Ambition Gap
What happens when partners want different things, at a different pace?
I never used to identify as being ambitious. It evoked certain ill-fitting, copyroom-xeroxed archetypes: someone eager to get ahead at the expense of others; someone motivated by money; someone who craves advancement in the workplace above all things.
I came to recognize my own ambition as something different. Not a ravening beast, but a gentle river current, constantly pushing at the back of my ankles. I recognized it in my lack of complacence, an inability to be fully content for long – even after getting or doing the thing I most wanted. I find this an exciting, if sometimes frustrating, way to live; reaching eagerly to grab the next project, the next collaborator, the next venture by the sharp lapels of its checkered coat, yanking it into your living room.
This was a quality that Andrew and I always shared. Before we began our business together, we would always itch to quit our respective jobs (and often did) around the same time. Our desire for the next thing would become too strong not to chase. A friend once remarked we were on the same professional menstrual cycle, and a similar principle held true for our creative lives.
Ambition has functioned as a communitarian value in my partnership with Andrew. What’s good for me is good for us. This relies not only on a desire to share resources, but on a shared sense of what we want, and how hard we want to work for it at any given time. For the most part, these cycles have miraculously stayed in sync. We’ve generally agreed when it’s time to accelerate, or decelerate, or change gears.
I have insisted on a rigidity with this newsletter over the past almost-18 months – the same day and time weekly, without fail. Our pace has temporarily slackened recently in a way that has bothered me more than I care to admit. And this is by way of a happy explanation to you all: Andrew has a new job. One that has invited him “in house” to do the sort of event direction on retainer that we usually do as freelancers. It’s a good job, a sensible and stable one, with access to good, sensible, stable things that non-self-employed people have, like our first sweet taste of employer sponsored health care in over a decade. Andrew has necessarily been writing a bit less as he adjusts to a new cadence, and I cannot keep up a weekly longform pace on my own, even temporarily.
It’s not the adherence to a self-imposed editorial calendar that troubles me so much as the nagging promise of what it might mean, generally, conceptually, to take one’s foot off the gas, especially when you’re driving a car in tandem. It’s not such a big thing, but it’s led me to realize that an ambition gap is a change I fear above all others, for its destabilizing qualities to our partnership.
I do not fear, as many assume, what it means for Andrew and I to meet separate romantic partners, nor to embrace other kinds of personal change in our living situations. But when it comes to the things we want, I fear the mismatch of chasing different aims, or even of chasing the same aims at a different pace. What might happen to our partnership when our hunger becomes unmatched; our drive to do, make, achieve falls out of step?
All long-term partnerships, I suppose – whether they be couples, collectives, or business allies – must learn to weather the ebbs and flows of unmatched desires. Sometimes it’s about money, or work, or sex. Maybe even simpler priorities. A friend and close advisor on this newsletter described to me last week the anguish of a mismatched desire in social appetite between herself and her partner.
Right now, Andrew is feeling drawn towards stability, routine, and home life. It doesn’t mean our desires are in conflict, but he is enjoying the quiet pleasures of fatherhood above all other things. When I check in for the hundredth time about whether Andrew minds watching our son solo again while I go out (while he rarely asks me to cover childcare while he goes out) Andrew reassures me again and again that he wants to stay close to home during this season of life, wants only to be with his child in these sweet and fleeting moments before our baby isn’t a baby. Andrew still desires his creative life, but at a quieter, more measured, and more private pace. He seems tired of striving at a time where I feel driven to strive harder than ever before.
Turning 40, as I mentioned last week, I feel at a point of frustration and inflection and desire. I wish for external validation and public recognition in ways I never have before. I feel a drive towards being seen, having our work read, and earning approval – pushing against the cumulative weight of every cultural gatekeeper who has barred the doors against our entry over the years. (I’m a Scorpio, and I do keep score).
Whereas the contours of Andrew’s desires seem (to me) to have softened with parenthood, the urgency of my own ambition is only sharpened by my longstanding fears of motherhood.
I still vividly remember drawing the ire of some of the eager, high-achieving women in a college seminar one time. A discussion on female artists drove me, normally the quietest student in the class, to blurt out my terrified suspicion that I would personally need to choose between creating children and creating Great Work, in order to do either successfully. I wasn’t capable of holding the line to do both. I don’t remember my exact words, but I do remember their effect.
As banal as this anxiety may sound, this was a time in the 00’s where the myth of “having it all” hadn’t yet been thoroughly interrogated; when “choose your choice” feminism was practically the rule of law; and among a cohort for whom “Lean In” would be greeted as a revolutionary manifesto 8 years hence. Girlbossing was not even a glimmer in the internet’s eye, much less the eyeroll-worthy joke it is now. My viewpoint, in this context, was greeted with indignation bordering on sacrilege. An offended classmate, both furious and puzzled, vowed she fully intended to enjoy motherhood in addition to doing worldsaving work. Good for her!
This fear was not something that I wanted to be true for myself; nor something I felt most of those women at my private college would suffer from particularly, with their type-A sensibilities and generational wealth. But I felt surely that I – personally – would be unable, and unwilling, to muster the ambition to sustain motherhood if I wanted to do something else “meaningful.”
Now that I’ve actually become a mother, those fears have eased in some ways. My ambition for meaningful, purpose-driven work is more energized than ever. Parenthood has become one among many meaningful pillars of work in the troubled conditions of our current reality, in which the importance of communitarian values and interdependence grow clearer each day. But those old anxieties about losing my initiative still prevail, goosing me when I take time and space; mistaking breathing room for complacence.
I look at Andrew and marvel how he can possibly feel content to move more slowly at a time like this. I know he has many lofty dreams, desires, and visions for himself, and for us – their quality and texture and pacing may have changed, but they haven’t gone away. I wonder whether I have mistaken his contentment, his patience, and his quietude for a loss of drive.
It is because I do not yet understand how to allow contentment and ambition to live side by side. Because ambition has always manifested largely as a lack of complacence, this is a coexistence I cannot imagine. Or, you may say, my real problem may be equating contentment with complacence in the first place.
Much as these seem like worthy semantic knots to unpick, I can only try to let things be as they are for now. Maybe it’s enough to let our desires run a bit unmatched; to allow myself to be the striver-in-chief of the household, if only for the moment. Our cycles may re-sync, or diverge farther, or reverse. What’s good for me is still good for us.
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As a footnote: even as the government reopens this week, the events of the past weeks have led me to find my local food distribution centers and community fridges, as it seems to me the most direct way to help neighbors is to contact the people ALREADY doing the work in my neighborhood to ask what kind of resources they need and in what form (money? goods? time?).
Even though the social safety nets will now reappear, they’ve been revealed to be tenuous and at the whims and mercies of craven political interests. [It’s also educated me to the fact that 1 in 8 Americans (!!) relies on food assistance — richest country in the world, my ass...] I hope to stay in touch with the needs of my community, and I hope you may be inspired to look up which HYPERLOCAL groups, temples, churches, and others are already doing the work in your own neighborhood or city.