Are You Trying to Grow Pinot With Merlot Effort?
No wine is actually involved in this post — but bear with me, because the analogy is worth it.
I was listening to a podcast recently — the Hidden Brain episode You 2.0: When Did Marriage Become So Hard? — and the psychologist being interviewed shared a quote from the film Sideways. In it, a character explains why he loves Pinot Noir: because the Pinot grape is extraordinarily difficult to grow. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, needs very specific conditions and a lot of careful attention. Merlot, by contrast, is resilient. It grows in many climates with far less fuss. It’s dependable. It’s everywhere.
The psychologist’s observation: many of us want Pinot relationships while putting in Merlot effort.
What a Pinot relationship actually requires
We expect a lot from relationships now — more than probably any previous generation has.
We want our partner to be our best friend, our intellectual equal, our adventure companion, our co-parent, our safe harbour. We want depth and passion and fun and honesty and growth. We want to be truly known and truly loved by the same person.
That’s a Pinot expectation. And there’s nothing wrong with it — Pinot relationships are genuinely worth having.
But Pinot grapes don’t just grow because you want them to. They need the right conditions. Careful attention. Consistent effort. Specific skills. And a willingness to understand what the grape actually needs rather than just hoping it’ll figure itself out.
A Merlot relationship isn’t worse. It’s just different — more robust, less demanding, less refined. If that’s what you want, that’s completely fine. But if you have Pinot expectations and Merlot skills, the gap between what you’re hoping for and what you’re actually building will eventually become impossible to ignore.
The skills nobody teaches us
Here’s what I find genuinely strange: we live in a society that offers almost no formal preparation for one of the most important things most of us will ever do.
We go to school for years to learn maths and history and how to write an essay. We get licences before we’re allowed to drive. Nobody expects you to get on skis for the first time and just ski well because you have legs.
And yet somehow, when it comes to relationships, the assumption is that we should just… know. That because we’re human and relational by nature, the skills for building and sustaining a healthy relationship should arrive automatically.
They don’t. They really don’t.
What most of us bring into adult relationships is a combination of what we absorbed from our families — which may or may not have been a great model — and whatever we’ve picked up along the way from experience, which often means learning the hard way.
The skills that actually matter — how to communicate during conflict without making things worse, how to stay curious rather than defensive, how to repair after a rupture, how to ask for what you need and respond to what your partner needs — these are learnable. But they have to be learned. They don’t show up by default.
Why it’s hard to look honestly at this
I see the mismatch between relationship expectations and relationship skills all the time in my work. And I have genuine respect for the people who are willing to look at it clearly — because it takes courage.
Taking an honest look at your own skills and gaps in relationships feels vulnerable. It can bring up shame — the sense that you should already know this, that needing to learn it means something is wrong with you.
It doesn’t. It just means you’re human, and that nobody handed you a roadmap.
The people who do the best in relationships long-term aren’t the ones who arrived already knowing everything. They’re the ones who got curious about what they didn’t know and were willing to do something about it.
Where to start
If communication is an area you’d like to develop — and it almost always is, because communication underlies almost everything else — a few resources worth exploring:
The Relationship Cure by John Gottman — accessible, research-based, and full of practical tools for improving how you connect with the people you care about.
Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson — one of the best books on adult attachment and what gets in the way of the closeness most of us are looking for.
If you’d prefer something more structured and interactive, the 11 Conversations Every Couple Needs to Have course walks you through the foundational conversations most couples avoid — including the PREPARE/ENRICH relationship assessment — at your own pace.
And if you want to work on this with some support, relationship counselling and premarital counselling are both available in Squamish and online across BC.
The thing worth remembering
Wanting a Pinot relationship isn’t unrealistic. It’s just specific. It requires specific things in return.
The good news is that the skills involved aren’t mysterious. They’re documented, researched, taught, and learnable. The gap between where you are and where you want to be isn’t fixed — it’s a distance you can actually travel, if you’re willing to be honest about where you’re starting from.
That honesty, more than anything else, is probably the most important skill of all.
