Disclaimer: This is not relationship advice. If, after reading this essay, you decide to either end your relationship or propose to your significant other, I don’t assume any responsibility. Although, in the latter case, I congratulate you and expect you to send me some wedding photos.
I’m sure we’ve all heard that one piece of advice that’s often given to ambitious young people. Actually, maybe it’s not reserved just for the ambitious. Probably every young person has heard it at least once: If you want to accomplish anything above average in your life, don’t fall in love while you’re young.
It’s not actually about falling in love. It’s about not entering a serious, long-term relationship. It’s about not even giving yourself a chance to fall in love.
Why? Well, the point behind this advice is pretty straightforward. Committing to a long-term relationship means investing your time, energy, and attention into it. On the other hand, being above average in any pursuit, whether it's the arts, sports, business, or your chosen career path, requires dedicating above-average, often even extreme, amounts of time, energy, and attention to it. Through this lens, all of the internal resources that you invest in a relationship are viewed as resources that you could’ve invested in your pursuit but didn’t.
I regard most advice of this type as soulless. I oppose those who advise us to live our lives like investment bankers instead of like artists, explorers, and warriors.
But I also don’t want to deny the facts. As much as this advice is often presented in a cringeworthy, online business mentor-type way, the general idea behind it is simply true. I never intentionally followed this advice, but I’ve experienced how true it is firsthand. When you are single, the amount of effort you can put into your chosen pursuit is ridiculous. This is, of course, assuming that you have at least a basic understanding of skills such as consistency, self-discipline, and delayed gratification. But we’re not talking about them now. Really, I can’t stress enough the amount of work you can get done on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly level when your sole focus is your chosen pursuit. Besides this, another upside of being single is the risk that you can take. When you are on your own journey, the number of risks you can take and their magnitude are immensely greater compared to when you are building your life with someone else. For the reasons mentioned, being single is an unfair advantage if you want to be successful in some external pursuit.
But this is not an essay about me convincing you to be single. I just had to keep it real.
So, if these could be the reasons to say that falling in life is the worst thing for your (external) success, what could be the reason to call it the best thing?
To explain that, we need to start by pointing out one major flaw in this advice against falling in love.
As great as the benefits may be in the medium and short term, intentionally not falling in love for the sake of external success is either highly unrealistic or detrimental to your long-term well-being. It supposes that you’ll be able to dedicate yourself solely to an external pursuit and not share your life with another person for years and decades without becoming utterly miserable.
Let’s say you are single and super focused on your pursuit. You spend 10, 12, and sometimes even more hours per day working on it.
But at some point, you realize that you don’t want to be alone all the time.
No matter how dedicated you are to your pursuit, unless you are one of the few extreme cases who stay married to their craft, art, or work their whole life, you eventually recognize the need to share your journey with someone. You see that the world is full of externally successful but internally miserable people. You see people who waited to accomplish everything they wanted before giving themselves a chance to develop genuine connections, so now they’re 40+ years old trying to relive their twenties.
When you come to this realization, unless you want to give up on your pursuit, there is really only one thing you can do: dedicate the little free time that you have to meeting new people. If you didn’t have any free time up to that point, now you have to create some.
And there is nothing wrong with this. Recognizing this need to have someone in your life and deciding to use your free time to meet new people is a healthy response to the situation you are in.
But people underestimate how stressful and sometimes even exhausting this is. Even when you are living a "normal" life and have plenty of free time in the day, as most single people do, it’s already hard to find a suitable romantic partner. Now imagine what it looks like when you have a fraction of the free time that other people do and you are used to trying to maximize every minute of your day.
I don’t have to imagine the scenario I just laid out. Over the last couple of years, I’ve interacted with quite a few people in this exact same situation.
"Where to go out? How to meet new people? Should I go to that place again, or should I try a new one? Should I try this hobby or join that community? What would be better for meeting new people? I only have time for one of them." The list of questions and doubts goes on and on…
This is not to discourage you from trying to use the little free time that you have to meet new people. It’s to encourage you to pursue long-term relationships in that time rather than casual ones so that you can eventually get out of that loop.
Which finally brings us to why falling in love could be the best thing for your external success.
If advice against falling in love can presuppose that you are an emotionless robot, maybe advice for falling in love can presuppose something that’s, although not easy to find, still a little less unrealistic: finding a person who supports you in your pursuit.
As I said, it’s not easy. It’s not common. But if you look for them, examples are out there.
I would even argue that there are more exceptionally successful people who have managed to find a partner who understands and supports their ambition than there are those who have somehow shut off their basic human need for connection and have reached true fulfillment solely through external pursuits.
Let’s imagine this scenario for a moment, no matter how unrealistic it may seem to you right now. You have a partner who understands that you have ambitious goals, or even dreams, that you are not ready to give up on. They know that, quite often, you won’t be able to give them as much time and attention as the average person can. But they’ve also seen that this doesn’t mean you lack emotion. You’ve negotiated how to maximize your quality time together so that they don’t feel neglected and you don’t have to give up on your pursuit.
Can you imagine a scenario more conducive to achieving your goals? At the end of the day, most of the distractions you face on your journey are related to getting other people to like you and approve of you. When you have that one person that you care about and know cares about you and supports you, the vast majority of distractions disappear. You are able to focus on the task(s) in front of you better than ever.
However, not only is falling in love the most underrated "productivity hack." If they felt what it’s like to give and receive genuine love, a lot of highly ambitious people would find out that they are not as ambitious as they thought they were. They would realize that the purpose behind most of their external goals was, if achieved, to make them feel like they were finally enough. And the thing about love is that, even though you are (hopefully) always trying to grow as a person, the one who loves you makes you feel like you are enough at every moment and at every stage of your journey.
In order to stay as objective as I can be, I must acknowledge that there are people who manage to live fulfilling and meaningful lives without ever having the type of romantic relationship I described. After all, the journey to fulfillment and meaning is not, and shouldn’t be, the same for everyone.
I just hope I brought some balance to the conversation about achieving your goals since it’s been dominated by those who would have you believe that the only way to external success is to become a soulless machine.
Thank you for reading.
You can send your engagement and wedding photos in my instagram DMs or at recoveringoverthinker@gmail.com
P.S.
The importance of relationships and community is one of the topics we cover in the free (Re)Build course that starts on Monday, July 31st.
I may not be able to give you any tricks for how to seduce people, but in the course we cover some practical and actionable advice for structuring your life and routine in a way that supports developing genuine human connections.
Re)Build is a blueprint for a fulfilling and meaningful life molded by insight from psychology's and philosophy's finest minds, as well as from my real-world experience of using those insights to rebuild my own life. From Nietzsche to Maslow, from the Stoics, to the Zen Buddhists, to your favorite overthinker.
Click here to join. Once again, it’s free.
Subscribed
Free Resources:
My free ebook: The Lost Art of Reading
Paid Resources:
The Art of Showing Up: A Clear and Practical Method for Mastering Consistency
The Gold Pill: Timeless Ideas for a Life Worth Living
If you like my Existential Espresso writing, there is zero-cost support in the form of subscribing, liking this post, commenting if you have any thoughts on it, and of course sharing this with anyone who would find it interesting.
Or you can consider becoming a paid supporter of Existential Espresso for 5$ per month. By doing this you would be helping me to keep investing time into researching and writing all the content on the daily basis.
What you get by becoming a paid supporter is access to the members-only essays (such as “Why Having a Price on My Head Didn’t Upset Me”or “Why Living With a Bulletproof Vest is The Best Thing to Ever Happen to Me”), as well as an opportunity to recommend topics for future essays.
However, even taking the time out of your day to read what I have to share with you means more to me than you can imagine. Thank you.
This felt like some of your greatest writing.
You nailed it. I’m convinced a lot of noise goes away when you remove trying to attract a partner from the list of (conscious or unconscious) motivations.