Never go to bed on an argument … and 19 other relationship ‘rules’ unpicked by experts

Is it wrong to flirt with other people? Do you have to agree on politics? And is it all about sex? Therapists examine the truths and myths of relationship lore - Joanna Moorhead in The Guardian

1 It’s not all about sex


TRUE “For most people, a satisfying sexual relationship is an important part of a good relationship,” says Susanna Abse, psychoanalytic therapist and author of Tell Me the Truth About Love: 13 Tales from Couple Therapy. “While sex may not be the most important thing, it’s certainly an indicator of chemistry, and it matters – especially at the start. Also, if you’re having bad sex with someone in the beginning, why would you want to carry on?”

2 Your partner should know what you feel/need

FALSE This is one of those saccharine myths we’ve been sold by romantic fairytales. However close you are to someone, says Joanna Harrison, divorce lawyer-turned-couples-therapist and author of Five Arguments All Couples (Need to) Have, you’ll never be able to second-guess them on everything. “And why would you want to? That would be boring. Also, people change; we’re all evolving.” What matters is that you each share what you’re feeling, you listen to one another, and you try to see things from your partner’s point of view.

3 No relationship can survive an affair

FALSE There are many kinds of affair, and this, says Abse, is key. “An affair can be an exit strategy, sure. But it can also be a protest – a way of bringing your partner’s attention to something that isn’t working for you in the relationship. If it’s that kind of affair, and you can work through why it happened with your partner, you can move on from it – providing apologies are given, reparations are made and forgiveness is forthcoming.”
If you’re having bad sex with someone in the beginning, why would you want to carry on?

4 A relationship is stronger if you share a bed

FALSE The important thing isn’t whether you share a bed – it’s talking about why if you don’t, says Harrison. “Whether it’s down to snoring or young kids, sleeping in separate beds reduces the intimate time you get together. So you need to discuss how you can compensate.” Make love on the sofa in the evening when the kids have gone to sleep. If snoring has driven you to separate rooms, at least have your morning tea in bed together.

5 Never go to bed on an argument

FALSE So often, says Terrence Real, family therapist and author of Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, rows happen because one or both partners have been drinking, or they’re not feeling good, or it’s late and you’re both tired. “What I say is: you’re not going to resolve anything tonight. Go to bed, and the next morning have a cup of tea together and talk it through.” All relationships are about the cycle of closeness, disruption and return to closeness. “Our culture worships the harmony phase, but a good relationship thrives on surviving the mess. The work of intimacy is the collision of imperfections, and how we manage those.”

6 It’s wrong to flirt with other people

TRUE You can be playful with someone, says Real, “but if you look into their eyes, there’s a difference between the shades being down – ‘shop closed’ – and the signal ‘come hither’. And if you’re using the sexual energy between you and someone else to feel excited, that’s like a mini-affair.” The rule is this, says Real: if your partner could hear you, and the way you’re speaking would upset them, it’s not OK.

7 People can’t change

FALSE. “I’m in the personality transplant business,” says Real. “Therapy is about understanding why we behave as we do, and making conscious decisions to change things in order to hang on to someone we care about.” Relate therapist Simone Bose, who runs her own practice, agrees that people can change, but they have to want to, and that means confronting aspects of themselves that might be uncomfortable or painful. “What’s hardest is overcoming the defensive mechanism you have as default,” she says.

  

8 Having arguments doesn’t have to be bad


TRUE If an argument escalates to violence or one partner feeling unsafe, that’s wrong, and you need expert help. But as you learn the landscape of your partner, says Harrison, arguments show you’re working each other out. “You’re finding out what your partner is passionate about, and sharing that. So these disagreements are full of useful information about what matters to each of you. If couples stop talking about what they care about, and sometimes arguing about it, they can start to feel disconnected.”

9 The ‘one’ is out there somewhere

FALSE “This is demonstrably nonsense: you only have to look at the people who find love again after losing their partner,” says Real. “We tend to fall in love with a person who we subliminally believe is going to heal us, give us what we didn’t get in our early life. Relationships tend to replay situations we’ve been in before. We fall in love with what completes us, in other words. And it’s this feeling – that we ‘fit together’ – that makes us feel we’ve found ‘the one’.” A successful relationship comes down to rewriting the script, so you’re not playing out things that went wrong in the past.

10 Once a cheater, always a cheater

TRUE and FALSE What’s most interesting about cheating, says Real, isn’t why someone does it – that’s obvious (it’s exciting, it’s sexy, it’s a thrill). No: the interesting thing is why someone doesn’t do it. “Cheating is always selfish: it’s always about overriding what you should do. So if you’ve learned from it and moved on, then no, you won’t necessarily be a cheater again. But your partner might never feel 100% assured you won’t do it again. It’s important to understand that.”

11 Marriage is just a piece of paper

FALSE “The question I’d ask a couple,” says Real, “is: who is your community? Who is supporting you, and how have you signalled you need that support, that you value it for your relationship?” Few rituals are left in modern life, he says, and a marriage ceremony is one that includes others as well as the couple themselves. “There’s something transformative about it being an experience embedded in the community,” he says. “That’s why it mattered to fight for the legal right for gay couples to marry.”

12 If a relationship needs therapy, it’s too late

FALSE Individuals are complicated, and partners who love one another and can see there’s potential for an ongoing relationship can also see there are stumbling blocks, says Bose. Having therapy, especially quite early on in a relationship, can ensure they get across those hurdles without the relationship being damaged. On the other hand, she cautions against therapy that goes on and on. “Some couples are scared to leave – you’ve got to be able to carry on without that crutch.”

13 You should always own up if you cheat

TRUE and FALSE You should usually confess, but not always, says Abse. “If we’re talking about a one-night stand on a business trip, maybe it’s OK, and better not to share it with your partner. But if you’ve had a longer-term relationship with someone else and you never reveal it to your partner, you’re avoiding something. It’s going to leave you in a sad place because you’ll have lost that sense that you and your partner share your deepest feelings.”

14 You have to agree on politics

FALSE If politics matters deeply to you then yes, says Bose, you need to be aligned. But if it doesn’t, voting for different political parties probably won’t unseat your relationship to any extent. “Much more important is sharing the same values: what’s important to you, what you truly believe matters. If you don’t agree on values, it seeps into your everyday life and can affect your relationship at a very deep level.”

15 Relationship problems always come down to money or sex

FALSE “In fact, they always come down to one thing: communication,” says Harrison. “Money and sex are taboo subjects in many families, and we all bring our family baggage to any relationship. But the issues aren’t about these things per se, they’re about being able to talk about these things – and everything else that matters.”

16 It’s always obvious when a relationship is over

FALSE Even for an experienced therapist like Joanna Harrison, it’s often not clear whether a couple are going to make it through. “Individuals have different thresholds for what they can deal with in a relationship,” she says. “There are no absolutes, no moment where it has to be all over.”

17 You need to have lots in common

FALSE In fact, says Abse, unconsciously we’re looking for someone who has attributes we’re lacking – because being with them helps us to learn different ways, and to grow our characters. “So if you’re a shy kind of person, you might find yourself attracted to someone gregarious.” It also means you can rely on the other person for those things – it’s the yin/yang thing. “A relationship is often more interesting and dynamic where there are challenges and differences.”

18 You need regular date nights

FALSE It’s not date nights that matter, says Harrison, it’s time together. So you don’t have to spend money or go out or have a treat (though that might be lovely). The bit your relationship needs is time shared as a couple: snuggled together on the sofa watching TV or a walk in the park can be every bit as good as a pricey meal out.

19 A baby will jeopardise your relationship

TRUE It’s tempting to hope a child who shares your genes, who you created together, will bond you and keep your relationship going. But, says Abse, relationship satisfaction goes down in the early weeks, months and years after the arrival of a baby. “Having a baby changes everything – you can’t underestimate that. You lose freedom, you lose autonomy, you lose intimacy. It’s a really challenging time for a couple.”

20 You can have a good sex life for ever

FALSE Viagra has sold us this idea, says Abse, and sure, in theory there’s no reason why sex should ever stop. But in the real world, things are different. “I’m wary of putting pressure on older people,” she says. “The reality is, for most long-term couples, sex drops off after their 50s or 60s. Those who carry on usually shift from swinging from the chandeliers to a more gentle, slow sex that might not involve penetration. It can be very intimate, but not all couples want it.”

A Confidence Artist (con man) Satisfies a Basic Human Need

“Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.’ Voltaire

The above quote is accurate because it touches on a profound truth. The truth of our absolute and total need for belief from our early moments of consciousness till we die.

In some ways, confidence artists have it easy. We’ve done most of the work for them; we want to believe in what they’re telling us. Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.

Confidence men are sometimes referred to as the ‘aristocrats of crime’. Hard crime - theft, burglary, violence is not what the confidence artist is about. The confidence game - the con - is about soft skills. Trust, sympathy, persuasion. The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want - money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support - and we don’t realise what is happening until it is too late.

Our need to believe, to embrace things that explain our world, is as pervasive as it is strong. Given the right cues, we’re willing to go along with just about anything and put our confidence in just about anyone. Conspiracy theories, supernatural phenomena, psychics; we have a seemingly bottomless capacity for credulity.

Or, as one psychologist put it, ‘Gullibility may be deeply engrained in the human behavioural repertoire.’ For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them. Stories about our origins. Our purpose. The reasons the world is the way it is.

Human beings don’t like to exist in a state of uncertainty or ambiguity. When something doesn’t make sense we want to supply the missing link. When we don’t understand what or why or how something happened, we want to find the explanation. A confidence artist is only too happy to comply - and the well-crafted narrative is his absolute forte.

 

Extracted from The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova

The Importance of Being Single

 

"Don't marry the one you love, but marry the one who loves you": Irish Wisdom

 

My year of no spending is over – here's how I got through it

Michelle McGagh in The Guardian


Just over 12 months ago I gave myself a challenge: give up spending on all but the essentials for a whole year. I started on Friday 27 November, just as many other people were hitting the shops. It hasn’t always been easy, but a year on I am wealthier and wiser. Embarrassingly, I have also realised just how much money I’ve squandered down the pub, in restaurants and through mindless shopping.

The challenge

As a personal finance journalist people assumed I was good with money but while I wrote a lot about the merits of saving, I wasn’t practising what I preached. I figured that because I earned a good wage, didn’t have any credit card debt and my bank account was in the black, I didn’t need to worry about how much money was leaving my account.

I was spending without thinking, lured in by advertising and the promise that I could spend my way to happiness. I was stuck in a cycle of consumerism – earning money to buy stuff I didn’t really need, which wasn’t making me happy.

Giving up spending for a year was an extreme approach, but the aim was to embrace extreme frugality, shake up my spending habits and overpay my mortgage instead of shopping. I could continue to pay my bills, including mortgages, utilities, broadband, phone bill, charity donations, life insurances, money to help my family and basic groceries.

I’ve learned to shop for food in a better way than I did before – I have planned meals, batch-cooked and improved my dire cooking skills slightly. My husband agreed to do the grocery part of the challenge with me this year and we reduced our weekly shop (which covered three meals each a day, toiletries and house cleaning products) to £31.60 a week.

 

Michelle McGagh’s cycle became her best friend.



Finding a new way to live

There were two instances in the last year when I had to put my hand in my pocket. The first was on a cycling holiday when I spent £1.95 on a bag of chips because there was nothing to eat in the only local shop except for pork pies. The second was when my next door neighbour – who didn’t know I was on a no-spending challenge – had given a roofer the OK to fix a missing tile between our terrace house and his. The work had already been done and the roofer paid. It cost £100 and we owed him £50 so I paid up. I’m not too upset by the fact I’ve paid out £51.95 all year.

I’m not going to pretend it was easy, especially in the first few months when I tried to live my old life without money and found it wasn’t working. There were plenty of times I wanted to abandon it and indulge in some retail therapy, buy a pint in the pub, or even just purchase a bus ticket instead of getting on my bike for another journey.

But I realised I just had to find new ways to have fun that didn’t include putting my hand in my pocket and defaulting to the pub. Using sites such as Eventbrite I have been to film screenings, wine tasting evenings and theatre productions for free. I’ve also used SRO Audiences to see comedy shows and TV programmes being filmed, and none of it cost me anything.

Living in London I have a wealth of free cultural activities on my doorstep and I’ve been to more art exhibitions this year than ever before – my favourite being First Thursdays, where 150 galleries in east London open late and hold private views and talks.

I even managed a free holiday, cycling the Suffolk and Norfolk coast and camping on beaches. It’s something I’d never done before and probably wouldn’t have, were it not for the challenge – and now I can’t wait to go again next year.

I would like thank those who engaged with me on social media to say they were enforcing their own spending bans

There were lows, such as when I missed gigs and blockbuster films. And I’ve not been able to join friends when they have gone out for a nice meal. There have also been some awkward moments when I’ve turned up to a friend’s house for dinner empty-handed because I couldn’t buy a bottle of wine as a thank you. I did a lot of washing up at my friends’ houses this year as a way of saying thanks for feeding me.

The savings

After my expenses were met, I started overpaying my mortgage. We also took in a lodger, and my savings and their rent have helped us pay off an extra 10% of our loan.

Paying off a large chunk of the mortgage has made me realise that I don’t have to stay indebted to the bank for another 25 years like it wants me to and that I have an option to pay it off earlier. By getting rid of my mortgage faster I not only cut the amount of time I spend paying it off but also the interest I pay to the bank.

I’m grateful to have disposable income to save and feel I should make the most of it – I hope I have encouraged other people to reconsider their spending patterns too. I would like to say thank you to those who engaged with me on social media to say they were enforcing their own spending bans whether on clothes or a month-long ban – they all helped me keep my resolve.

That’s not to say that everyone was happy about my experiment, with some accusing me of poverty tourism, but there is a big difference between poverty and frugality. This experiment was not about living in poverty because poverty isn’t a choice. I could still pay my mortgage, bills and food. The last year has been an experiment in extreme frugality and choosing not to buy, rather than not having a choice.

 

Michelle McGagh’s jeans have seen better days

Despite the awkward moments and missing out, this year has been the shove I needed to try new things. The best thing about the challenge is that I’ve been willing to say ‘yes’ more and that I’ve become more adventurous.Having the choice to spend, or not, is a privilege and I have become far more aware of why we buy. I have come to realise that consumerism keeps us chained to our desks, working to earn money to spend on stuff we think will make our lives better. And when the stuff doesn’t make us happy, we go back to work to earn more money to buy something else. The last 12 months have allowed me to step outside this cycle and I can honestly say I’m happier now. I’ve gained confidence and skills, done things I would never have done and met lovely people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.

Many people have said to me, “I bet you can’t wait to get down the shops and have a splurge”, but in all honesty, I’m not interested in hitting the shops. There are a few practical items I need to replace, such as jeans and trainers, and my bike could do with a decent service but that’s about it. I have one more day of no spending to get through and after that there are just two things I will be buying this weekend: a round of drinks for my friends and family to say thanks for their support, followed by a flight to see my grandad in Ireland.

A year of no spending has taught me what things I really need, and it really isn’t that much.

Five things I really missed


There were lots of big events and nights out I expected to miss out on, but there were some small, more everyday items that I hadn’t expected to miss quite so much.
Decent curry: I’m not the best cook and my home-made curries just can’t compete with my local takeaway.

Fresh flowers: I realised how much I’d missed flowers at home when I was sent a bunch for my birthday – they brightened my home and my mood.

Moisturiser: this didn’t make it on to the “essentials” list, which was probably a mistake judging by my wind-whipped face.

Perfume: my Lidl deodorant stood up to the test of cycling everywhere but a spritz of perfume may have helped me feel a bit more human and less of a sweaty mess.

The bus: while I love cycling, not being able to get on the bus in the cold and rain could be trying; taking the bus, especially to meetings where I had to look smart, would have been a big plus.

It’s divorce day – let’s bust some marriage myths

The conservative narrative baffles: how can tying the knot be both a moral choice and an insurance policy?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Monday 5 January 2015

‘There’s nothing moral about making a promise, the moral part is in keeping it.’ Illustration by Mitch Blunt

It’s “divorce day”, the first working Monday after Christmas, customarily the busiest time of the year for family lawyers. In this age of constant contact, there’s been a modest surge in people seeking advice between Christmas and New Year, but for most, Twelfth Nisi is today (a half-pun for those who have already begun their divorce). If you’re married, there is a one in five chance you’re considering a split (according to a survey by legal firm Irwin Mitchell); it sounds improbably large, but there it is. If it’s not you, it’s probably him; check his phone, that’s how all the best divorces start.

Sir Paul Coleridge, a former high court judge, runs the Marriage Foundation, a charity that encourages getting and staying married. He told the Sunday Times, as part of a marriage-promotion drive in the lead-up to D-Day, of a case he’d seen: “She was the long-term girlfriend of a very high-profile celebrity person by whom she had had no fewer than four children. It was looking as if it was going to come unstuck, and she wanted to talk to me informally about what her position was. She said, ‘We’ll no doubt need an hour or two.’ I said, ‘We’ll need a minute or two because the answer is very simple: you have no rights.’”

Many people – in the 18-34 age group, almost half – believe that “common law” marriage actually comes with rights attached; that cohabiting couples with children have the same access to each other’s incomes, in the event of a split, as married ones do. This is untrue, though the “no ring, no rights” rallying cry of the marriage lobby is a bit of an overstatement (maintenance obligations obviously exist for the non-resident parent, whether previously married or not). This can prove disastrous for the main carer, who is unlikely to be the higher earner and, labouring under an illusion of legal protection, may have made no attempt to shield their finances from the hit of parenthood.

Family lawyers are divided on the answer – some would like to see new legislation that brings the common law into the purview of the actual law. Others, like Coleridge, see this as totally illogical; marriage, being limitless in both time and liability, is about the most profound contract a person can enter into. You can’t just slide into it, via cohabitation and parenthood; you have to enter into it willingly. His view is that marriage must be taught in schools (as a good idea, that is; I believe children already broadly know that it exists), and he’s supported in this by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), among others. There is something touchingly absurd about the amount of store people set by telling children things in schools – as if, when you want to alter behaviour, you simply insert a lesson and make it so. It doesn’t even work with oral hygiene.

Conservative belief in the institution of marriage runs like this: making a commitment to one another is what moral people do, and this makes marriage the most stable of all known relationships. Since stability is good for children, marriage is good for children (this mantra is given by the CSJ, especially, as something akin to gravity in its self-evidence).

Then, finally, if it all goes Pete Tong, you have the protection of the law, without which the weaker party may well end up dependent on the state. (The Sunday Times article was illustrated rather vividly by the story of a woman who, while waiting two and a half years for her husband to pay maintenance, said: “I’m pretty sure I cost the government around £400,000.”)

Few of these suppositions make much sense. There’s nothing moral about making a promise, the moral part is in keeping it, which 42% of married people don’t. Arguably, cohabiting couples are more moral than married ones, never making the promise in the first place that, most people agree and 42% prove, is rather unrealistic. In many cases, the so-called stability conferred by marriage is indistinguishable from that bestowed by wealth, which has itself become a major determinant of people’s decision to get married. But the critical contradiction, the bit I really cannot compute, is the idea of marriage as at once a moral choice and an insurance policy. It’s one or the other, surely? The abnegation of the self in the search for true togetherness, or a bid for your spouse’s income: how can it be both?

A conservative would see no contradiction, here: to have taken out the insurance policy of marriage is to have assured one’s self-sufficiency, thus protecting the state from its otherwise 400k liability (that figure does seem improbably high, but let’s go with it). Self-sufficiency is a moral act, to a conservative. In practical terms, this is nonsense; you may have left a copper-bottomed marriage, but if you weren’t rich to begin with, it is highly unlikely that your family earnings will expand to cover two households. Forty-two per cent of single parents live in poverty, 63% have no savings, 71% of all those renting are on housing benefit; so “self-sufficiency” is a byword for affluence, which then has moral superiority conferred upon it.

This is a recurring motif in the political mood music, cropping up in discussions from marriage to poverty to growth. The view from the right is that the ultimate in respectability is to need nothing from anyone: to which the left generally answers, self-sufficiency is about systems, and in the current system, it is very hard to be self-sufficient, however hard you work. But perhaps the question should be: what’s so wrong with needing one another in the first place?

How Much Land Does a Man Need?

"How Much Land Does a Man Require?" (Russian: Много ли человеку земли нужно?, Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno) is an 1886 short story by Leo Tolstoy about a man who, in his lust for land, forfeits everything.

Synopsis

The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pakhom, whose wife at the beginning can be heard complaining that they do not own enough land to satisfy them. He states that "if I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the Devil himself!". Unbeknownst to him, Satan is present sitting behind the stove and listening. Satan abruptly accepts his challenge and also tells that he would give Pakhom more land and then snatch everything from him. A short amount of time later, a landlady in the village decides to sell her estate, and the peasants of the village buy as much of that land as they can. Pakhom himself purchases some land, and by working off the extra land is able to repay his debts and live a more comfortable life. 

However, Pakhóm then becomes very possessive of his land, and this causes arguments with his neighbours. "Threats to burn his building began to be uttered." Later, he moves to a larger area of land at another Commune. Here, he can grow even more crops and amass a small fortune, but he has to grow the crops on rented land, which irritates him. Finally, after buying and selling a lot of fertile and good land, he is introduced to the Bashkirs, and is told that they are simple-minded people who own a huge amount of land. Pakhóm goes to them to take as much of their land for as low a price as he can negotiate. Their offer is very unusual: for a sum of one thousand rubles, Pakhóm can walk around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak, marking his route with a spade along the way. If he reaches his starting point by sunset that day, the entire area of land his route encloses will be his, but if he does not reach his starting point he will lose his money and receive no land. He is delighted as he believes that he can cover a great distance and has chanced upon the bargain of a lifetime. That night, Pakhóm experiences a surreal dream in which he sees himself lying dead by the feet of the Devil, who is laughing.

He stays out as late as possible, marking out land until just before the sun sets. Toward the end, he realizes he is far from the starting point and runs back as fast as he can to the waiting Bashkirs. He finally arrives at the starting point just as the sun sets. The Bashkirs cheer his good fortune, but exhausted from the run, Pakhóm drops dead. His servant buries him in an ordinary grave only six feet long, thus ironically answering the question posed in the title of the story.

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

Is protecting the environment incompatible with social justice?

When Oxfam investigates the question of whether environment conflicts with development, we should take notice

A girl carrying water in Kibera slum, Nairobi. There is sometimes a clash between environmental policies and social justice. Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images

By George Monbiot

It is the stick with which the greens are beaten daily: if we spend money on protecting the environment, the poor will starve, or freeze to death, or will go without shoes and education. Most of those making this argument do so disingenuously: they support the conservative or libertarian politics that keep the poor in their place and ensure that the 1% harvest the lion's share of the world's resources.

Journalists writing for the corporate press, with views somewhere to the right of Vlad the Impaler and no prior record of concern for the poor, suddenly become their doughty champions when the interests of the proprietorial class are threatened. If tar sands cannot be extracted in Canada, they maintain, subsistence farmers in Africa will starve. If Tesco's profits are threatened, children will die of malaria. When it is done cleverly, promoting the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich under the guise of concern for the poor is an effective public relations strategy.

Even so, it is true that there is sometimes a clash between environmental policies and social justice, especially when the policies have been poorly designed, as I argued on this blog last month.
But while individual policies can be bad for the poor, is the protection of the environment inherently incompatible with social justice? This is the question addressed in a discussion paper published by Oxfam on Monday.

Oxfam, remember, exists to defend the world's poorest people and help them to escape from poverty. Unlike the rightwing bloggers, it is motivated by genuine concern for social justice. So when it investigates the question of whether concern for the environment conflicts with development, we should take notice. Kate Raworth, who wrote the report, has created an essential template for deciding whether economic activity will help or harm humanity and the biosphere.

She points out that in rough terms we already know how to identify the social justice line below which no one should fall, and the destruction line above which human impacts should not rise.
The social justice line is set by the eleven priorities listed by the governments preparing for this year's Rio summit. These are:

• food security
• adequate income
• clean water and good sanitation
• effective healthcare
• access to education
• decent work
• modern energy services
• resilience to shocks
• gender equality
• social equity
• a voice in democratic politics.

The destruction line is set by the nine planetary boundaries identified in Stockholm in 2009 by a group of earth system scientists. They identified the levels beyond which we endanger the earth's living systems of:

• climate change
• biodiversity loss
• nitrogen and phosphate use
• ozone depletion
• ocean acidification
• freshwater use
• changes in land use
• particles in the atmosphere
• chemical pollution.

We are already living above the line on the first three indicators, and close to it on several others.
The space between these two lines is the "safe and just space for humanity to thrive in". So what happens if everyone below the social justice line rises above it? Does that push us irrevocably over the destruction line? The answer, she shows, is no.

For example, providing enough food for the 13% of the world's people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%.

Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%.

Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.

In other words, it is not the needs of the poor that threaten the biosphere, but the demands of the rich. Raworth points out that half the world's carbon emissions are produced by just 11% of its people, while, with grim symmetry, 50% of the world's people produce just 11% of its emissions. Animal feed used in the EU alone, which accounts for just 7% of the world's people, uses up 33% of the planet's sustainable nitrogen budget. "Excessive resource use by the world's richest 10% of consumers," she notes, "crowds out much-needed resource use by billions of other people."

The politically easy way to tackle poverty is to try to raise the living standards of the poor while doing nothing to curb the consumption of the rich. This is the strategy almost all governments follow. It is a formula for environmental disaster, which, in turn, spreads poverty and deprivation. As Oxfam's paper says, social justice is impossible without "far greater global equity in the use of natural resources, with the greatest reductions coming from the world's richest consumers".

This is not to suggest that all measures intended to protect the environment are socially just. Raworth identifies the evictions by biofuels companies and plantation firms harvesting carbon credits as examples of the pursuit of supposedly green policies which harm the poor. But before the sneering starts, remember that the fight against both these blights has been led by environmentalists, who recognised their destructive potential long before the libertarians now using them as evidence of the perfidy of the green movement.

But there are far more cases in which poverty has been exacerbated by the lack of environmental policies. The Oxfam paper points out that crossing any of the nine planetary boundaries can "severely undermine human development, first and foremost for women and men living in poverty." Climate change, for example, is already hammering the lives of some of the world's poorest people. You can see the consequences of crossing another planetary boundary in the report just published by the New Economics Foundation, which shows that overfishing has destroyed around 100,000 jobs.

Just as mistaken green policies can damage the poor, mistaken poverty relief policies can damage the environment. For example, where fertiliser subsidies encourage farmers to use more than they need, as they do in China, money supposed to relieve poverty serves only to pollute the water supply. Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth's capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.

But extreme poverty, just like extreme wealth, can also damage the environment. People without access to clean energy sources, for example, are often forced to use wood for cooking. This shortens their lives as they inhale the smoke, destroys forests and exacerbates global warming by producing black carbon.

With a few exceptions, none of which should be hard to remedy, delivering social justice and protecting the environment are not only compatible: they are each indispensable to the other. Only through social justice, which must include the redistribution of the world's ridiculously concentrated wealth, can the environment and the lives of the world's poorest be defended.

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more. As Gandhi said, the Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone's need but not everyone's greed.

Apple and the art of business

By Sreeram Chaulia

Since the ailing Steve Jobs announced his retirement from the chief executive position at Apple Inc last week, tributes have poured in to a giant of a business leader whose personality rivaled few others in corporate history.

Hailed as a genius who steered Apple from a down-in-the-dumps crisis in 1996 to the world's most valuable company (this year briefly surpassing ExxonMobil), Jobs' life imparts a message that individuals can make all the difference even in a complex and diversified global economy.

Of all the stunning insights Jobs has bequeathed, the basic one is that entrepreneurship is an art, rather than a science to be learnt through formal education or training. A college dropout like Microsoft's founder Bill Gates and Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, Jobs read the pulse of consumers like no other business titan of our times, and did so in an uncanny and instinctive fashion without meticulous market surveys, focus group discussions, or commissioned research reports.

One quote that epitomizes Jobs is his response to a journalist when asked how thoroughly he had analyzed market moods and tastes before introducing the iPad tablet computer: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."

This arrogant statement upends the mythology of capitalism, wherein the "consumer is the king" and corporations compete to serve this master by peddling choices. Jobs' scintillating career demonstrates that the marketplace is essentially a creation and a construction of wants and desires, not an invention to satisfy consumers' own preferences.

Apple, now valued at over US$300 billion, is at the apex of designing new gadgets whose need is not necessarily felt by people ex ante, but which nevertheless become indispensable for millions of buyers after getting launched.

"Coolness" - an ineffable quality - separated Apple from its direct competitors as well as peers in other industries. From the day the Macintosh arrived in 1984 until the latest iterations of the iPhones, iPods and iPads, Jobs imbued in his production stable a magical touch that made their outputs objects of mass desire.

In assessing which model of an electronic device would "click" and emote with the consuming public, Jobs must have performed mental and psychological role plays wherein he became the market, and the market became him. If business leadership is about divining the market and its future shape beforehand, Jobs was a natural at it.

Apart from design cachets in Apple devices, which were premised on gut feelings about American and global popular culture and psyche, Jobs deployed daring marketing tricks, such as keeping the supply of new products scarce and limited and whetting the appetite of customers until they became ravenously hungry. Such a teasing marketing strategy was risky, as impatient consumers could have jumped ship and plumped for an alternative tablet computer or smart phone that was readily available without the agonizing wait.

But apart from technical know-how about logistics and supply chains, Jobs had the supreme artful confidence of a maestro to execute this approach, knowing that the hungry would salivate and wait for the "real thing" rather than substitutes that lacked the X-factor of Apple.

Apple probably has the lone distinction of counterfeits not only its specific products but of its entire stores and retail outlets, as seen in China this year. Even the recognizable facade of the Apple store was fabricated in numerous locations by conmen in just one area - Kunming - until the government clamped down. It shows that a strategy of setting up far fewer sales points than is actually warranted by the mushrooming consumer demand pays off (provided competitors lack your charisma and pulling power).

The way Apple entered and then cracked the Chinese market - which had hitherto been a wild goose chase for several Western technology firms - is worthy of business school case studies. Where literally every other starry eyed international technological firm had beaten a sullen retreat, Apple went into China with its colossal global reputation and tapped into the rising disposable purses of the world's second largest economy. Jobs, the demystifying business guru, silenced market analysts who used to highlight China's cultural peculiarities and how Western multinationals lacked the local discretionary knowledge to woo the Chinese buyer.

As the ultimate capitalist of our times, one who rivals the industrial-age Henry Ford in ambition and vision, Jobs' reading of the Chinese market revealed that culture and local idiosyncrasies can be overcome through global consciousness and integration into a seamless "world market" that defies nationalism and parochialism. With every buyer, including the upwardly mobile Chinese one, glued into the same materialistic dreams, globalization takes on a new universalizing force with companies like Apple at its nerve center.

Chrystia Freeland of Reuters has written about the "Apple economy" as a distinctive phenomenon that globalizes employment and life chances instead of confining them to workers within countries where corporations are headquartered. With the bulk its buyers, manufacturers, salespersons and assemblers coming from outside the United States, Apple under Jobs was the ultimate symbol of a new era in economic organization of the planet. Local identities remain entrenched in some spheres, but ever less so in the high-technology domain, where the likes of Jobs have rendered the nation-state a defunct unit of analysis.

Steve Jobs was like an orchestra conductor who had the command to sway the audience the way he wanted them. He was not an average soap opera producer who went by "what the people like to see". Similar to the great auteur Alfred Hitchcock, who confessed to "enjoying playing the audience like a piano", Jobs delighted in deciding what form and content daily-use technology should take, and the masses lapped up his confections.

Few business leaders can deny that they nurse inner urges to take the market to a different plane, beyond staying profitable within the existing parameters. The premature departure of Jobs (he is only 57-years-old) from active stewardship of the most admired company for innovation is an opportunity to examine what it takes for one individual to remake her or his profession or field. It is a moment to reflect on how the part can transform the whole through unconventional boldness and inspired imaginativeness.

Reminiscing about a low point in 1985, when he was forced to quit as CEO of Apple, a company he had co-founded in 1976, Jobs talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again". Each of us, regardless of the station of life, has a chance to become a "beginner again", unlearn received wisdom and think fresh. Jobs' take-home legacy is a lesson that creativity is within reach if the mind is attuned.

Sreeram Chaulia is Professor and Vice Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs in Sonipat, India, and the first ever B Raman Fellow for Geopolitical Analysis at the Takshashila Institution. He is the author of the recent book, International Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones (I.B. Tauris, London)