#psychology

There is a particular kind of athlete who has existed for much longer in fiction than he has probably existed in anything resembling pure form in real life. He is enormous. He plays football, wrestles, lifts weights, or does all three. He is not especially troubled by abstract questions. If somebody uses a four-syllable word around him, there is a reasonable chance that the joke will be that he does not understand it. He may be good-natured or he may be a bully, but either way his body seems to have consumed most of the resources that otherwise might have gone toward interiority. In the old cartoon version of the archetype, he may literally begin a sentence with “duh.”

Archie Comics has given us perhaps the purest specimen in Moose Mason, officially described by Archie itself as Riverdale High's star athlete and also its worst student, a boy whose listed dislikes include both math and “big words.” (Archie Comics) Moose is exaggerated because he is supposed to be. He belongs to an old cultural taxonomy in which the body and the mind are different territories, and excellence in one raises suspicions about what happened to the other. There is the nerd, who thinks. There is the jock, who acts. Everyone knows which one should be asked about existentialism and which one should be asked to move the couch.

Somewhere very far away from Moose Mason, apparently, is the athlete who runs in search of enlightenment.

For much of my life, I thought of suffering as something like weather. It arrived from somewhere outside me, often without much warning. There was not necessarily anything to do with it. You prepared as best you could, endured whatever came, and waited for the sky to clear. Anxiety could work this way. Depression could work this way. So could the obsessive replay of something that had happened already, or the anticipation of something that might happen and could not yet be influenced. The experience was not only painful in itself. Part of what made it painful was the sense that I was being acted upon. Suffering was a hurricane, and I was the house.

Over the last few years, though, something in that relationship has changed. The strange part is that the change has coincided with my deliberately introducing more pain into my life. I lift weights almost every day. I run a lot. Since getting rid of my car in late March, I have made walking, running, biking and public transit the machinery of ordinary mobility, sometimes adding a cargo wagon when I need to move more than my back can sensibly carry. There are now many more occasions on which my legs ache, my lungs burn, my muscles reach the point where they would strongly prefer that I stop, or I discover that the place I need to reach is inconveniently several miles away.

And yet I suffer less.

That sounds contradictory until I distinguish pain from suffering. The discomfort of a long run is perfectly real. So is the final repetition of a difficult set. There are moments when every physiological signal available to consciousness seems to be voting for rest. But those sensations do not feel anything like the old experience of psychological suffering. They can even feel life-giving while they are unpleasant. There is an odd simultaneity to strenuous exercise: I can want the hill to end while also being glad that I am climbing it. I can experience something that hurts without experiencing it as something bad.

There is a familiar trajectory built into the way we talk about serious relationships. Two people meet, spend more time together, begin sharing routines, and gradually accumulate more of the infrastructure of life in common. Their friends overlap. Their holidays merge. They may move into the same home, combine finances, marry, raise children, and begin making major decisions as a unit. None of this is necessarily undesirable. For many couples, increasing integration is one of the great pleasures of love.

But there is an assumption hidden inside this progression that is rarely examined: Why should increasing love require increasing coupling?

I came to this question not from decades of navigating a successful marriage, but from watching its opposite. Growing up, I observed how tight coupling—when two lives become so structurally intertwined that separation means total logistical, social, and identity collapse—can quietly turn commitment into captivity. I watched how easily "building a life together" could turn into a trap where two people stayed not purely out of desire, but because the cost of decoupling was simply too high. That observation shaped my own caution. For a long time, I hesitated to step into deep relationships, largely because the default model seemed to require surrendering the very autonomy that makes a person whole.

In engineering and software design, two systems are said to be tightly coupled when each depends heavily on the internal workings of the other. A change to one component can require changes elsewhere, and the behavior of the whole system becomes harder to separate into independent parts. Tight coupling is not always bad. Sometimes it is efficient, elegant, or unavoidable. But engineers generally notice it because it creates dependencies, and dependencies affect how resilient a system is when something changes.