A romantic relationship is an agreement.
The terms of such an agreement may be written or implied. Spoken or unspoken.
…but all romantic relationships are agreements.
Some agreements are monogamous. Others are not.
But all relationships are ultimately agreements, in one form or another.
…And all agreements yield outcomes.
For some relationships, the agreed-upon outcome is a house and children.
For others, it is an agreement to pleasure and support each other for its own sake, perhaps without children.
But all romantic relationships are, at their core, agreements intended to produce an outcome.
With this understanding in frame, a successful relationship occurs when the intended outcome of its agreement is achieved, while a failed relationship occurs when the intended outcome of the agreement is not achieved.
Simple.
“Cheating” occurs, then, whenever the terms of a romantic agreement are violated throughout the process of striving to achieve its intended outcome.
Even simpler.
No mysticism. No emotional blurriness. No needless complexity.
Instead, I present to you clean-cut, simply worded definitions that make romantic relationships, of any kind, analyzable and troubleshootable. Meta-analytically understandable with philosophical simplicity.
Thus, when speaking specifically of romantic relationships founded upon the intent to “build something,” the question is begged: what does that even mean?
This article will explore it.
What Is Your Romantic Net Worth?
To “build something in a relationship” means to come together as a team, with your mutual strengths and weaknesses, to produce a mutually desired outcome.
It doesn’t always have to mean children. Interpret my use of the term “desired outcome” as abstractly relative to the individuals in question.
This means that the “desired outcome” does not have to mean producing children, as you could be a heterosexual couple who love each other but are simply incapable of having children.
Or, perhaps you are capable of having children but merely don’t want them for whatever reason.
Or, you may be homosexual.
The list goes on.
There are plenty of outlier scenarios to consider, but the logic still applies: to build something in a relationship means when people come together as a team to produce a mutually desired outcome.
Simple.
However, for the sake of brevity and clarity, allow me the use of a traditional, heterosexual, nuclear family as an example.
A man and woman come together to build a desired outcome: Let’s say three children, financial independence through a family business, and a home.
The family business is the crux of the household; for with it, they are able to pay for the home and afford the expenses of the children.
So, in this case (similar to my own marriage, though I have a higher number of children), the marital union doubles as a business partnership.
The woman brings her respective skills to the table.
The man brings his respective skills to the table.
Each of their skills has an arguable, relative dollar value. And virtually all skills are outsourcable, substitutable, or replaceable in some way, shape, or form.
That may be jarring for some people to think about, but it is true.
For instance, let’s observe cooking skills. Regardless of who does the cooking in the household at any given time (as my wife and I both cook).
Theoretically, neither one of us has to cook; we could hire a cook to come to our home and cook for us. It wouldn’t be that expensive to do. Speaking as a former professional chef myself, you can hire a chef at a price ranging anywhere from minimum wage (merely $10 to $15 per hour) who will show up for an hour or two per day (or on whatever schedule you mutually agree to), cook what you like, and then leave.
…To live-in, six-figure annual salary chefs who are on-call year-round, specifically for you.
Every time you eat out at a restaurant, as well, is technically outsourcing one’s cooking responsibility. You are getting someone else to cook for you; in this case, “eating out” just means that you traveled to them instead of having them traveling to you.
In which case, at what price per hour would you rate your own cooking skills if you were to sell them? Personally, I’d charge $45 to $60 per hour for my cooking skills, as I have experience working at multiple restaurants when I was younger, and I am adroit at Asian foods as my specialty.
This means that every night I cook for my family, I am bringing anywhere from $45 to $180 of non-cash asset value, depending on how long it takes me to cook (which is usually anywhere between 1 to 3 hours, depending on what it is that I am cooking).
If I am cooking for my family every night of a 365-day year, let’s take the median number of hours spent cooking per night (being rounded to 2) to calculate what my annual delivery of value to my family would be:
$60/hr (2 hours x 365) = $43,800
So, according to this model, my cooking skills alone are worth $43,800 per year to my family.
Now, take the same economic reasoning and apply it to literally every skill you bring to the table of your family. Cooking may simply be one of them (assuming that you, the reader, cooks at all).
You may end up with a number somewhere close to several hundred thousand dollars, if even a figure above seven figures.
Now, sum it together with the income you generate for the family. That’s your romantic net worth.
According to this model, this means that even a stay-at-home mother would bring in similar value. Even if she doesn’t actually work, even if she doesn’t bring in a single literal dollar, her romantic net worth as an asset to the family may be well in the millions according to how valuable her traditional, maternal skills may be, such as cooking, housekeeping, babysitting/child rearing, emotionally supporting her family, etc. as it would cost you such money to outsource each of her skills to their respective professionals (e.g. a chef, babysitter, maid, therapist, etc.).
Even the act of childbirth has a dollar price. For instance, you could theoretically contract a surrogate mother overseas for about $70,000 to $150,000 to have a baby for you. Wealthy people struggling with fertility issues do it all the time; it’s actually a booming industry wherever it is legal.
This means that the woman who would give birth to the three children of the aforementioned hypothetical would arguably be bringing in an estimated total $210,000 to $450,000 in value to the relationship alone, on top of her other skills.
As such, viewing each spouse through this model is also how a man or woman can stop taking their spouse for granted, as well. They can use this model to think clearly, and realize what they will lose in such a partner if they were to break up with them. Understand what it is that you’d truly be letting go, or risk the loss of by cheating on them, abusing them, etc.
One’s spouse, or whoever it is that one may take for granted, may be worth more in the relationship than their counterpart may realize.
A relationship partner is truly toxic when, after performing a calculation like this, the spouse yields a negative value. Is the headache or harm they otherwise cause rateable at a higher integer than the total of their summed asset value, yielding a net negative familial worth?
For instance, if a man has a woman who sought a man who makes six figures and has so many other ducks in a row…
…yet, she doesn’t cook, clean, etc.
Then, his familial net worth may be a positive integer, but hers is negative.
And she may not even realize it, while thinking that she is worth more than she is (the classical female narcissist) and misunderstanding him as worth less to her than he is.
…and vice versa, of course, when idiotic, narcissistic men overvalue themselves while underappreciating good women.
Now, with all that in mind, one can argue that fatherhood and motherhood are priceless. Fair.
However, to that, I would argue that “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” —George Box
So, don’t rely on this model I propose as the absolute truth, but rather as a guide for providing general structure or a framework for the otherwise immeasurably abstract.
At Last, On What It Means To Build Something
So, if relationships are essentially agreements founded upon an intended outcome, start at the outcome and work backwards.
Come together and analyze what your skills are; you may have more than you think. You may be more valuable than you realize.
Use this model to determine the “how” pertaining to what roles you will perform throughout the process of following the rules of your agreement throughout the process of bringing your intended outcome to fruition, and voila…
…you would have built something together.
A family. A business. A lasting legacy.
Marriage is merely the formalization of the agreement, with the vows being the rules of engagement (setting the terms for what is cheating and what is not).
And whether your marriage is monogamous, polygamous, or whatever…is simply a matter of your preferred team structure.