I have been in a romantic relationship for over a year now. As with all such things, the initial rush is replaced by the more quotidian reality of living, sleeping and sharing life with another person who, like all of us, is damaged and broken in significant ways, even as my flaws and deficiencies become obvious.
My girlfriend is about as good as they get: she is kind, loving, patient, hard-working. She loves my kids and me to a fault. She is as domestic and family-oriented as I am, and a great, really great mother. We have a lot of fun together. She is fully committed to the process of working through issues in our relationship. For reasons I fail to fully comprehend, she thinks I am the hottest guy to grace the planet with footsteps. She is also sometimes insecure, possessive, jealous, co-dependent, judgmental and a nicotine addict, all of which she is working on, striving mightily to overcome. She is very much in love with me and wants nothing more than to spend every moment with me, which can be both good and bad.
I have questions to answer:
- Am I ready to commit the time and effort required to manage, negotiate, compromise, forge into existence a mutually fulfilling relationship? (It is never free)
- Am I willing to expose myself to the risk of a fully committed relationship? If I disappoint my partner, fail to deliver what she expects of me, will she settle for using me as a means to an end, as my ex-wife did? What if she deeply disappoints me?
- Am I willing to once again subsume my individuality to the group-mind of 'married' life? effectively giving up any independent life, friends, interests? (or how much of those am I willing to trade in exchange for the good stuff of a relationship).
As important as those questions are, the question I find myself pondering most is what determines the amount of effort required to make a relationship work and the ultimate quality of the end result.
Are relationships always gruelingly hard? Is the effort required to make them work, the risk of being used, the extinction of one's independence determined by the individuals involved or the practical realities of their relationship?
Let's say, just for example, that a man and woman have an amazingly open, honest, profoundly (emotionally) intimate friendship, is it because:
A- These two people are well "matched", with "compatible" temperaments, interests, communication styles, values, humor, and backgrounds. They somehow establish and maintain an open, honest, healthy mode of interaction, through unwavering honesty, strong sense of self, devotion to Rule #1 ("Be happy") and to each other.
Or is it because:
B- They aren't *actually* dating. They aren't sleeping together, raising kids together, wrestling over money and house chores, dealing with raised toilet seats and moldy coffee cups, trying to figure out the balance between togetherness and independence, thereby simply avoiding the complications of a romantic relationship (jealousy, power struggle and simple stress). In other words, is friendship simply so very much easier than a full-on romantic/living relationship? If so, one must chose: a wonderfully open, intimate relationship OR a romantic one.
Option A is the romantic, optimistic (or is it delusional?) view: you only have to find a suitable match and establish/maintain a healthy, open, free relationship. Option B is the pessimistic, jaded (or is it realistic?) view: we are all interchangeable, the things that determine the nature of a relationship are its objective specifications (kids, money, sex).
As I ponder my life and what to do in the next few months, I think it really comes down to this question: "What to I believe?". I think we all want to believe in option 'A', I certainly do. Perhaps the raw leap of faith of believing in 'A', is what makes us human, and life worth living.
Or does the eternal optimism of 'A', however irresistibly attractive, merely expose us as us silly and irrational, never learning from experience, condemned to repeat the same mistake over and over in futile pursuit of what can never be, hurting ourselves and everyone else because we aren't willing to 'settle' for the world we *actually* live in?
When I figure it out, I'll have a better idea of what I should do.
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The ongoing saga of my life, my search for meaning and happiness.
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About Me
- Tim
- I am a recently divorced parent, going through an "interesting" period of transition and wish to write about it to no one and everyone as an outlet for my meandering thoughts.
2 comments:
So....what did you come up with?
Great questions by the way....
Coach Joni Peschman
The answers I came up with aren't as clear a I would have hoped, but here's what I feel confident in saying at this time:
- Any romantic relationship, especially if it involves living together, is hard because it is 'complicated', involving all aspects of both people's psyche and because people tend to *expect* something significant out of it and their partner. Interactions tend to be about more than they appear at the surface. That difficulty makes real intimacy challenging.
- Friendships, even very close ones, are very much easier because they are 'simple'. Friends don't really expect much from each other. Interactions are just what they appear to be. You get to select when you see them, etc.. Ironically that makes true intimacy easier. It is often easier to talk to a close friend about hard things than a mate.
- The above points support the idea that the nature of a relationship is a prime determinant of how hard it is to maintain. The fact that it is hard to maintain an open, honest, intimate relationship with a romantic partner does not mean it is impossible, but definitely hard.
- People's emotional and psychological maturity and health are a prime determinant, perhaps *the* determinant of the outcome and quality of a romantic relationship. Issues can be worked through if everyone involved has the psychological resources to do so.
- Which specific issues the two parties have can make it easier or harder to resolve them. So if someone has a deep-seated revulsion of drinking, dating a (social) drinker will be harder than if they are also a moderate drinker. But that issue might simply be replaced by another issue in someone else, because...
- Everyone has issues. Any romantic relationship will require wading through and sometimes just tolerating them. So 'compatibility' (sense of humor, habits, education, communication style), while it can affect how easy it is to maintain intimacy, is less important than having the emotional maturity to deal with the fact that your mate is an independent person with their own fears, habits, aspirations, goals, desires, wishes.
- "You don't always get what you want". Sometimes you do have to settle for the world you *actually* live in, rather than some ideal world you would like to have. The secret to happiness is appreciating and being genuinely happy with what you have, or changing it, but definitely not sitting there whining about what should/could be different. Whatever can be done to make me happier is all in my control, be it nothing, a little, a lot.
Thank you for asking Joni.
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