- Why Relationships Matter
- Take our Can You Spot Red Flags In A Relationship?
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Key points
- What once worked can stop working when we mistake a habit for the principle behind it.
- When a relationship struggles, one useful question is: What is this relationship for?
- Conflict reveals a relationship’s character by showing whether we seek understanding or certainty.
- Discernment is refined perception: the capacity to see more than our first interpretation allowed.
Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007) is a rare title that feels self-evident. You understand its insight before you’ve read the first page
A caring manager runs a small office. Every Friday, he calls the neighborhood donut shop. The ritual becomes part of the office culture. People look forward to it. His team feels appreciated. His boss notices the enthusiasm he’s building. Before long, the manager is promoted to a global role
Friday morning arrives
Manager: “Hey, Big T.”
Tony: “Morning, my friend. The usual mixed dozen for Donut Friday?”
Manager: “Actually…I got promoted.”
Tony: “Congratulations!”
Manager: “Thanks. I have absolutely no idea how to manage fifteen thousand people.”
Tony: “Hey, just stick with what you know.”
(Long pause.)
Manager: “You’re right. I need fifteen thousand donuts.”
The example is absurd, but the problem isn’t uncommon. People can succeed without clearly grasping why. And it crosses domains. Enter the athlete, who knows where the answer lies
When a hitter suddenly goes 0-for-27, he knows something that got him here isn’t getting him there anymore. Modern baseball technology can detect tiny changes in bat speed and swing path, but the search for a way forward returns to the fundamentals
What Got Us Here
Goldsmith’s title gives us the warning. Did we examine what got us here, or did we simply get habituated to what seemed successful? The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Before long, you’re on autopilot, thinking you’re still flying the plane
The hitter points us back to fundamentals. Another route begins with one of philosophy’s oldest questions. What is this for? Aristotle made that question central to his thinking. Before asking how to do something well, he wanted to know what it was for. Clarifying the purpose, the telos, comes first
Thus, we can get beneath a successful practice by asking two deceptively simple questions. What is fundamental here? What is this for?
What is leadership for? What is fundamental to good leadership? Once we start asking, the questions multiply:
- What is dating for?
- What is an apology for?
- What is an argument for?
- And, perhaps surprisingly, what is a donut for?
They sound obvious until we realize how often we take the answers for granted. Relationships can slump too
A partner who has spent years showing love by providing may respond to emotional distance by becoming even more distant in order to provide more. What once brought two people closer may no longer do so as they and their circumstances change. Before we diagnose poor communication, incompatible styles, or bad habits, we might return to our two questions. What is a good relationship for? What are its fundamentals?
Learning to See More
Those questions only help if we can tolerate not answering them too quickly. It can be anxiety-provoking to realize how much may depend on getting them right. We may rush to judgment before we have seen enough. Patience, please
Psychologist Michel Dugas and colleagues (2026) describe research on intolerance of uncertainty. When discomfort with not knowing makes us close the question too soon, we naturally strip away depth and nuance before they’ve had a chance to emerge. That’s premature closure
- Why Relationships Matter
- Take our Can You Spot Red Flags In A Relationship?
- Find a therapist to strengthen relationships
As a professor, coach, actor, and director, I know this problem too. Giving an actor a line reading, “Say it this way,” forecloses deeper exploration before the actor has discovered what the moment holds
If we can slow down and resist the rush to judgment, even as new, potentially confusing evidence pours in, we begin to develop a new kind of power: the ability to tolerate ambiguity. We now have greater capacity for discovery
So let’s refine our gaze and turn it to something seemingly simple: the French omelette
Enter Jacques Pépin
The legendary chef, author of La Technique, once said that if he had to judge another professional, he would ask them to make an omelette. Every detail matters: heat control, the shake, the roll, the baveuse center. Tiny bubbles? Overwhisked. Chef Thomas Keller credits Pépin with teaching him that “mastery begins with the fundamentals.” But mastery does something else. It changes what we can see. Expertise is not merely knowing more. It is seeing more. Discernment is refined perception
Relationships Essential Reads
How to Give a Great Compliment
When Good Things Go Wrong in Love
Chefs have a phrase for preparing the conditions of excellence: mise en place, everything in its place. Ingredients are chopped, measured, and ready before cooking begins. Long before the first pan is heated, the work has begun
Parenting is a kind of mise en place: preparing a child’s fundamental capacities for judgment, perception, and interpretation before either parent or child can know what life will ask of them
The People We Think We Know
I remember an argument with my father when I was in high school. I don’t remember what started it, only one exchange:
Dad: “What do you do for me?”
Me at 15: “I’m in high school.”
I hadn’t found a smaller answer. I’d found the fundamental one. Later, he came back and apologized. I was surprised and relieved. At the time, I figured he’d heard my point and conceded. That memory stayed with me. I guess I wasn’t finished with it. I guess now is later
With time, the same moment can reveal details we weren’t equipped to see before. Today, I can recognize something that escaped me then. There was probably more happening in that room than I knew. I don’t know exactly what my father was carrying, and I no longer need to. That didn’t excuse the hurt, nor erase his apology. What I understood at 15 remained true. It simply wasn’t everything that was true. I was no longer listening with the ears of a teenager
Memory isn’t dead weight. Sometimes our earlier selves leave placeholders, archiving moments we can’t fully grasp yet. The child holds the place until the mature adult arrives to see what else was there
If time can widen our view of an old argument, discernment asks whether we can make a little room for that wider view while we’re still having one
We often screen potential partners for attractiveness and charm. Maybe we should pay more attention to how they reveal themselves through conflict. The next time you find yourself in an argument, notice how quickly your mind reaches certainty. How quickly you decide what the other person meant and what kind of person they must be. That is precisely the moment to resist premature closure
Ask the fundamental question: What are we fighting for? If the answer is domination, the conversation is already lost. If the answer is understanding, stay with it longer. Allow the moment to reveal more than your first interpretation permitted. Scholars call this coalescent argumentation: uncovering shared values to transform disagreement into greater clarity. In a good relationship, it can alchemize negativity into closeness
As I write this final paragraph, I ask Aristotle’s question one last time: What is this for?
Perhaps it’s this: to never finish discovering the people we love. And that is a good thing because to love someone is to make room for who they are becoming. Goldsmith was right that what got us here won’t get us there, but that is simply what a dynamic life looks like
We can stay curious about the person before us and honor the child who held the place until we were ready to see
SCENE
References
Michel J. Dugas, Naomi Koerner, and Mark H. Freeston, “State of the Science: Intolerance of Uncertainty,” Behavior Therapy, 57(1), January 2026, pp. 17–36
Pépin, J. (2026). Jacques Pépin Complete Techniques: 50th Anniversary Edition. Black Dog & Leventhal
