In my former life, I was a political and government reporter. I thought I was sitting in the trenches of democracy, talking to candidates and bureaucrats, attending zoning board hearings and national political conventions. I thought I had a front row seat for democratic principles at play. It took becoming a couples counselor to vastly broaden my view of what democracy means and how democracy plays a role in our day-to-day lives.
Right now, we're seeing democracy and democratic ideals being exercised more freely because they seem jeopardized. Maybe you're a part of that. Maybe you're adding a signature to a paper on a clipboard, giving prepared comments at a board meeting, chanting in the street with a sign in your hand. That's a practice of democracy in the public sphere, and no doubt we ought to be mindful of the need to participate democratically. But if that mindfulness ends when you put down the sign or leave a meeting, that's not enough.
The practice of democracy needs to extend beyond the zone of political engagement. It needs to be strengthened, but in our homes and our neighborhoods and our workspaces. As a couples counselor, I can see contempt and avoidance and power struggles dismantle a marriage. The repair lies in reestablishing or even learning for the first time how to apply democratic principles as a practice, one for that most intimate of relationships.
Pamela Paresky is a writer, researcher, and psychologist who created the project called "Habits of a Free Mind: Psychology for Democracy and the Good Life." She makes the case that habits in a thriving democracy are the same habits needed for a good marriage. She says that this success in democracy and marriage means acknowledging common goals, which requires strengthening what she calls the habits of the free mind. Those are candor, courage, curiosity, compromise, compassion, calling, and commitment.
As I see it, the real consistent practice of democracy actually happens in the home. It's the consistency of it that happens in the home. It's in the way we treat each other in moments of stress and strife. It's in the moments when we're driving to soccer practice and waiting with a kid in a doctor's office. It's in the midst of a partner's anguish or when a partner is lethargic. It's in the small moments of childcare and household chores.
And the practice is really on tending not to the outcome of a certain situation, but instead on the connection itself. It's a willingness to recognize that, yeah, my voice matters, but yours does too; that my hopes share an equal platform with yours; that you may dissent and I'll still listen. That together we will assess, we will engage, we will recapitulate and reconsider.
I will see you and expect to be seen.
The practice of democracy is a mindset. It really is a commitment to engage with another, to repair the connection when broken.
Marriage is our most consistent laboratory for democracy and democratic principles.
So sure, let's exercise democracy in voting booths and board meetings and political party rallies and, as it seems happening more and more these days, at protests.
But let's commit to democratic connection in our home, with the ones who matter most to us.
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