The Idea That You’ve Met ‘The One’ is a Myth
By that I do not mean I have doubts about whether we are meant to be together till death do us part. Rather, I do not believe in this idea of ‘the one’ because there is always the possibility of a coin toss that looms. The lives of Kara and me are intertwined. We love each other. We have a daughter together. We plan to spend the rest of our lives together. But we have had moments when I’ve threatened to move out, or when she has been cast into a state of dismay about whether I would ever learn how to be ‘present’ in a relationship, or when disagreements about how to live and how raise a daughter have boiled over. In the weeks after our daughter was born, when sleep was a luxury and we were charged with the survival and care of a newborn, we had moments of friction when our faith in each other was stretched. One could say that we were not ready for all this. Love. Parenthood. Commitment. There was sometimes a strong chance it might not work out between us.
Some of our frictions stemmed from the baggage each of us brought to the relationship. Given her past relationships, she had difficulty trusting my motives. Given my own past relationships, I had difficulty trusting that she was acting in good faith. A host of other prejudices derived from experience had seeped into the marrow of our relationship and interfered with our ability to smoothly reconcile our differences and integrate our lives. This is a fundamental challenge familiar to anyone who has been in a relationship, though specific frictions are unique to each relationship. The point is that rarely, if ever, is a relationship immune to cracks that seep into its edifice of trust and understanding if one does not put in the work to maintain it. Relationships are inherently fragile.
One must not take a relationship for granted. The integrity of a relationship is like the performance of an investment portfolio. You can buy and hold, in which case the strategic allocation will go astray as market volatility skews the value of stocks and bonds away from their original allocation, at which point the allocation does not correspond to the proportions set by the initial assessment of one’s overall risk and return profile. If your aim is to optimize your portfolio so that it is in accord with your investment objectives and risk tolerance, you must monitor and rebalance. You must be alert to the inherent volatility of market forces and take active measures to maintain the ever-tenuous equilibrium of a portfolio allocation. Market volatility is not unlike a coin toss, but one can try to stack the odds in his favor, or at least be prepared to take action when the market turns.
Monitoring a portfolio is like monitoring a relationship. One must work to minimize the chances that destiny comes down to a coin toss. One does not want to be unprepared to overcome the challenges that circumstances inevitably present. Life can come down to a coin toss, or you can make luck the residue of design. You can neglect your relationship, or you can work on your relationship every day. Depending on your choice, any gulf between you and your significant other either widens or narrows when tragedies strike (e.g. a death in the family, a child is diagnosed with cancer, a partner is laid off from a job), or when the stress and grind of daily life threaten to dull the passions you felt when you first fell in love. The equilibrium of a loving relationship can come apart at the seams, or it can be stitched so tight it is impervious to the rip and tear of well-worn experience. It depends on how well you knit the fabric of your relationship, and how diligently you seek to mend fraying edges.
When the confused attendant says he hasn’t put anything up, Chirguh says yes, you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life you just didn’t know it. It is not clear what exactly the attendant has been putting up his whole life. The audience is left to make up its own mind. But Chigurh has formed an impression of what caliber a man the attendant is, and presumably he has taken him for a chump, until that is, he calls heads and gets it right. Well done, Chigurh says, newly impressed with the man.
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