Recently, I wrote about accountability partners, mentioning that I have a few, because one can better encourage me in a given area than another.

Yet the notion that a single individual can serve every purpose in another person’s life persists. And it causes many relationships—romantic and otherwise—to fail.

Pamela Haag’s Marriage Confidential, which I’ve written about in the past, posits that the ideal of the romantic other half, to whom you become each other’s everything, is one of the reasons modern marriage struggles. The notion puts an unsustainable weight on a single bond—albeit an important one.

As Haag points out, expecting your spouse to become your “everything” just wasn’t the notion prior to the romantic-marriage era. You had other confidants. Other activity partners. You expected your spouse to play one or a few roles—not all.

Yet today, the partner-as-everything is our overarching cultural expectation.

Expecting any one person to fill every purpose in your life brings disappointment—and disillusionment. Yes, friends and partners must spend time together and have adventures together to maintain and build their relationships. However, they need to recognize that putting the weight of “completing you” on any one person is too much pressure, too much responsibility—and doomed.

As with accountability partners, one person may be wonderful for one facet but terrible in another. Turning to the right person for the right need just makes sense. Not all friends will want to participate in all your hobbies. No one person can provide the right counsel in every situation.

And you should have multiple relationships, anyway. Research shows that strong support networks are critical for health and happiness.

A strong support network is never a single person.

Seems like we set ourselves up for disaster, no?

Me playing Pac-Man at about the same age and in about the same belly-flop position I would have read and written past lights-out. (No one caught a photo of that.) c. 1980

Ready for me to out myself as the most boring person on the planet?

In my youth, I got into trouble most for reading and writing past lights-out.

Yep.

No surprise to my followers here: From the moment I gained the ability, I loved to read. (Before then, I loved to have someone read to me.)

I’d read by the dim glow of the Disney night light plugged into the socket by my bed. When my parents remodeled the room and the bed no longer abutted a wall, I’d sneak as close as I could to the edge of my bedroom without risking detection to read by the hall light, which we kept on to scare away boogeymen (mainly vampires).

Also, as I wanted to be a writer, I’d take my notebooks of novel into the same dim circle of hall light to sprawl on my stomach and pen as many scenes as I could.

My dad made a sport out of catching me. I could sometimes hear his knees clicking as he tiptoed toward my room to ensure I slept—but not always. Looking back, I detect his pure delight in making a “nab.” Back then? I felt too terrified to notice the game. He’d jump out of the darkness and boom: “What are you doing?” and “Get back in that bed right now!”

My punishment? Lost privileges. No television, for example.

I can’t say that hindered me much.

For which deeds did you get into the most trouble growing up?

A company called Intuitive Automata has created a robot it’s named Autom.

Autom sits on your kitchen or bathroom counter with its uncanny, oversized, slowly blinking humanesque eyes and talks to you about whether you’re on track with your diet and exercise.

How long did you exercise today? What kind of fitness activity did you do? Have you eaten as you should have?

The company touts that no two conversations with Autom are the same and that she adapts, tailors her advice to your tendencies, and builds a supportive relationship with you.

Unsettling, no?

Is it creepy to have a little creature lurking on your counter, poised to pop to life and question you about whether you’re doing what you should and to guilt you if you’re not? To ask highly personal questions and collect data on your answers?

This sounds far worse than a bathroom scale leering at you as you exit the shower. Is it good to obsess about food and exercise so much?

And what other robots will someday sit around our houses to nag us about other things? Will there be a personal and household hygiene robot? A fix-your-marriage robot? A homework robot? A professional-goals robot? (In fact, these machines may already exist, for all I know.)

I'll stick with my human accountability partners.

Would you use a product like Autom?

The review frames the books in contrast with the journalism from The Great Depression.

Packer makes a number of compelling points about the differences, one of which is that writers covering the Great Depression profiled the downtrodden, destitute, and struggling and how the economic crisis affected them. Yet in the thick of our recent recession, writers mostly focus on how the bigwigs, the perpetrators of the scandal, and the celebrities of the downturn masterminded or contributed to the financial crisis.

These days, people don’t want to read about desperation.

Seems to contradict my article about people craving the upbeat in trying times, doesn’t it? After all, I referenced the Depression as a supporting point. Yet something Packer brings up later in the review ties it together. We’ll come back to that.

Packer’s final sentence struck me hardest: He points out that our society has no idea for the future “genuinely shared by large numbers of people—[no] real and lasting solution to the conditions described in these books.”

During the Depression, large swaths of people believed communism or socialism or the New Deal or general-purpose activism would solve the problem. And although the theories varied in specifics, universally everyone agreed that a society should take care of people—that being American meant justice and compassion for our fellow humans.

What do we have today?

Like Packer, I don’t see a theme. I haven’t heard a truly collective vision for the future.

About to mention the Occupy Wall Street movement, were you? Like Packer, I disagree that Occupy was more than “a moment of its time—a cri de coeur, stylish, media-distracted, and (to invert one of Agee’s best-known sentences) not so easily wounded as easily killed.”

Occupy became an outlet for anger and frustration without any overarching argument for how to handle the problems it decried.

And that brings us back to our unwillingness to look at the bleak in favor of the fluffy: If we shared a vision and passion for where we want to go, seeing how it could help the people currently afflicted would become a positive and motivating call to crusade.

Without one, seeing them suffer is just depressing.

Do we really want to be a society without a vision?

In vice, people commit one of the seven deadly sins—also known as the “cardinal vices:” wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Each of the seven deadly sins has consequences.

But what if you could undertake just one vice without any negative side effects?

What would you choose?

I don’t struggle with anger, materialism doesn’t color my thoughts, calling me “lazy” spurs me to further action, I’m confident but not arrogant, I’m as red-blooded as the next human but not more so, and I tend to support and admire others over coveting what they’ve done or acquired.

Ah, but food—I’ve always struggled with food.

I’d choose gluttony.

Fortunately, recent changes have helped my insatiability, but I could regularly eat far more than I should. And I’m no gourmet—give me pizza and cookies and bread and queso and chips over foie gras any day. (Remember my last meal?) Given the chance, I’d always eat the entire pizza. Happily I’d finish the full box of cookies.

No exaggeration.

But eating like that makes me feel ill. Physically drained. Mentally sluggish. Puffy and achy. Unable to sleep. And the more horrible food I eat, the more horrible food I want. It’s a cycle of insatiability.

I just can’t eat like that. So I don’t. (And making changes has made a world of difference. I don’t even crave that stuff anymore. Although I’m sure it’d be amazing if I started eating it again.)

But that’s me.

What would be your vice of choice?

Universally, I’ve found the experience flawed.

In all cases, the organizations have tossed mentors and protégés together without much consideration as to what the each person can offer the other.

In my most recent experience, a university program matched me with an MBA student who worked for one of the largest multinational corporations on the planet. In our first session, I asked him what he hoped to gain from our scheduled nine months of biweekly meetings.

His response?

He’d like to learn how better to navigate the politics within his corporation and how to transition from engineering to supply-chain management.

Right.

I’m an entrepreneur with a professional services firm and a commercial property company. My largest employer had a few hundred employees and they all worked in a single building in Chicago.

How could I help this guy?

When questioned, the organizers admitted lack of much reasoning behind how they paired executives and students. They figured a senior-level professional could help anyone at an early career stage. Certainly, that’s true to an extent: My protégé and I talked about emotional intelligence and I did my best to connect him with people who had direct experience with his concerns.

However, protégés will always gain more from someone with specific experience in his or her area of interest and challenge. The experience will then prove more rewarding to the mentors, too: When you volunteer your time, you want to feel maximally effective.

In my most recent example, I struggled to provide value.

My take:

If an organization asks someone to dedicate the time and focus necessary to serve as a mentor—and offers the program to protégés who must spend time and effort on the experience as well—it should better pair the teams.

Yes, this will require more work. Organizations will need to create questionnaires and surveys to better understand what applicants from both sides seek to gain and give. Organizations may find that they need to wait to find an appropriate mentor for a given protégé—and vice versa.

But throwing people together just doesn’t work.

Have you served as a mentor or protégé? How could the organization have improved the experience?

Ramona enjoying the afternoon sun on our front porch. According to Zoobiquity, our species share more health issues than I'd realized.

Zoobiquity, by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers, discusses the different diseases and conditions present in animals and people and how studying them across species can help us improve medical care.

In reading the book, I realized how often we fear less likely medical disasters—and rarely let more common ailments enter our concerns.

Women fear breast cancer over heart disease, as this National Institutes of Health study shows, although heart disease will affect and kill many more women than breast cancer. (One in thirty-six women will die of breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. One in four women will die of heart disease, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office on Women’s Health.)

People in general fear uncommon infectious diseases like SARS and whatever tonight’s evening news fearmongers up for us over more common everyday killing illnesses like hepatitis C and diabetes.

As I reflected on this tendency and compared the likelihood of diseases to the prevailing level of concern they evoke in the populace, I noticed that many of the diseases and conditions we fear most we can’t control.

We can address risk factors for heart disease far more easily than we can control our chances of breast cancer. Through safe-sex and safe-needle practices, we can protect against hepatitis C. Through diet and exercise, we can prevent diabetes.

In contrast, we can’t control our likelihood for contracting many illnesses we fear most. Ebola, SARS, flesh-eating parasites—we know little about how to keep some of these diseases from occuring in populations and others are so uncommon and so random that precautions to prevent them wouldn’t prove realistic.

Why do we like to fear the uncommon and hard to prevent over the prevalent and controllable?

I could understand the tendency to fear the outlandish if we’d already done everything to address the diseases and conditions we can control.

But we don’t.

I wonder: By failing to consider the real, true, prevalent medical dangers—the ones we can take steps to prevent—while panicking about rare diseases out of our control and unlikely to affect us the way we avoid personal accountability?

What do you think is going on?

Humid morning in the Cayo District (Belize) jungle as we began our three-hour trek into Guatemala to hike Tikal. December 2012.

Two people recently asked me:

“Which do you prefer more? Relaxing vacations or adventure trips?”

As a youngster, I liked adventurous vacations best. Without any stress beyond the normal social anxieties of growing up and coming of age—papers to write, how my clothes looked, did that guy like me, how could I lose weight, would my report please my boss—I wanted a trip to include excitement and the thrill of the new:

• Let’s take an unplanned road trip and see where we end up!
• Let’s jaunt to Greece with no hotel reservations or agenda and see what happens!
• Let’s go to Russia and tour its entire western half in a handful of weeks!

These days, I prefer relaxing vacations.

The constant stress, pressure, and nonstop work schedule of entrepreneurship—not to mention the adult anxieties of health conundrums, financial planning and management, sudden and protracted dramas among friends and family—have changed the meaning of “escape” to signify

• worrying about nothing (let someone else take care of everything for me, please),
• sleeping as much as I want,
• eating healthfully,
• exercising,
• reading and writing, and
• general pampering. (Massages, anyone?)

But I do still like adventures on occasion. My recent trip to Belize—trekking across the Guatemalan border to hike Tikal and all-day caving to see Mayan ritual-sacrifice sites—qualifies.

Perhaps when I’m older and less stressed with striving, the preference scales will tip back toward adventure vacations. When a youth on a trek, I saw a fair share of retirees. One day, I may be one of them.

What’s your favorite vacation type?

My beverages of choice. May 2013.

When people notice that someone doesn’t drink alcohol, they become extremely awkward.

Some try to convince the nondrinker that she should have “just one.” Some say that alcohol has health benefits. If they don’t say anything, they seem uncomfortable. Likely, the silent ones don’t know what to say.

I don’t drink alcohol—and never really have.

When people discover this fun fact, they react as though I’ve judged them. They appear to think I care that they drink. They act slightly threatened and defensive.

Yes, food and drink are communal. Even some members of the animal kingdom use food to make friends. A study of bonobos found that they will share delicacies with unknown monkeys to build social networks. (And for a wild animal, sharing sustenance is no small sacrifice.)

However, humans find community in many endeavors. And we regularly dine together without eating and drinking exactly the same things.

And I don’t like alcohol.

Why?

• It tastes nasty.
• I don’t find it relaxing.
• Fuzzy-headed-ness sours my mood.
• Acting out of control or idiotic does not appeal to me.
• Alcohol is highly expensive (which mattered a great deal in college and graduate school).
• The calories in most drinks could make a meal. Worth it if I liked the stuff—not worth it when I find it foul-tasting.
• I have enough of an obsessive personality and enough alcoholics in my family to see what happens when a person combines intensity and addictive substances. I’ll pass on tempting their fate.

I’m happy to go to bars with friends and drink something else. I don’t mind if someone chooses wine at dinner and I order sparkling water. Yet I don’t see a reason to do something I don’t like that has few benefits.

With almost anything else, people wouldn’t care. I don’t like oysters. I’m not a fan of horror movies. No one seems freaked out by either preference.

So why do people care so much about nondrinkers in their midst?

What’s your take?

People have long said that writing down your goals increases your chances of realizing your plans. I’d add that accountability partners have proved equally essential to my achievement.

Accountability partners know what you want to accomplish and hold your feet to the fire on getting it done. They ask you about how you plan to progress toward goal. When forward movement stalls, they ask why. They help you work through obstacles. And you do the same for them.

What makes an ideal accountability partner?

• Implicit trust. You need to spill your guts about what you really want. Your accountability partner shouldn’t laugh or dismiss your goals. Sure, he may ask some hard questions, but not in an overly critical or judgmental way.
• Not your parents, spouses, or siblings. Your spouse asking about progress in your fitness goals will make you feel unattractive. Your sister asking about career targets brings up old rivalries. Your parents asking you about, well, anything harks back to childhood nagging. Family has too many undercurrents.
• Matching styles. Drill sergeants don’t work for me. (“Boot camp”-style workouts? Pass.) Yet you might need someone aggressive to keep you on track and motivated.
• Share and share alike. Your accountability partner needs defined goals as well and should look to you as an accountability partner in return. If he doesn’t have defined goals, he won’t understand their importance. And when both people spill their goal guts, the relationship is mutual—not one sided.

You can have many accountability partners. I have one friend I meet to write—we keep each other on track with targets and help each other get over speedbumps. Another friend and I meet every four to six weeks to share business-goals progress and we annually define these goals together. Accountability partners don't have to be one-size-fits-all.

Do you have accountability partners? Should you?