When Husbands are a Mystery: Dandelions and Orchids, Part 2

Photo by Maira Salazar on Unsplash

My friend Jodi and I are both baffled by our husbands.

“Michael’s like that too,” Jodi said after I told her that Sam comes home from work in a GOOD MOOD. A good mood, folks. Even if he worked 14 hours that day.

“Michael wakes up generally happy,” Jodi continued. “He goes on the roof and practices his martial arts. He’s thrilled to see the girls. He goes to the office and works ridiculously hard. Then he comes home happy, with energy to spare.”

We were sitting in her bedroom at the time. She was sprawled on her bed, while I was on the lounger. Neither of us had worked 14 hours that day, but it sure felt like it.

Jodi’s a friend I met in recovery rooms, which means that she, like every friend I made in my twenties, has been diagnosed as mentally ill.

She’s struggled with addiction. She’s intimately familiar with depression. Life has, for large chapters of her life, felt intensely challenging.

Jodi is an orchid.

It’s a Swedish term that’s used to describe a person who’s sensitive to their environment.

Like orchid plants, orchid humans require the right environment to thrive. If you put an orchid in a cold room and forget to water it, it will quickly wither.

It doesn’t have hearty resilience. It’s fragile. Delicate. Oh so very sensitive to its surroundings. You can’t neglect an orchid and expect it to do well. 

But if you tend to its needs, if you nurture the orchid as it needs to be nurtured – wow. It blossoms into intense beauty.

Jodi’s husband, Michael, on the other hand, suffers from no mental illnesses. He runs a successful company, finds joy in most aspects of being a human, and has, in general, always been alright.

Michael’s not an orchid. He’s a dandelion.

Like plant dandelions, human dandelions aren’t particularly sensitive to their environment. You don’t need to spend a lot of time tending to their needs. They can grow just as well through the cracks of a sidewalk as they do in a greenhouse.

Dandelions are hearty and resilient and well-suited to having a generally pleasant time on planet Earth, regardless of how life unfolds for them.

And, fascinatingly, the doctors who study this topic think we might be able to tell AT BIRTH if someone is a dandelion or an orchid. The difference between the two archetypes is 100% about sensitivity to stress in the environment, so high APGAR scores (that thing where doctors smack a baby) could indicate an orchid: high sensitivity to stress.

I am in love with the dandelion-orchid hypothesis because it answers so many questions for me.

When I say that Jodi and I were baffled by our husbands–I meant it. I didn’t understand how Sam could have a day that was ten times harder than mine, but I could be the one who came home and sobbed on the bathroom floor.

Now I get it.

Like Jodi, I’m an orchid married to a dandelion.

Sam has a high threshold for navigating the day-to-day stressors of life on Earth. He did as a child, he does as an adult. The man can work 14-hour days then come home and dance around the kitchen. He doesn’t need to have the perfect job in the perfect environment in the perfect city for that to be true, either. It’s just how he’s made

But me? That’s not the case. I can absolutely come home from a 14-hour work day and dance around the kitchen…if I’m in the perfect job in the perfect environment in the perfect city. Because when an orchid is in EXACTLY the right circumstances, her resilience then exceeds the resilience of a dandelion. But when the environment is off – yikes.

Now, Sam does have one key vulnerability: the 15-year period between the ages of 35 to 50 (ish) can smack a dandelion in the face. It’s called the U-shaped happiness curve and it’s a theory that explains why people who have generally been happy, healthy and well-adjusted can struggle when the stressors of midlife pile up. (People like Jodi and I, who ran our lives into the ground at an early age, are more likely to have a “rising line” happiness curve, where life gets better each decade instead of dipping in midlife.)

But we’ll talk about that another day because I’m working on writing shorter posts.

This topic – the dandelion-orchid hypothesis – it’s the starting point for my “How to Human” research. What an orchid needs is different than what a dandelion needs, and what a dandelion needs varies based on stage of life.

So, if you have any interesting insights about being an orchid versus a dandelion, or questions that you’d like to have answered, let me know. It’ll help me in my research.

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