What We Can Learn from Amelia Earhart’s Relationship Realism

Source: Public domain, via The U.S. National Archives

It’s tempting to view a romantic relationship as a way to live out greeting card platitudes: Love is the answer...love changes everything...blah, blah, blah.

Setting up love this way, as the be-all and end-all of human existence, is ultimately counterproductive and often toxic to relationships and those in them.

Love isn’t unimportant, but the reality is romantic relationships have varying levels of importance in different people’s lives.

I’ve come to see that relationships are sometimes of less importance for a person who is very driven by their work. I see that in aviator Amelia Earhart’s 1931 letter on her reluctance to marry, written to her fiancé, George Putnam, whom she reportedly loved dearly.

To Earhart, a relationship might be a lovely thing, but it was not a necessary thing on the level of her work. Earhart writes:

Dear GPP

There are some things which should be writ before we are married — things we have talked over before — most of them.

You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means most to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could do. I know there may be compensations but have no heart to look ahead.

On our life together I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties which arise may best be avoided should you or I become interested deeply (or in passing) in anyone else.

Please let us not interfere with the others’ work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.

I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.

I will try to do my best in every way and give you that part of me you know and seem to want.

A.E.

Tips for a Rational Approach to Relationships

There are a few takeaways from her letter that are helpful for couples considering marriage or serious commitment to each other:

• Figure out what’s most important to each of you, personally, and preserve it.
• Decide whether being sexually faithful is realistic and agree on how you’ll navigate that area.
• Consider the possibility that the relationship won't work out and how you’ll deal with that.

Another essential and often-neglected consideration for relationships:

• Come up with a plan for conflict resolution.

In my work as a mediator, helping quarreling couples and angry neighbors resolve their disputes, I see over and over that arguments are not resolved by fighting—hammering the other person with one’s points—but through the generosity of listening. Sure, somebody might sometimes get their way through verbally wearing another person down, but they likely poison the relationship.

To resolve disputes, each person needs to not just hear each other’s words but really listen, open-mindedly, with the idea that maybe the other person might have a point. This allows each to empathize with the other and maybe be open to coming around in the ways the other is asking for.

At the very least, the respect and generosity shown through listening can give a person the sense that they’ve been treated with dignity—told that they matter. And a mediator secret: Sometimes, once somebody feels that way, the thing they were fighting to the death for stops mattering so much.

It can seem a little cold to plot out the details of a relationship, down to how to fight with each other; however, it's anything but. Taking a realistic approach to relationships is, paradoxically, the best shot a couple has at “happily ever after.”