Table Theory — How Many Legs Does your Relationship Stand On?
How many legs does a table have?
How many legs does your relationship stand on?
(These questions are related, I promise)
When I was in high school, my best friend Shannon and I made up this philosophy about romantic connections we called our “table theory”. It was corny, but the idea was simple: just like your average American dining table, a solid relationship, in our mind, contained four “legs” — an emotional connection, a physical connection, an intellectual connection, and a spiritual connection. We theorized that everyone had a different personal weighting of the importance of those types of connections, but the most important thing was that the balance was enough to support stabilization — in our mind, the “tabletop”.
It worked about as well as you might expect a philosophy concocted by 17-year-old girls to work. We over-simplified, boxed people out based on whims, and ultimately, discovered that we were never really sure how to test this theory; it seemed like neither of us would ever find a relationship that actually you know — met the criteria.
In high school, we were lucky to feel one or two types of connection. Now that I’m older, I know it’s not just the fact that we were young, but that we couldn’t really understand what those connections would look like. After many years and experiences, my idea has only gotten slightly better.
That being said, I feel like, with a bit of nuance, the table theory actually holds up decently well. Here are the four types of connection Shannon and I talked about; what they are, what they aren’t, and what they look like to me now.
An emotional connection
In our particular environment, this might have been the one that was easiest to forge. Now, not so much. An emotional connection requires a type of honesty and vulnerability with your feelings that’s a lot harder to pull off when you’re not in the “acceptably emo/heart on your sleeve” stage: in absence of your favorite pop-punk lyrics, here are some questions you can ask yourself about whether your emotional connection feels valid
Am I able to feel investment, excitement, and empathy with this person?
Do we have a shared language for our feelings, with which we can discuss the ups and downs of our experience together?
How are my feelings treated when things are going well? What about when they aren’t? Do I feel safe telling my partner how I feel — even if I’m not quite sure how to explain it yet?
The most frequently therapeutic — and in my opinion, useful — tool used in building a strong emotional connection is to learn more about attachment styles and love languages. People can very frequently have completely different styles of showing they care — or showing that they’re invested in a relationship — and learning to see the differences between them will save you from so many unnecessary fights.
A physical connection
Back in high school, Shannon and I’s idealism was at an all-time high — while our experience with physical intimacy stayed, as you might expect, at an all-time low. We used to write off physical connection as the “least important” of the table’s legs (as if a table has one leg that’s doing a particularly good job of holding the table up, and the rest are just freeloading — not how carpentry works) because we didn’t want to be “used for our bodies” or feel alienated by somebody’s mismatched expectations for sex. Honestly, it’s still totally valid to feel that way — sex is vulnerable work! — but more importantly, sex is not the only way to express a physical connection. Affection, sports, dancing, grappling — all these things are ways to incorporate touch and build a physical affection
In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, we practice live sparring every single day. In our community, it’s called “rolling”, and you’re a woman, 9 times out of 10 most of your partners will be men. As an active competitor and a survivor of assault, I have a huge appreciation for the way a good partner can make the experience both safe to do and technically engaging.
Someone stronger than you should be able to interact with your body in a way that matches the setting and allows you both to get the most out of the experience. This means that they “play” with skill, instead of force — rather than going limp to avoid hurting you, for example, (or worse, going tournament speed and definitely hurting you) a good kinesthetic partner has the capacity to move as your body moves and respond to nonverbal cues. When you do give them verbal feedback, they won’t need to be told twice, especially about considerations that make you feel safer.
In grappling, this form of emotional safety and respect looks like a tap. In sex, it might be a safe word. In all the forms of physical connection that lie between those two points, little things like a hand squeeze, meaningful eye contact, or the direction a person’s body takes — the ways you communicate to a partner about mental state and desire — are all signs that a physical connection is solid.
An intellectual connection
“What kind of books do you read? What music do you like? Did you see this movie I’m obsessed with? What? Why not?!”
Have you ever had a conversation with a potential partner that felt more like a job interview than a casual conversation?
What about the “I can’t believe you haven’t seen this movie/watched this show/heard this album — what are you even doing with your life?’
Listen, besides the fact that consuming media is in no way a moral victory — it’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it? — trying to define an intellectual connection as a 100% overlapping Venn diagram of personal library favorites is the pitfall of gatekeepers and high schoolers everywhere. It’s not unreasonable: storytelling is an incredibly important part of learning who we are, and the stories that impact us the most can be formative in a way few other experiences in this life will ever be.
That being said, it’s important to be curious about the “why” behind a person’s thoughts and tastes, and not the particular “what”. “What’s their favorite book?” Isn’t as vital of a question as “Do I understand why that’s their favorite book? Is it a story about things I value — heroism, humility, enthusiasm, bravery, loyalty — and do we see eye to eye on that? Are the questions this person asks about life valuable to me as well — are we curious about the same things?”
Instead of trying to gauge whether your partner is right for you based on whether they saw whatever life-changing movie or book you consider a part of your own identity, ask the questions. Read books together. What’s their goal in life? Does it make your brain tick — or is it just raising your heart rate?
A spiritual connection
This one is, hands down, the most complicated. It might also be the most rewarding and lasting of all the types of connections you have in your life.
Spiritual is a word that’s misused every single day: when I say spiritual, I don’t mean “going to the same church” (unless that’s important to you both) or “reading the same philosophy paperbacks”; I mean, what is the driving magic — the reason to live — in a person’s life?
Shannon, that best friend of mine I mentioned earlier, was different from me culturally in almost every significant way. She was a politically conservative, Christian, white rural American. I come from a mixed family of Mexican union organizers, ranchers, and Baha’i hippies, and my politics aren’t exactly the front page of Fox News. An ideological “match made in heaven”, we were not.
That being said, Shannon and I had a spiritual friendship that transcended everything on that list, because we knew how to talk about love, magic, wonder, art, the things that we found worth staying alive for.
For Shannon, her love of films and filmmaking made her realize that the pursuit of awe and the majestic impact of the world around her was her version of “God’s love”, a higher power, the Universe vibing with you — whatever terminology you want to use for forces that define our lives.
For me, I knew I loved a few things so powerfully it hurt. Writing, my family, scientific inquiry, and the sheer scale of space— my first high school dream job was to be a quantum physicist; after a lot of Python and not so many successful calculus tests, I became a full-time software engineer instead.
Writing code, writing about science, and writing about love are the ways I express parts of my soul — but they also involve journaling, prayer (Baha’is consider traditional praying/artistic expression/perfecting a craft all valid types of prayer), and forging relationships with the people around me. The most successful relationships I’ve had in my life — romantic or otherwise — involved us being able to bring out these forms of soul expression in each other.
When you’re talking about a spiritual connection with your potential partner, just ask them this:
What’s the magic in your life?
What are you staying alive for?
Why do you think we exist?
A table is a form of balance: heart, body, mind, and soul
A well-implemented “table” in table theory involves some bending of the rules. Balance your table, check your connections, but ultimately, don’t take rules too seriously. Yes, a table has four legs; a relationship, in reality, probably has about a hundred plus.
That being said, these legs — emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual connection — do a decent job of directing thoughts on the things that matter to you most.
When evaluating and guiding a potential relationship, or evaluating the one you’re currently in, ask yourself these questions: what does my heart, mind, body, and soul look like when it’s happy? What about my partner’s? How do these things show up in our relationship — is the table solid?