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Social-media platforms’ attempts to break into commerce have largely flopped. Will TikTok Shop fare any better?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again The very common, very harmful thing well-meaning parents do The real issue in the UAW strike The Senate’s deep and dirty secret

“Silicon Valley Math”

A chamoy-pickle kit for $17.98; 352 sold so far. An ab roller wheel for $24.29; 8,592 sold. A one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exerciser for 89 cents; 81 sold. Such is a sampling of the items featured on my TikTok Shop tab on Wednesday morning.

Earlier this week, TikTok Shop, a feature that allows audiences to purchase a baffling array of items through a stand-alone Shop tab and from videos on their feed, rolled out to TikTok users in the United States. Now many of the app’s livestreams are “QVC-like places where sellers are nonstop pitching products to live audiences,” as my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce recently wrote. TikTok’s latest move is an attempt to shift the app’s identity—and a sign of the company’s confidence in the loyalty of its users. Yes, we can riddle feeds with often-ludicrous product promotions, the Shop feature seems to be saying, and people will still keep coming back for more.

TikTok is the latest in a series of prominent platforms that have tried to pivot to e-commerce. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and even Google have tried to launch shopping functions, with varying—though generally low—degrees of success. “Every advertising company tries its hand at commerce, because they think that there’s some huge prize to be had if you can actually own the transaction and know what people are purchasing,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. But though the potential gains are tantalizing, it’s hard to pull off: Instagram booted its shopping feature from the navigation bar and shut down its live-shopping feature earlier this year. Facebook similarly shut down its livestream-shopping function last year. Live-shopping services on YouTube have also struggled to gain traction.

Platforms moving to e-commerce need to build product pages and figure out details such as order fulfillment, secure checkout processes, customer service, and other logistics. That’s a lot for tech companies whose primary expertise lies in other areas. “It’s never worked for anyone else,” Kodali said. “Why would it work for [TikTok]?” (A spokesperson for TikTok told me that there are upwards of 200,000 sellers on TikTok Shop, and more than 100,000 registered creators, but declined to share more information beyond what’s posted on the company’s press site.)

American customers, by and large, don’t seem all that eager to shop on social-media apps instead of on trusted e-commerce websites. In China, where TikTok’s parent company is based, shopping via livestream is a huge trend—an estimated $500 billion in goods were reportedly sold on streams last year. But just because shopping on social media is big in China doesn’t mean it will translate to American audiences; Kodali noted that Chinese e-commerce trends do not have a track record of blowing up in the United States. And TikTok’s own norms may make commercial activity a hard sell. Caroline told me today that, although the app’s culture of authenticity may help some users sell things, “you could see shopping being a bit of an odd fit: This app was supposed to be where I watched relatable videos from everyday people, and now they’re trying to make money off of me?”

Still, Caroline told me, “people spend a tremendous amount of time on TikTok, and I don’t see them quitting en masse over TikTok Shop. I think it’s more of a question of how much users will tolerate, and how successful it’ll be in the long run.” In-app shopping, she added, is a “white whale” for social platforms.

Commerce and social media have long been intertwined: Much of social-media influencers’ role boils down to recommending products. But audiences follow these influencers because they trust them and because these people have a track record of offering useful or interesting information. On TikTok Shop, meanwhile, almost anyone can start selling things. I currently have five followers, and perhaps one dayI too could apply to set up an account to start hawking one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exercisers. (I probably wouldn’t do that.) And some reporters have already identified safety and integrity concerns with the feature.

If other apps have failed to grow e-commerce businesses and there doesn’t seem to be a strong consumer appetite for these services in the U.S., why is TikTok trying to get into the retail game? Part of it might be a simple grasp at big numbers, combined with a healthy dose of the hubris that powers the tech world. American retail is a multitrillion-dollar industry: If tech executives are engaging in what Kodali called “Silicon Valley math”—calculating the total size of a market and estimating the percentage of it they can capture—they may extrapolate big revenues. And to large tech companies, it may seem relatively easy and worthwhile to create a checkout module and order pages if it means getting even a small slice of the retail pie. Social-media companies have a long history of foisting new products that they hope will prove good for their business on users who did not ask for them—consider the metaverse.

Tech companies have been throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall for years, seeking out new revenue streams where they can. TikTok Shop may be another such investment: a grasp at revenue just in case it works. Social-media apps are always mimicking features from other apps. Instagram is trying to be like Twitter and Snapchat; LinkedIn is emulating TikTok; Facebook is trying to be like everyone. And TikTok seems to be the latest app trying to become Amazon.

Related:

TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok. The endless cycle of social media

Today’s News

Tropical-storm warnings are in place for millions of people in New England and Canada as Hurricane Lee approaches. In remarks from the White House, President Joe Biden expressed respect for the United Auto Workers strike and emphasized that record profits for auto companies have not been “shared fairly” with workers. Corpses are decaying under rubble in the Libyan city of Derna, where at least 10,000 people are believed to be missing due to devastating floods.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks whether we should still read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and discusses the book’s moral complexities with Clint Smith.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Don’t Let Love Take Over Your Life

By Faith Hill

If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?

Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Illustration by Katie Martin

Read. Why are women freezing their eggs? Many are struggling to find a male co-parent, a new book by Marcia C. Inhorn concludes.

Listen. An audio collection of some of last month’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

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P.S.

In another fascinating addition to the annals of Sam Bankman-Fried, my friend and former colleague David Yaffe-Bellany reports in The New York Times that while on house arrest, the FTX founder crafted a set of byzantine documents explaining himself, which he gave to the crypto influencer Tiffany Fong for reasons unclear. Bankman-Fried’s apologia took the form of a 15,000-word, 70-page unpublished Twitter thread, replete with links to Alicia Keys and Rihanna music videos as well as jabs at former colleagues; another file featured a screenshot from the Christopher Nolan movie Inception. A favorite detail of mine from the article: Apparently, Bankman-Fried told Fong that his parents were installing a pickleball court for him while he was on house arrest.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The suicide bombing killed 170 Afghans and 13 US service members during the messy US withdrawal in August 2021.

Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children. Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are currently believed dead—a number that could double in the days ahead. An estimated 38,000 residents have been displaced.      

Libya has seen no shortage of suffering and misery since the 2011 revolution that toppled its longtime dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Yet Storm Daniel promises to be a singular event. Already, Libyan commentators inside the country and out are pointing to the apocalyptic loss of life in Derna as the product not simply of a natural disaster, but of Libya’s divided and ineffectual governance. The west of the country is run by the internationally recognized Government of National Unity; the east, including Derna, falls under the rule of the renegade strongman Khalifa Haftar.   

[Read: Photos from Libya’s devastating floods]

Derna has become an emblem of ills that afflict many of Libya’s 7 million inhabitants: infrastructural decay, economic neglect, unpreparedness for global warming. But to understand the scale of its destruction requires seeing the city in its particularity—as a stronghold of opposition to Haftar’s violent consolidation of power in eastern Libya, and before that, a hub of intellectualism and dissent. Derna’s suffering is not entirely an accident. Though for that matter, neither is Libya’s.

Founded on the ruins of the Greek city of Darnis, Derna has always been a place apart in Libya, distinguished by its cosmopolitanism, creative ferment, and fierce independence. It sits along the Mediterranean coast, at the base of the aptly named Jabal Akhdar, or Green Mountains, which constitute Libya’s wettest region and account for anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of its plant species. A port city of 100,000, Derna is famous for its gardens, river-fed canals, night-flowering jasmine, and delicious bananas and pomegranates.

Muslim Andalusians fleeing persecution in Spain helped build the city in the 16th century, leaving their imprint on the designs of mosques and ornamental doors in its old quarter. Waves of other settlers would make their way there across the Mediterranean. By the early 20th century, Derna had become a font of literary output and nationalist agitation. Poets and playwrights gathered in a weekly cultural salon called the Omar Mukhtar Association to rail against colonial rule across the region, and after 1951, against the Libyan monarchy.

An officers’ coup ousted that monarchy in 1969, and the country’s new ruler—Colonel Muammar Qaddafi—naturally took a wary view of the coastal city’s troublemaking potential. By the 1980s, he had made Derna a place of despair, its arts scene eviscerated, its prosperous traders dispossessed, its youth crushed by unemployment. Many of Derna’s young men joined the Islamist insurgency against Qaddafi that spread through the Green Mountains in the 1990s. The dictator responded by shutting down the region’s water service and detaining, torturing, and executing oppositionists. By the mid-2000s, the city’s rage was channeled outward, as hundreds of young men flocked from Derna to Iraq to fight the American military occupation. The U.S. military captured documents attesting to the militancy of these recruits, also revealed in a U.S. diplomat’s 2006 cable titled “Die Hard in Derna.”

[Read: How Qaddafi fooled Libya and the world]

In the years after  Qaddafi’s fall in 2011, Derna became the site of violent infighting among Islamists, including a radical faction that sought to make the city an outpost of the Islamic State. Haftar, a Qaddafi-era general and defector, began his military campaign under the guise of eliminating jihadist militias and restoring security. But his sweep was actually a bid for national power, and Derna’s fighters were among its staunchest opponents. He was determined to subdue the city. With remorseless, siege-like tactics and substantial foreign assistance, including air strikes and special-operations forces from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and several Western countries, he did so in 2018, though at the cost of destroying swaths of the city and displacing thousands.

In the years since, Haftar has kept Derna under a virtual military lockdown, ruled by an ineffective puppet municipality and deprived of reconstruction funds, human services, and, crucially, attention to its decaying infrastructure, including the two dams that collapsed during Storm Daniel. Studies and experts had long warned that the dams were in dire need of repair.

Derna’s officials and Haftar’s military authority reportedly issued contradictory instructions as the storm approached: Some advised an evacuation and others ordered a curfew. The confusion suggests a lack of coordination within the eastern government, which, a Libyan climate scientist told me this week, habitually paid little attention to expertise. Haftar will exert tight control over relief and reconstruction efforts in the weeks ahead, funneling contracts to companies run by cronies and family members.

Having obstructed Haftar’s ambitions, Derna has become a particular target for repression. But Haftar’s style of rule—kleptocratic, authoritarian, extractive—has made for poor stewardship of eastern Libya’s infrastructure and natural environment, leaving other communities vulnerable to climate-induced extreme weather events as well.

Haftar’s militia controls a body called the Military Investment Authority, which is essentially a profit-making enterprise for the Haftar family. The authority has taken control of eastern Libya’s agriculture, energy, and construction, with dire consequences for the environment. Climate activists from the east have told me that under Haftar’s watch, the deforestation of the Green Mountains has accelerated. Elites and militias have cut down trees to build vacation residences and businesses, and to sell the wood as charcoal. Urban development and new settlements have expanded into once-forested areas to accommodate people displaced by war.

The absence of tree cover, other human-induced transformations to the Green Mountains, and irregular patterns of rainfall caused by climate change are worsening the damage that floods can wreak. Those that hit the eastern city of Al-Bayda in late 2020 displaced thousands of people. And without the cooling effect of the mountains’ sizable forests, the average mean temperature in the area has risen, which in turn raises the risk of wildfires among the trees that remain. Already, soaring heat waves set forests aflame near the towns of Shahat and Al-Bayda, in 2013 and 2021 respectively.

In most countries, civil society and other grassroots actors can help address such ecological concerns. But in Haftar-ruled east Libya, climate and environmental activists face an extremely repressive security machinery that either stifles their involvement or confines it to politically safe initiatives, such as tree planting.  

“Young people are willing, but they are afraid,” an official from the region told me candidly in July. “There is no state support.” A member of a climate-volunteer group in the east told me this week by phone that Haftar’s government had blocked their group’s attempt to obtain weather-monitoring equipment from abroad, citing “security concerns.”

I’ve heard variations on this theme time and time again during my research in Libya—an arid, oil-dependent country that is among the world’s most vulnerable to the shocks of climate change, including floods and rising sea levels, but also soaring temperatures, declining rainfall, extended droughts, and sandstorms of increasing frequency, duration, and intensity.  

According to one reputable survey in which higher numbers correlate with greater climate vulnerability,  Libya ranks 126th out of 182 states, just after Iraq, in the lower-middle tier. Despite the recent inundation of Derna and the east, water scarcity poses the gravest climate-related risk to the majority of its inhabitants: Libya ranks among the top six most water-stressed countries in the world, with 80 percent of its potable-water supply drawn from non-replenishable fossil aquifers by means of a deteriorating network of pipes and reservoirs. And yet Libya has done little to address its climate vulnerabilities.

[Read: We’re heading straight for a demi-Armageddon]

The country’s political rivalries, corruption, and militia-ruled patronage system have stymied its response. The eastern and western camps engage in only modest exchanges of climate-related information and technology. Even within the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, the ministry of the environment and a climate authority within the prime minister’s office have been jockeying for control of the climate file. (They reached a modest modus vivendi in recent months, some insiders told me this summer.)

Derna’s plight is so extreme that perhaps—so activists and commentators hope—it will not be ignored, as countless other Libyan calamities have been, but may instead lead to lasting and positive change. Derna holds a lesson for Libya’s elites, if they are listening, about the costs of division and self-aggrandizement. Momentum toward such recognition, however tragic its origins, would be in keeping with the city’s storied and sometimes controversial role as beacon of dissent.  

“It’s a revolutionary city,” a climate scientist with family roots there told me this week.

US president sends two government officials to Detroit, says corporate profits have not been shared fairly with workers.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield says Washington is committed to multilateralism ahead of high-level UN General Assembly talks.

Washington targets Iranian officials and state-linked media outlets on first anniversary of Mahsa Amini's death.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to visit Washington DC next week as Congress debates whether to approve more aid for Ukraine.

Ah, The Morning Show. Less a television series, really, than a vibe—plotlines that were topical two years ago, ageless female faces, constant chaos that you should simply allow to wash over you like rain. Does it make sense? Not at all. You could watch other shows, and you would never see this: Jennifer Aniston’s frown-acting, Reese Witherspoon’s pissed-off listlessness, Billy Crudup harnessing all the frantic charisma of Satan losing at poker. The first episode of the new season begins with the broadcast-morning-show host Alex Levy (played by Aniston) watching her own TV obituary, and ends with the news anchor Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) in literal space, weeping in zero gravity while bemoaning the war in Ukraine. What other series has the creative capacity, the daring, the money to do something so grand and so pointless? TV like this is a gift.

And yet. The Morning Show is so close to something like greatness. You can see, in the new episodes, all of the ways in which the series knows what works (dazzling one-liners; the absurdity of a TV program that requires anchors to segue from pie-eating contests to racism) while also being handicapped by the most unshiftable hindrance of all: its stars. When it was first conceived, the show was the jewel in Apple TV+’s crown—a fictionalized adaptation of Brian Stelter’s 2013 book about the vicious world of morning-news programs whose premise set up two of America’s most beloved actresses to tussle over ratings.

However, the #MeToo allegations about the news anchor Matt Lauer prompted the series to retool itself around the subject of workplace predation, which clashed with its hammy, quippy, All About Eve–esque setup and left its two central characters somewhat adrift. The first season, for me at least, was a nonsensical volley between glorious excess and Sorkinian sincerity, never finding cohesion between the two. The second leaned closer toward cheerful camp but inexplicably decided to rewrite Steve Carell’s disgraced anchor, Mitch Kessler, as a flawed but tragic victim of cancel culture. Its characters were thinner than crepe paper, and multiple-episode arcs (about tell-all books and ominous lawsuits) were discarded when more enticing storylines came up.

[Read: What went wrong with The Morning Show?]

Having watched all of Season 3, I’ve come to the conclusion that the issue with the show’s two leads isn’t just that after 30 episodes of television, neither has yet managed to read a teleprompter with even a hint of animation. For The Morning Show to thrive, it needs either Alex or Bradley—or both—to embrace antiheroism, yet both are played by actors so recognizable and likable on-screen that explicit villainy seems well out of their range. The first episode of the new season, set in March 2022, loosely explains where the two women stand: Alex, having withstood an early and televised bout of COVID two years ago, has parlayed her “survivor” status into a hit streaming show called Alex Unfiltered; Bradley, thanks to her audacious footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6, is now the country’s top evening-news anchor, reporting “controversial” stories that the network keeps threatening to kill. (Don’t think too hard about how Bradley went from being a field reporter for a local-news station in West Virginia to achieving Diane Sawyer–like status practically overnight despite constantly going off-script and not showing up to work for several weeks in Season 2, because it’ll make your brain hurt.)

Apple

Season 3 has a new showrunner, a new team of writers, and, apparently, a new fascination with the business side of television. This last preoccupation is possibly a knock-on effect of Succession’s popularity, but it’s also possibly because Crudup’s Cory Ellison, an executive at The Morning Show’s parent network, United Broadcast Association, is the only person showing us what the series should be about: deranged ambition, unnerving pizzazz, extreme self-awareness. Knowing that UBA is basically broke, Cory has hatched a plan for a merger with a company owned by Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a billionaire who’s into space rockets and filthy lucre. Standing only partially in the way is Greta Lee’s Stella Bak, UBA’s head of news, who previously worked with Paul and will only say, between gritted teeth, that he’s “ruthless.”

The season dips into serious and timely issues (the murder of George Floyd, the overturning of Roe v. Wade) but seems much more interested in creating set pieces that let Cory wield his offbeat magnetism. When he struts into a network presentation for advertisers, backslapping stars and glad-handing executives to the soundtrack of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” the music appears to be playing just for him, which has the effect of bringing us into his mind more than any other character’s. Late in the season, we get to witness a charged reunion between Cory and his mother (Lindsay Duncan) that’s loaded with more emotional violence than a Pinter play. Every other confrontation this season—Bradley and her Trump-supporting brother, Alex and the ultra-acquisitive board, Bradley and her icy ex-lover—has the tension of cheese curds by comparison. (The show adds a new presenter, Chris Hunter, played gracefully by Nicole Beharie, but it doesn’t let her have much of a good time.)

You can almost sense the writers’ relief at having someone as fiendish as Cory to write for. Imagine a series in which every character could be this peacocking, this nakedly self-interested, this fun. One of the new characters introduced in Season 3 is an unnamed anchor at a rival network who obsessively covers the turmoil at UBA, and who does so with more dynamism and interest than any on-air talent at The Morning Show has managed to muster. Meanwhile, even as Bradley makes one bad decision after another, Witherspoon plays her so sympathetically that we can’t condemn her. Alex gets close to revealing her lust for power, but Aniston resists giving us glimpses of her moral complexity. People will watch The Morning Show regardless, because this kind of star power is a hell of a hook. Still, I can’t help wondering if it’s also a curse—especially when there are actually interesting stories that a show could tell.

If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?

Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom. When Kuurne asked them to rate, on a scale of one to seven, how close various relationships felt, they’d frequently give the highest mark to only their partner and their children, if they had them; when subjects illustrated their social networks, they’d commonly put those other connections—friends, co-workers, siblings—on the outskirts of their map. People outside the household, for the most part, weren’t “woven into that everyday life,” Kuurne told me.

Relationship trends can vary across cultures, but Kuurne told me that the pattern she noticed isn’t limited to Helsinki. Researchers in the U.S. have made similar observations. Katie Genadek, an economist who studies Census Bureau data, told me that the amount of time the average couple spends together has actually slightly increased since 1965.

Finding love is a beautiful, lucky thing. And some research suggests that shared time, at least up to a certain point, can make partners happier (though the strength of that link is up for debate). But there is only so much time in a day, and the minutes you spend alone with your partner are minutes not spent deepening connections with friends and relatives or building new bonds, not spent relishing the pleasures of solitude or enjoying whatever interests are uniquely yours. If you build a life with your relationship at the center, everything else gets pushed to the perimeter. There’s a way to maintain what I think of as “love-life balance,” to preserve your identity and autonomy while nurturing a caring partnership. Losing that balance can be damaging for a person, for a relationship, and for society.

You might not think that in 2023, partners would still be deeply interdependent. Perhaps more than ever, people are talking about the ways friendship has been historically undervalued; community is an overused buzzword, and alternative relationship structures—nonmonogamy, “living apart together” (sharing a life but not a home), communal living—are growing more common. And of course, women have gained more financial and social independence over the past decades; largely for this reason, according to Sean Lauer, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, many researchers assume that marriage has become “individualized,” with spouses free to pursue their own identities and goals. But the reality is more complicated.

[Listen: How to not go it alone]

According to Genadek, partners today tend to be entangled, in part because parents spend a lot of time watching their children together. Although parents in the 1960s might have been doing their own thing while the kids were off playing, they’re now much more likely to be jointly engaged in child care. But couples are spending more leisure time together than they did in 1965 too. And the pandemic further disconnected some couples from their social networks, Benjamin Karney, a UCLA psychologist, told me. He and his colleagues found that couples’ interactions with other people plummeted when the pandemic hit, especially for the low-income study participants who weren’t as likely to use video-chatting platforms; about 18 months in, when vaccines had been available for some time, those connections hadn’t come close to recovering.  

Partners do of course need quality time—but the question is how much, and what it’s coming at the expense of. Erin Sahlstein Parcell, a University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee communication professor who studies long-distance relationships, told me that partners who are rarely together in person can keep up very strong relationships; they can even benefit from developing other parts of their lives, having their own experiences to then share with their partner, and cherishing the precious shared time they do have. More and more time isn’t necessarily better and better.

For one thing, couples who lose a sense of love-life balance are at risk of forgoing important support. Studies indicate that married people are, on average, less connected to their friends, siblings, parents, and neighbors than single people are. That lack of connection can leave them vulnerable, Karney told me, particularly if they end up needing help: if they have a baby, for instance, or if one partner loses a job or gets sick. No couple can do everything on their own.

Even beyond sharing time and resources, family and friends offer different kinds of emotional care than partners do. In one study, participants who reported meeting different emotional needs with different people in their life—say, having fun and blowing off steam with a college friend but talking through problems with a sibling—showed greater well-being than those who had a similar number of close relationships but fulfilled emotional needs with a smaller subset of them. No one person can realistically be good at responding to all different types of feelings or giving advice on every subject, yet some experts believe partners today are likelier than ever to lean primarily on each other for their psychological needs. Even worse: If the relationship ends, people can be left without anyone to rely on in a time of distress.     

Not only can your relationships with others suffer when you’re too focused on your partner; so can your relationship with yourself. Some researchers refer to this as a lack of “self-differentiation,” or a clear sense of who you are. More “differentiated” partners can support one another without losing sight of their own desires. But if you’re not doing the activities you would do, seeing the people you would see, or pursuing the goals that you would if you were single, those untended parts of your life can start to wilt. That lack of differentiation might be hard to avoid if you’re spending all your time as a couple; partners can start to match each other’s negative moods and even cortisol levels when they’re together. You might really feel like a “we” more than a “you” and “me.”

Patricia Marino, a philosophy professor at the University of Waterloo, told me this is the danger in romanticizing the idea of two lovers merging into one. If two people’s interests conflict, whose get swallowed up? Historically, Marino said, “the we was created when women’s wills were made subservient to men’s.” Today, that inequality isn’t so explicitly assumed. But the question of whose self is disappearing is still relevant, even on the simplest everyday level—say, deciding what you want to do for the evening. In one study that followed straight couples for more than a decade, researchers found that the link between shared leisure time and marital satisfaction wasn’t strong at all—largely because the subjects were spending some of that time on activities that only one of them enjoyed.

That underscores something important: Love-life balance isn’t just good for individual partners. It’s good for their relationship. Depending on only each other is too much pressure; spending time with only each other is constraining—and, frankly, boring. Even just including others in couple activities, Karney told me, can provide partners with “new experiences, new insights, new perspectives” that keep the relationship interesting. He mentioned one study that found that couples that discussed personal topics on a double date seemed to feel more “passionate love” for each other afterward, especially when the other couple responded affirmingly. It can be appealing—and illuminating—to see different facets of your partner come out with different people. If you spend the bulk of your time alone with your partner, you might not be understanding them fully; you might also feel your own personality isn’t being fully expressed.

[Read: We expect too much from our romantic partners]

Some psychologists believe that in order to truly have their needs met, apart and together, couples need to balance two elements: “relatedness” and “autonomy.” Relatedness is a sense of connection and intimacy; autonomy is the degree to which partners are free to follow their own will. Sometimes that might mean choosing to spend time together, Richard Ryan, a psychology professor at Australian Catholic University, told me—but given that partners won’t always have the same interests, autonomy eventually requires some independence.

Partners who feel more autonomous may be able to communicate more openly, and are more likely to respond to partner transgressions with forgiveness and accommodation and to feel satisfied after disagreements; those with less autonomy are likely to feel their sense of self depends on their relationship, and that can leave them more emotionally reactive. In one study, the partners with the most constructive responses to conflict were the ones who felt their relatedness and autonomy needs were fulfilled. Those two elements might seem like opposites, but Ryan told me it’s difficult to truly have one without the other. That suggests that the healthiest relationships don’t involve a merging of selves at all, but rather allow intimacy and independence to coexist.

The biggest obstacle to love-life balance is probably just time. There’s never enough of it to do everything you want to do and see everyone you want to see—especially if you have children or other loved ones to care for, or a job with long hours and little flexibility. The issue isn’t just individual but structural: Low-income couples are less likely than affluent ones to have access to child-care services and more likely to have jobs with more fixed, longer hours outside the home. Regardless of socioeconomic status, though, plenty of partners would hypothetically love to spread their time more evenly—but struggle to do so in reality. Karney told me that even when couples want roughly the same degree of autonomy and relatedness, “it doesn’t mean that minute to minute you are identical … We might say, ‘Oh, we both want to be together four nights a week,’ but we don’t always want the same nights.” In that sense, he said, love-life balance is a “coordination issue.”

But it’s also a values issue. Kuurne believes that many people, if only subconsciously, think of intimacy as exclusive by definition; a romantic relationship is special because it’s prioritized more than anything else. Finding a better love-life balance in the everyday would mean creating what she calls “inclusive intimacy”; it would mean imagining a world in which the things that give life meaning don’t need to be placed in such a strict hierarchy.

That’s not a task that can be fully achieved by any one couple, but there are steps toward love-life balance that everyone can take. Karney told me that couples should intentionally negotiate time apart—make a concrete plan for it, and compromise if necessary, rather than argue about the more abstract question of how entwined partners should be. (“A negotiation is better than a debate,” he told me. “Ten out of 10 times.”)

For Kuurne, opening her life beyond the nuclear family has meant accepting limitations. She can’t always host formal get-togethers or clean the house before visits, but she has a whole set of people who pop in whenever, regardless of how messy the house is or how much she’s prepared. Her dad comes by and helps take care of her daughter. Her neighbors pass through; “the kids play, and maybe we open a bottle of bubbly.” When she does host more official gatherings, she tries to keep a low barrier to entry—no pressure, and certainly no gifts.

And she tries to keep in mind what she’s learned in her research: To stay connected to people, you have to share. That might mean concrete resources, but it might just mean sharing little moments of honesty and vulnerability. The other day, she told me, she called her close friend while eating lunch, because that was the time she had to check in; her friend’s son had just moved out, so she asked how her friend was feeling—and she also gave updates about her own day. All the while, she was inelegantly chewing her food. When it comes to intimacy, she told me, “you can’t just put it in a nice little box and control it.” You just give what you have.

The struggle to balance all the different pockets of life will probably never end; every day requires a new negotiation, a new set of things clamoring for your attention. But widening your focus isn’t just about you and your partner—it’s also about all of the other people in your life who might otherwise get shut out. That’s the flip side of Kuurne’s 2012 study: The couples had built walls between themselves and everyone else. And the subjects outside couples’ fortresses were left there when the drawbridge pulled up.

The partners probably didn’t mean to leave anyone out; they just only had so much time. But whether intentionally or not, everyone—always—is making choices about how to spend their hours. When I asked Karney if he had any wisdom for couples trying to find love-life balance, he told me that he’s not in the business of giving advice. But he did pause for a second, considering what he could say with certainty. “As a scientist of relationships,” he told me, “this much we know: Relationships need to be nourished. Your relationship with your partner does. And all of your other relationships do too.”

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