Deals and Vows

The two hidden games of human connection, and how to spot which one you're actually playing.

Why Connection Feels Fragile

Leaving a networking mixer early in my career. Crumpled business cards in my jacket pocket. My cheeks ache from three hours of working the room. The quick handshake, the practiced warmth. The split-second sizing-up of each new face.

The car door slams. The silence, sudden and total. I sit there, engine off, staring with envy at an orange cone in the parking garage. How it just gets to be a cone.

I’d spent the evening sorting people into “worth my time” and “not worth my time.” That’s not who I am. But I thought it was what you were supposed to do.

Had I met myself that night, name tag and all, we’d have exchanged cards, promised to grab coffee, and never spoken again. I drove home feeling like I needed a shower.

Mercifully, I stopped going to those events. But I kept seeing it - that transactional mindset - wherever I looked. No one fully sheds it at the door. It follows you home.

We absorb the people around us. Before long, it’s just how things are - so familiar that everyone forgets there was ever another way.

The same quiet calculation always ticking underneath: Is this still worth it?

I saw it in friendships that never went deeper than the next plan. In relationships that looked solid but felt fragile. I’d sense it the moment they opened their mouth - a part of me would shut down. And when I finally found myself somewhere free of it, that same part stirred awake.

Here’s the language I found for it.

The Two Games

There are two games we play with other people. One is a Deal. The other is a Vow.

A Deal is a commitment to a situation. It’s about optimization, return on investment - keeping score. The Deal asks a single question on a loop: “Is this working for me?” It centers the self.

A Vow is a commitment to a person. It’s about presence, steadfastness, loyalty - the covenant. It acknowledges what a Deal never can: the situation might be hard - even terrible - but you’re the one I want to face it with. A Vow asks a different question: “How do we make this work, together?” It centers the relationship.

You can have a Deal with a spouse and a Vow with a coworker. The setting doesn’t predict the game.

A Deal gives itself away. You hear it in the phrases we’ve learned to accept as normal.

• “We just grew in different directions.” Treats drift like weather - as though no one was even supposed to notice.

• “I refuse to settle.” Frames commitment itself as giving up. Try naming a partnership where both people think the other is flawless.

• “I want someone who adds value to my life.” Try saying it in a wedding toast.

I’ve played this game too - I just never said the quiet part out loud.

A Vow, by contrast, doesn’t announce itself. One day you look up and realize it’s already there. It’s the friend who sees you struggling and says, “Call me. Anytime.” And means it.

The difference sharpens in crisis. A wounded Deal asks: “Did you violate the terms? Is this still working for me?” A wounded Vow asks something different: “Are you okay? Are we okay? How do we get through this?”

A Deal looks at the terms. A Vow reaches for the other person.

What We Settle For

Our lives are full of healthy, necessary Deals. The camaraderie with a coworker on a project. The gym buddy who’s never seen the inside of your house. The neighbor you wave to every morning without either of you breaking stride. “How are ya, Bob?”

They don’t demand the weight of a covenant. They fill out a life - and they’re good.

The tragedy is building a load-bearing wall of your life on top of a Deal. This is the Hollow Vow: a Deal that looks like a Vow when you squint at it. But reach for a hand, and you find only a paper contract.

Even before a crisis hits, there are tells. The relationship runs on autopilot. Everything works - but nothing’s been tested. Can you think of the last time you were vulnerable together?

The Hollow Vow keeps the letter of the contract. Its loyalty is to the situation - the shared lease, the social circle, the routine that’s easier to keep than break. The moment that situation is threatened by a true crisis - illness, job loss - you discover that the bedrock was just scaffolding. A Deal all along.

Sometimes you see a Vow where they see a Deal. You show up, bear weight, reach across - and they take without reciprocating. A covenant needs two people. If you’re the only one honoring it, you’re bound to a contract with only one signature on it: yours.

Why are Hollow Vows so common? C. S. Lewis saw it clearly:

If you want to keep love intact, give it to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it in the coffin of your selfishness. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

We’ve learned to build for the exit. A new job, a new city, a new relationship - there’s always one in sight. Repair is for someone with no options - why not just replace? Live this way long enough, and you end up with a life that’s easy to pass through - and hard to call home.

Behind it all is the Deal’s deepest fear: settling. The almost-right partner. The merely great job. The city that’s only top-five. The life smaller than your ambition. Always another rung. You reach it, eyes on the next one. Will I be loved then?

The real danger is settling for a Deal when only a Vow will do.

What we yearn for is simple: to settle in with people who stay. To simply be, without having to re-audition for the part.

How a Deal Becomes a Vow

Apart from family, every Vow begins as a Deal. We start curious but careful - not yet sure what we have.

The problem is staying there. “Careful” hardens into armor. If I never fully commit, I can never fully get hurt. The Deal never graduates. But Vows don’t just happen - we have to cultivate them. Left untended, they become Deals again - a footpath the forest reclaims.

To build a Vow, the armor comes off. “Careful” means watching for chances to step closer. A Deal graduates when we start asking, Can we go deeper? The answer comes in small but telling moments: showing up when it costs you, and staying when someone lets you in.

The first time I had COVID, bleary and miserable, I texted a friend: “Ugh, tested positive.” The Deal-level response would be “Oh no! Feel better soon.” Kind but effortless. Instead, I got: “Dropping off soup. Don’t argue.”

That reply is her reaching for me. It’s saying: I’m willing to step outside the contract. Are you? A Deal avoids the friction. A Vow endures it.

When someone you care about is in pain, it’s tempting to rush to solutions. But someone making a Vow does something more radical: they stay. They sit with you in the discomfort. They commit to you.

There’s a scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams could have kept it clinical with Matt Damon - advice, solutions, professional distance. Instead, he stays with him. “It’s not your fault,” he says - again and again, through every deflection - until Damon finally breaks down. That’s what a Vow looks like.

How the other person responds - with reciprocity or withdrawal - tells you what you need to know.

And what if they withdraw?

Some people won’t meet you there. They might be in a different season, or playing a different game than you are. You reach. Silence. You try again. More silence. This is where it hurts: you care more than they do, and no amount of reaching will change that.

Three unanswered reaches is a pattern. At that point, you’re not building a Vow so much as auditioning for one - and the part’s already been cast. A Vow is mutual. An audition is one-sided hope. You can’t mend what was never there.

I’ve had to learn this the hard way: you weren’t wrong to reach. They showed you what you needed to know - believe them.

What We Build Together

How do you know which game you’re playing? I come back to three questions:

1. When friction arises, is my instinct to pull back or lean forward?

2. When was the last time showing up cost them something (even a little) - and they did it anyway? When was the last time it cost me?

3. If things changed dramatically - a job loss, an illness - would this relationship survive?

That last one isn’t hypothetical.

Every relationship worth having will be tested. Most of us hope our bonds will be spared. But crisis is where we find out what we truly have.

A Deal, like a contract, is brittle. When a core term is violated, its response is to break. Its instinct is to litigate - assign fault, end the arrangement, move on. Its language is one of blame and exit: “I didn’t sign up for this.”

A Vow is a living thing. When wounded, it doesn’t break - it bleeds and rallies. The bond itself is the patient. Its instinct is to triage - “Are you okay? Are we okay?” - and then to repair. Especially when you caused the wound - when you’re the problem, and you need grace. A Deal walks away. A Vow stays - even when it’s hard.

Ask anyone married long enough for their secret. Most will tell you it’s looking at the person who infuriated you last Tuesday and thinking, “Fine. I’ll keep you.”

Every lasting bond has its version. The siblings who didn’t speak for years - and now do. The friends who should have fallen out - and didn’t. They bring it up to mark the place: here is where we almost broke - and chose instead to stay.

The scar is the proof. We made it.

I have a friend I met when I was thirteen. She’s not blood. Thirty years later, she’s my sister. That didn’t happen by accident.

We built it - showing up through distance, through hard seasons, through the stretches when it would have been easy to drift. Now there’s something real and irreplaceable. We just get to be ourselves.

Last year, her partner said something I’ve never forgotten. We were at their kitchen table, nothing special happening, and he told me - matter-of-factly, like it was the weather - that I was family. We’d made it true by staying, year after year.

That’s what a Vow becomes. You reach, and they meet you there. A fact you build together.

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This essay was originally published here on my blog, Attunement.