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What Relationships Should Really Be About
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The Perfect Partner
We expect our partner to be perfect in every way. As we spend our life with our partner, we seem to mistakenly believe that the other person will have everything in common with us and will think the same thought that is occurring in our head, at the same time.
If we have unrealistic and comical expectations from our partners, getting irritated at every minor flaw, and having a lofty, movie-like idea of what a relationship is, we won't be happy no matter who we are with.
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Essential Things To Look For In a Partner
Instead of making relationships complicated and overambitious, we can just take care of these three essential but overlooked aspects:
- Kindness: A person who is humane and kind, gentle and not too serious.
- Shared Vulnerability: A person who is a good, empathetic listener, and makes us open comfortably about our anxieties, problems and worries.
- Understanding: Someone who has a deep understanding of our traits, quirks, features, obsessions, and the way we see the world. Someone who is interesting enough for us to want to understand.
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A Simpler Life
Paradoxically, by limiting our expectations about our relationship, we can concentrate on the three critical ingredients of kindness, understanding and vulnerability, and have a simple yet loving connection.
By simplifying and clarifying, we can release ourselves from our complicated conflicts and pursue a deep and profound bond.
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The Complicated Relationships With Our Parents
Parents, for many of us, are a complicated relationship. They can be a source of joy and can also feel like an emotionally draining ordeal.
Confronting them and making them understand how t...
Discussing With Our Parents: Unrealistic Expectations
Even if we feel that we have made our point, painstakingly making our parents understand the time we felt they did us wrong, we erroneously assume that our twenty-minute discussion will suddenly cure them of behavioural patterns that are in effect from several decades.
An outright bad parent is easier to handle, but the problem is complicated when the same parent is also caring, loving and is a genuine well-wisher.
Conflicting Emotions: Between Love and Hate
While we may think that our parents are conflicted personalities, we are unconsciously having the same kind of behavioural patterns.
We periodically love and hate our parents, and have them imbibed in our body and mind, right down to mannerisms and quirks. We care for them yet sometimes wish to stay away from them.
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A cultural endorsement of love
Love is often seen as the exciting feeling we get in the presence of someone with great intelligence of beauty that we hope will reciprocate our interest and whom we badly want to touch and one day...
Love is focused on the other person
- This type of love is displayed when we come across the itinerant drunk - weather-beaten and ranting - and do not turn away but consider them as a version of ourselves, falling prey to the same passions and getting upset by similar losses and worthy of their own share of compassion.
- We also show love to the well-dressed person shouting grandly at an airport, filled with self-righteousness, and do not dismiss them as insane or entitled, but as vulnerable beneath the bluster.
- We show love when we see a small child throwing themselves on the floor, and do not focus on how piercing their screams are, but that their pain is in its general form ours too.
- It is love too when our partner is sometimes plainly irrational, unfair, and maddening, and we do not direct back a full dose of righteous anger but hold back and wonder how this formerly sane adult should have fallen apart in this manner. It is to hold open the idea that they might not have slept very well, are perhaps panicked by the future, and don't understand how to master it.
Love for the weak
It is no particular accomplishment to love someone who is on their best behavior.
What is needed for our attention is the love of what is crooked, damaged, and self-disgusted. Here love is the effort required to imagine oneself into the life of another person who has not made it easy to admire or like them.
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Love is vital in recovering from serious mental illness
Love is critical to help us keep faith with life and rescue us from severe mental illness.
In fact, anyone who has ever suffered from mental illness and recovers will do so...
Love is unconditional approval
When we are sick in our minds, we have this punishing sense of how terrible we are, even if we often can't point to a specific crime. We are appalled by, and unforgiving of, who we are.
In this situation, a loving companion can make all the difference. They don't try to persuade us of our worth. They make pleasant conversation about something that won't make us anxious. They can tolerate how ill we are and will stick by us. They love us for who we are rather than what we do.
Love and non-judgment
Patronising pity can make the attention of others oppressive.
Loving companions do not judge us as beneath them. They don't oppress us by clinging to their belief in their own solidity and competence. Our companions indicate that they too might one day be in our place and suffer with and for us.