Hiroko Tanaka

About

The myth worth retiring is that a good pairing does not require maintenance, and that needing to work at it means something is wrong. The opposite is closer to the truth. The ones that last are maintained deliberately. Every long relationship accumulates small unresolved items, and the difference between those that hold and those that do not is largely whether anybody attends to the accumulation. We attend to it. That is unglamorous work and it is far more predictive of how things go than compatibility or chemistry ever were. Crisis work came at the very start for me, which gave me a durable preference for prevention over rescue. It is much easier to deal with this before it becomes urgent. If you have been waiting for a real problem before addressing it, you do not need to wait. Maintenance sounds unromantic, and it is nevertheless the thing that keeps a pairing alive over decades rather than years.