them sometimes to do what our lizard brain really wants to do — and the lizard, in my experience, is always wearing sunglasses and cracking open a beer.
Dating, too, is notoriously ruinous to the habits that keep brains and bodies in working order, messing with spending, sleeping, eating, drinking and sometimes throwing in a dark emotional undertow. When you’re single and supposed to be “doing you,” some stranger’s whims can drive a Saturday’s worth of decisions. Friendship does this, too, unless you’re exclusively meeting up for interval training and iced peppermint teas.
But marriage is worse. Being with someone so much, and ideally, so contentedly, that your days and interests and selves start to mesh is the usual goal of marriage and its equivalents, but the same things that make that relationship work — spending quality time together on vacation and quantity time together on the reg — can destroy what each person needs to be their best self, or live their version of a best life, if that’s what they’re shooting for.
And, shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t anyone with the internal and external resources be setting up their lives to be as happy, healthy, successful, free, loving, generous, whatever-better as possible? In both the contexts of our lives alone, and in relationships, we just don’t, usually.
Even with everything I have — enough privilege, time, agency and information to develop philosophies on skin care — so much of what I consciously choose to do — eat vacation food, because “I’m on vacation!” — defeat the habits that would take me somewhere I really want to go.