The Use of Small Rules

A rule that costs nothing to keep is not a rule. It is decoration, and both of us can see it.

I am not interested in the elaborate ones. The long lists, the protocols with clauses, the arrangements that need a document. They collapse within the month, every time, and they collapse for a reason worth understanding: they were designed to be impressive rather than to be kept. A man writes them in a state of enthusiasm and then has to live inside them on an ordinary Tuesday, tired, with other things on. Enthusiasm is not a building material.

What holds is small. Absurdly small, frequently. A message at a set hour. A thing he does not do without asking. A word he uses for me and no one else. Read from outside, these look trivial to the point of silliness, and people who have never been inside such an arrangement say so with great confidence.

They are missing what the smallness is for. A rule that is easy to keep is one he will still be keeping in March. That is the entire point. The value is not in the difficulty of any single instance, it is in the accumulation, and accumulation requires that nothing ever becomes heavy enough to skip. A rule he can keep on his worst day is worth more than one he keeps brilliantly for a fortnight and then quietly retires.

And the small ones are honest in a way the grand ones are not. When something is difficult, he can tell himself he failed because it was hard. There is no such cover in a rule that takes four seconds. If it lapses, both of us know precisely what happened, and so does he, immediately, without my saying anything. That is the mechanism. It is not that I am watching. It is that the rule is so light that only one thing can explain its absence, and he has to sit with that explanation himself.

This is why I add them slowly and rarely remove them. Each one is a small standing question with a daily answer. Ask enough of them, over long enough, and you have something no declaration can produce: a record. Not of how he felt about me, which is unreliable and mostly weather, but of what he actually did, on the days when nothing about it was exciting.

Men tend to want to prove themselves through effort, because effort is legible and finite and can be completed. A grand gesture has an end. That is its appeal, though he would not put it that way. Small rules do not end, and there is nothing to complete, and the only way to satisfy them is to keep being the kind of man who keeps them. Which is what I was asking for, and not the gesture.

So when he asks for something demanding, and they always do eventually, I usually decline and give him something smaller instead. He is briefly disappointed. He thinks he has been handed a lighter thing. He finds out over the following months that he has been handed a longer one, and that it asks more of him than the difficult thing would have, precisely because it never lets him finish.