It began innocently enough with one of those Wikipedia wormholes you tend to stumble down late at night. You know, the ones that start innocently enough–say “how to fix a leaky faucet”–and two hours later you find yourself down the rabbit hole of “antarctic ice worm evolution.” Well, somewhere between rust prevention methods and ice worm_OS_ifamily_, I’d stumbled onto an article about biological symbiosis. The click sounded somewhere in my brain that both sounded like “science.”
I burst into Mei’s bedroom, startling her as she sat on our bed reading with glasses pushed up on her nose.
She looked so…pure and angelic in that moment that I couldn’t help but love her despite throwing her off guard like that.
“We are literally a fungus,” I said. She put down her book.
“It’s past midnight, Jamie. What are you babbling about?”
“We! As a couple!
As a married unit!” I waved my hands for emphasis, nearly sending her book flying off the bed. “Our relationship is biological symbiosis, Mei! Two separate organisms each fulfilling a specialized niche in an evolved capacity.
I just read about it, and it’s LIKE SO MUCH OF WHY OUR WHOLE THING WORKS BECAUSE WE’RE COMPLETE OPPOSITES AND YET-”
“You and me are symbiosis?” Mei set her book down and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m talking about US AS A MARITAL UNIT!” I replied, because shouting clarifies things. “Look, mutualism is a type of symbiosis where organisms of different species ‘enter into an evolved relationship that is mutually beneficial.’ Mei.
Remember how I told you I was gonna finish my dissertation soon?” She nodded glumly. “Y’know why we work so well together?”
She sighed. Eight years together and she’s still mastered that look of lovingexasperation only I can draw out of her.
“Are you going to compare our marriage to fungus again?”
“No! I meant…ALONGSIDE fungus! Symbiosis includes fungus AND, like, bacteria and plants and algae!”
And so began a six-week long exercise in me viewing my marriage through the lens of biology.
The first thing I did was take notes. Like actual sit-down-and-write notes on our relationships. Lots of colorful index cards and graphs charting the ‘when and where we interacted’ against ‘how those interactions fell under scientific models of symbiosis.’ Mei put up with a lot of my ridiculousness during that time, but she did draw the line when I insisted on setting up placebo-control couples in the produce section to interview about their ‘resource sharing habits and defined ecological roles within their domestic living space.’
But you know what?
The more I paid attention, the more it WORKED. Marriage had baffled folks since the beginning of time, spawning philosophical discourse, religion, and at least one Seinfeld episode1. But dissecting my marriage through the lens of symbiosis actually explained some things.
Allow me to itemize the findings:
Take mutualism, for example. Classic synergy between two (or more) organisms that rely on each other to survive or simply exist more efficiently than they would alone. Mutualism in action: Defined divisions of labor in our household.
Mei is in charge of all things tech support related and does so with surgical precision. Two years ago, I nearly wiped out our wireless network trying to update the damn router. When it comes to gadgets and gizmos, she fixes them.
I break them. On the other hand? I do all of our cooking because Mei swears our gas stove hates her.
Like, is sentient and evil-smelling fan fire-targeting hate us specifically. This isn’t happenstance. We adapted to our strengths.
Cool thing about highly defined mutualistic partnerships? The organisms involved grow adaptations to complement each other over time. Honestly, me and Mei are pretty efficient at communicating.
Case in point: I can now understand at least fourteen different variations of “HMPH” based solely on Mei’s sigh. Ranges from “Annoyed with Jamie bullshit” to “Does science have a forgiveness quota if I kill you right now.”
She’s equally talented at reading me, often knowing way before I do whether or not my latest project is going to be a) completely harmless; b) burn down the apartment; or c) bring Homeland Security knocking with concerns of domestic biological warfare. But here’s my favorite thing about marriage as symbiosis: brain-offloading.
Scientists call it ‘sharing your resources.’
See, your brain comes with limited processing power and memory storage. Or at least mine does. I can’t remember birthdays.
Deadlines. When we’re supposed to take the car in for maintenance. Hell, I sometimes forget I have a wife if I don’t have to interact with her constantly throughout the day.
Meanwhile, Mei will walk into a room for something and forget what she was doing there TWO POINT SEVEN TIMES A DAY. We’ve both got weak spots. But because we balance each other out, neither of those flaws are incredibly apparent most of the time.
She remembers our important dates. I’m home enough to remember this is the woman I want to celebrate them with. Brains.
We offload on each other because she remembers things I forget and I’m home enough to remember things she needs to. Relationship brain storage that defies the limits of our OWN cranial capacities. Also, like other relationships built on resource-sharing, we’ve developed completely separate but somehow complementary stress reactions.
If there’s a problem, I immediately want to try and FIX IT. Like, rip the bandaid off and THROW SOMETHING AT THE WALL FIX IT. Meanwhile, Mei tends to freeze in place and glare at me while her brain slowly concocts every solution to the problem at hand.
By themselves, these reactions should wreck any shred of sanity we have left. Instead, they make us better problem solvers. My frenzied tactician balances her by thinking of EVERY POSSIBILITY.
Sometimes her worrying even prevents me from burning down the apartment. Obviously, there are times when one of us takes up more space than needed or, dare I say, positives sands of Parasitism. Your relationship doesn’t always stick to the Golden rule of symbiosis.
For proof, I called Josh. Former college roommate, current evolutionary biologist with the lovely dilemna of working at Cornell. Remember when I said I called him at 2 AM to discuss my findings?
“Yes,” he answered sleepily, “and unfortunately for you, symbiotic relationships can—and often do—fluctuate between mutualism and parasitism.”
Oh, great. So basically I was shit all over his theories. “Remember Parasites,” he continued.
“Where one organism benefits at the other’s expense? Think of those times as anomalies in your specific ecological unit.”
OH GREAT MYSELFISHNESS WAS AN ANAMOLY. MY MARRIAGE COULD WORK WITHOUT ME.
Honestly, it took some deep diving into the Josh-as-parasite files. Did I use up all the hot water with my neuroscience-themed showers? Sure.
But she hated those shoes anyway. Leave-me-alone-I’m-studying invasion of the kitchen when she’s trying to actually cook meals? Girl’s gotta hypothesize.
She gave me a pass on my “research” the weekend of The Great Sourdough Incident. (The Great Something Incident has been the sequel to a number of particularly shitty experiences in my kitchen. This is what prompted an actual ambulance visit.
The Great Sourdough Incident is not that)
See, I got really into the microbiome of sourdough starters. Our kitchen counter looked like the set of a Wes Anderson movie starring fermentation baskets. Every flat surface not occupied by baby sourdough cultures at various stages of fermentation had piles of notes, pH testing pens, and spreadsheets charting hydration levels, growth rates, and multiple instances of myself crowning tiny boules.
Mei came home from a conference that weekend to nearly empty pantry. Every burner on the stove top boiled different iterations of what could only be described as sourdough jelly. I had babysat no less than twenty-seven sourdough starters because…well.
Science. She found me hovering over my favorite, furthest-along starter snacking on coffee and saltines. Instead of yelling at me about how gross of a human I was being (she totally had every right), she simply looked up at me from where she was perched on the counter.
“This,” she said finally. “Is what happens when your metabolism outpaces the resource contributions.”
Dammit Josh. She’d effectively called me a parasite.
Except here’s the thing about any mutualistic relationship–You balance each other out. Maybe I was selfish with my sourdough abuse, but Mei made up for it the week her book came out. Deadlines being what they are, she camped out in our living room for a week, setup officeCmd.exe the command center with triple monitors, laptops, and enough coffee pods to run her own private caffeine black market.
I manned the food Operation supplies during those nights, refilling her coffee cups so she didn’t have to break concentration and tidying up behind her when she crashed. Basically I made sure she lived through her deadline. Viewing marriage through a scientific lens also taught me something else.
When an organism dives deep enough into symbiosis with another, they become something greater than the sum of their parts. An ecological unit. Take leafcutter ants and their fungal gardens, for instance.
Together they act as a single organism, the ants having traded living as individual ants to fulfill specialized roles within the garden’s success. Mei and I are similar in that our ability to make decisions together is so refined that we each contribute pieces to the thought process that neither of us could accomplish alone. She’ll run through every possible solution to a problem in her head while I research random possibilities no one else would think of.
Combine that with her unparalleled ability to avoid unrealistic options and my “set it on fire and see if it works” mentality and you’ve got a hybrid that balances out our natural tendencies towards useless ideas. I ended my analysis of our marriage by giving Mei a binder full of notes, complete with meticulously labeled index cards and charts detailing instances of our symbiotic relationships falling into classified sections of microbiology. I’d stayed up three nights in a row finishing it off because Biologist-me loves dropping SAT words like “phenotype” in everyday conversation.
Mei blinked at me over her glasses as I thrust the binder into her hands. She thumbed through it absently before setting it down next to her book. “You realize most people just say ‘I love you’ instead of doing this, right?” she asked.
“But this proves we’re perfect for each other!” I countered. “It’s scientific validation that we work!”
She grabbed my hand before I could make a third (defensive) point and sighed. “Do you know how long I spent staring at turtles and lizards for my dissertation?”
She’s right, too.
Hours spent trawling through academic journal articles about mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism could easily be chalked up to me testing hypothesis that we were incompatible. But sliding into bed that night, I started thinking about other biological concepts we somehow fit into as a couple. Stable ecosystems?
Evolutionarily-developed threat displays? Neurobiology?
But really, symbiosis is perfect because it takes two completely different organisms and adapts them to each other’s…quirks.
Together we become something new and better, not because we lose our differences but because we embrace them and grow to fit each other anyways. “You can’t include that in your results,” Josh told me over lunch when I described my revelation. “What?” I stared at him, scientifically offended.
“It sounds like feelings.”
He’s not wrong. But I’ll be damned if love doesn’t sound an awful lot like science to me.
0 Comments