Day 12 - New content on rituals
I have been thinking about rituals today. New content for the Negotiations section.
Some things that people would put in the negotiations category should actually be the maintenance of a ritual.
Of course, there can be negotiations around which person does which aspect of a ritual. Also which person remembers which parts of the ritual, and which person maintains executive function around remembering the ritual and pressing “go” on it.
However, a lot of people I see “negotiate” things that should be about setting up rituals. That is, the ritual should be doing the work that they are hoping “negotiation” would do.
One way to tell if something maybe “should be” a ritual, versus a negotiation, is if it is the sort of thing that has been ritualized a lot in history, or by various groups of people. Some examples:
dinner
holidays
baths / grooming
certain kinds of sex
homecoming
welcoming guests
goodmornings / goodnights
What is the difference between a habit and a ritual? The difference is different for different people. The lines between them are often blurry and not very important. But sometimes they can be important, and so I will attempt to define them in my own way, though you may split the difference differently.
For me, a habit is meant to make potentially negative experiences seem better. For example, cleaning up the dishes, while listening to your favorite audiobook every night, makes “the medicine go down.” The dishes need to get done in some way, and combining it with something you enjoy makes it better. That’s a habit. Or working out, on your drive to work, before work, and showering there and changing into your work clothes, and then grabbing your coffee and going to work. That is a habit that makes working out feel better through making it automatic.
Rituals meanwhile are not automatic. They can be cyclical, and regular, but they are not meant to be “automatic.” A meditative practice for example is a quintessential example of a ritual. They are meant to create containers for presence, and even extra presence to be possible, rather than be flows throughout your day to create automaticity.
However, rituals can surround daily parts of the day, depending on what you want. Some people have special rituals around showering. Some around cooking, some around cleaning, some around driving and going to the store. Some people have special rituals around doing administrative tasks, or finances, or taxes. Some have rituals surrounding children or pets.
I believe part of having a nice life with a partner is having nice rituals that you do with your partner. I think this is like a cheat code. But a lot of people do not know how to set up rituals very well, or take them seriously enough such that their partner starts to take them seriously too.
If there are a lot of rituals that are very important to you, that are simply not at all important to your partner, and that they do not wish to join you in, that can be a sign of incompatibility. Breakups that go “I love you, but it seems like we have different interests, we just are not doing things together and do not seem to want to” are like this.
Some credit to Logan Stahl for inspiring some of this! And to Tee Barnett for hosting talks by Logan Stahl so that I could talk to him!