Recipe for a good relationship
This one is a funny, because it may seem at first like a very easy parallel to Recipe for a good life, you take the core elements: ability, stability, safety and basic needs, then you find a beautiful person who helps you achieve those. Well it's not quite there in my view, there is more adaptation to be done and of course there is more interpretation and implementation of those said elements, how do you make them work and how do you "measure" them. In addition it's actually not required at all to get all of those pillars, or even most from your significant other.
A simplification I use when reducing those to a relationship level are
- communication channels, emotional and logical
- trust/safety
- love
- sexual compatibility
- ability and competence
And i'll expand on those and how they parallel the pillars from Recipe for a good life in a bit, but lets stay on this level for minute.
I think a happy relationship, a happy marriage, partnership, can be built on just a few of them and be successful. It could be fine if your relationship doesn't provide ability, some people get that somewhere else, they solve problems on their own, they do things they want to do on their own and earn money and influence without dependence or togetherness. Sexual compatibility is important because we evolved for it to be a big part of a dual familial bond. But if your goal is not that, and just a functional partnership, it could be fine without. Love makes up for others here, makes the good things better and the bad things not as bad, it fills us, love is a fundamental need (to love and to be loved) but one can get and provide it in a distributed model through friends and lovers separate from a core relationship (I believe this is not a good model, but it is possible). And that leaves us with communication, which I think is the base for any connection and can't be disregarded, and trust/safety which comes from communication and from alignment of all the other pillars. Note that both of those don't need to be very strong if you forgo the other three. If you accept that your partner does not provide ability into the dynamic, then trusting them to fulfill that expectation is easy for example.
Now that we covered how possible it is to disregard some of those pillars, and build a relationship without them, lets dive into why I don't want to do that at all. In my personal view with regards to myself, I think they are all equally important. I know that I want my relationship to fill those things, to be able to hold them and build them. I know I don't want to forgo any of those. I know that it doesn't matter for me if one is "more important" because in my case I see them all as dependent on each-other in the early stages of a relationship and then as reinforcing each-other later on and because of how much they are important to me having them damaged might mean a slow degradation of all five