My father’s secret for an ideal marriage
Congress should act to permanently protect Bears Ears and Grand Staircase.
My parents were married for 46 years. Right up until my dad died 10 years ago, he lived by a simple maxim: On all matters, big and small, my mother was right. When she embarked on difficult personal journeys, it was because they were necessary. When she took daring professional leaps and suffered great setbacks, they were only temporary. In every conflict and argument in which my mother found herself embroiled, my dad was on her side. This wasn’t a strategic decision he made to purchase domestic harmony. He genuinely thought of her as the Delphic Oracle. He was all in.
Regardless of whether such unswerving faith was good for my mother, I have come to realize it was very good for my father. His delusional belief in her allowed him to lead a very happy married life. If my mother were a psychopath, having such a loyal conspirator could have led to disaster. But in the ordinary choices that families make — where to live, how to raise children, what to eat for dinner — my father’s simple faith in my mother’s infallibility meant many important decisions got made quickly, easily and without recrimination.
Many couples unwittingly undermine each other because they lack such simple faith. This is especially true when both halves of a couple have strong views. When you think you’re the expert on something, and your partner does too, this can be a recipe for conflict.
This is bad news when you consider we live in a world increasingly dominated by “assortative mating,” a fancy way of saying that people tend to marry others who are like themselves. (This is why you have so many lawyers married to other lawyers, or writers married to other writers.) Many dating apps, in fact, try to match you with people who are exactly like yourself, which is great until you find “the narcissism of small differences” can turn trivial disagreements into vicious conflicts. (You like Joseph Conrad? What are you, a Nazi?)
My father was spared all of that. He was convinced that his wife had impeccable taste in music and books, and that she was infallible when it came to how my sister and I were raised in southern India. My father came from very humble beginnings and suffered great physical and professional setbacks in his life, but the anchor of his marriage — his belief that he was in an ideal marriage — meant he died happy.
To be clear, I am not suggesting you should just hand over all your keys to your partner. Being overly trusting can sometimes get you in trouble. There is much to be said for evaluating partners carefully and thinking through whether you are compatible. Some people are better matches than others; when it comes to romance, people who drive you nuts on Day One are best avoided.
But too many people, especially those who are highly educated, imagine that finding a partner with whom they will be happy over a lifetime is a matter of insight. As they stare into a lover’s eyes over Valentine’s Day dinner, they imagine it is possible to know whether they are with the “right” person. Sadly, this is impossible.
Not only is your partner going to be different 46 years down the line, you are going to be very different in a few decades. What you want now will not be what you want then. Over time, aspects of your personality will inevitably drive your partner bonkers. And no matter how compatible you think you are, any partner you choose will at some point cause you to question your judgment.
Most relationships, accordingly, benefit from a certain degree of self-deception. At some point, successful relationships involve transitioning from being with the one you want, to wanting the one you’re with. People in successful relationships are not those who have partners without flaws. Rather, they are people who discount their partners’ flaws and accentuate their partners’ virtues. They embrace “useful delusions” about each other.
If you want to be happy, you can do worse than to have my father’s simple faith in my mother. His wisdom, of course, is reflected in religious texts, such as the passage from Corinthians that is often quoted in marriage ceremonies: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not selfseeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
If you are not religious, perhaps I can offer you a secular saint instead. Here is Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s advice for a happy marriage: “It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.”
His faith in my mother’s infallibility was a useful delusion that all happy unions need to have to some degree.
There’s a painful axiom in the conservation community: “To protect land, you have to win the same battle over and over again.”
The fight for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments has resumed. It never really ended.
When President Trump eviscerated these Utah preserves in December 2017, Grand Staircase had been a national monument for more than 20 years. Bears Ears was new, established by President Obama in 2016, and acclaimed as a historic gesture of healing and respect toward the five Native American nations that had proposed the preserve and would share in its management. Trump’s directive reduced the size of Bears Ears by 85%, Grand Staircase by half.
Joe Biden campaigned on the pledge to fully restore both monuments. He has already initiated the process, asking the Department of the Interior to review the boundaries and make recommendations.
And so here we are, once again called to speak on behalf of building cultural and environmental resilience in red rock country, to support and renew what were historic acts of conservation.
In a joint statement, Utah’s Republican congressional delegation, governor and legislative leaders predictably decried Biden’s plan for the monuments. They grumble that “land management actions have often been done to us rather than with us” in the “two-thirds of our backyard” that “belongs to the federal government.” The officials ask federal authorities to collaborate, to work with “state and local elected leaders toward a consensus product.”
That sounds reasonable, but the history of interactions with these officials belies their claim of good-faith collaboration. Their states-rights pro-extraction values preclude the deliberative give-andtake they now self-righteously request.
They are tragically consistent with their political forebears.
When Utah Gov. George Clyde pondered the slickrock spires in the then-proposed Canyonlands National Park in 1961, he rejected protection, saying, “We are a mining state. We might need this as building stone.”
When President Lyndon Johnson expanded Capitol Reef National Monument sixfold in 1969, the tiny neighboring town of Boulder,
Utah, briefly changed its name to Johnson’s Folly.
When President Clinton proclaimed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996 without public hearings, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch called his action “the mother of all land grabs.”
And so President Obama took note. In 2016, he gave Utah citizens and state political and tribal leaders the chance to work out a just compromise for protecting public lands on the Colorado Plateau. Obama refrained from executive action until the last weeks of his administration, patiently waiting for success at the negotiating table. But when Utah officials continued to push for rampant fossil fuel extraction instead of conservation in the state’s southeast corner, the tribes walked away in protest.
Finally, Obama used the Antiquities Act to designate Bears Ears National Monument. Although monument status expanded protection only on federal land, leaving private land untouched, Utah officials nonetheless raised the familiar cry, declaring another land grab. (Grand Staircase’s monument designation likewise affected only federal lands.)
And here we go again. Because Chris Stewart is my congressman, and Grand Staircase lies within his district, I’ll focus on this monument and this
representative.
In a debate last fall, Stewart proclaimed, “The presumption of many is that the people in Utah are just too stupid or too ill-willed to manage their lands.” His muchcriticized bill to create an Escalante Canyons National Park from fragments of the diminished Trump monument would grant local county commissioners management of federal lands.
But these lands have never been Utah’s to manage. Indigenous homelands first, then claimed by Spain and Mexico in turn, Utah’s public lands have been under the shared ownership of all Americans since 1847. Stewart and his allies in the state simply do not believe in this fundamental fact. Instead, they consider Utah the rightful owner of U.S. public lands. These officials do not make fair partners in negotiating the future of the Colorado Plateau.
Biden has no real choice but to move on without them. When he does, he’ll find that the reasoning in the Clinton proclamation leading to Grand Staircase’s original size and shape remains sound.
Scientists drew the 1996 Grand Staircase boundaries carefully. They embraced a sufficient range of habitats, soils and biodiversity to allow for robust research on plant speciation and plant-community dynamics. The monument’s
corridors for wildlife migration and dispersal create crucial connections to surrounding protected lands. The monument’s expansive size helps secure the longterm ecological health of the entire region.
The Clinton proclamation acknowledged “exemplary opportunities” for paleontological discovery. A generation of research has verified the monument’s promise, transforming our understanding of the Age of Dinosaurs.
And now we have additional imperatives to fully protect this landscape at scale.
The Colorado Plateau will experience hotter temperatures, more severe droughts and increased variability in precipitation through the 21st century. Grand Staircase’s size and biodiversity — it is the most species-rich protected area in Utah — may shield some plants and animals from the worst effects of climate change.
As extinction threatens ecosystems across the globe, “arks” such as Grand Staircase-Escalante may become the refuges from which species can spread to recolonize surrounding areas whose flora and fauna falter. By interlocking with other designated federal lands, from Bryce Canyon National Park to Bears Ears, a fully protected Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will mitigate
global warming, provide a carbon sink, protect watersheds, springs and seeps, and prevent wholesale extinctions.
Grand Staircase’s representative in Congress, Stewart, barely acknowledges climate change as real — he certainly does not acknowledge it as the existential threat it truly poses to humanity. He manages just a 3% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters.
To advance conservation and address climate change, Biden has vowed to rely on science. Utah’s Republican elected leaders, with their commitment to extractive industries and their mistrust of “big” government, have other agendas. The president should not hesitate to restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by proclamation.
And, to put an end to an endless ping-pong of executive orders and court actions, Congress should then pass legislation confirming Biden’s actions for both monuments. Only by making Bears Ears and Grand Staircase impervious to any future president who might wish to reduce their size can we safeguard their future.