Forget chocolates, roses, baubles and bears. Don't fret over the perfect ambience for the candlelight dinner. Ignore Mars-Venus interpretations of the world. What you really need to pay attention to in a romantic alliance is diplomacy, negotiation and balance of power. So says Stephen M. Walt, professor of International Relations at Harvard. Believe me, as a long married person who has had to negotiate and re-negotiate terms of endearment over the years, Walt's perspective is closer to the truth than all feel-good psycho babble out there. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member's autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.
Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn't originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.
Realists have long argued that bipolar systems are the most stable. So if any of you lovers out there are thinking of adding more major actors to the system, please reconsider. As most of us eventually learn, trying to juggle romantic relationships in a multi-polar setting usually leads to crises, and sometimes to open warfare. It's certainly not good for alliance stability.
IR theory also warns us that shifts in the balance of power are dangerous. There's an obvious warning here: relationships are more likely to have trouble if one partner's status or power changes rapidly. So that big promotion that you both celebrated may be a good thing overall, but it's likely to alter expectations and force you and your partner to make serious adjustments. The same is true if one of you gets laid off. Bottom line: it can take a lot of patience and love to work through a major shift in the balance of power within a relationship.
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