We often have qualms about the people closest to us: our romantic partners, our best friends, our parents. We expect more from these people than we expect of others. We expect them to understand us, to tend to at least some of our needs, to absorb our flares of frustration. We hold them to a higher standard than we do for others. We want our values to be aligned, our passions compatible, our beliefs and worldviews congruent. If they do not meet these criteria, there is a hard limit on how close we can ever feel to them, how comfortable we can be in their presence, and how much we can trust them.
There is a talk by Alain de Botton (creator of the School of Life) in which he both criticizes such ambitious expectations of our most intimate relationships and offers a surprisingly optimistic perspective to displace them with. I subscribe to a related set of beliefs that someone is neither “good” nor “bad” at loving another (their partner or friend for example), but rather that both of these two individuals are motivated to love each other and to communicate to each other how they would like to be loved without trying to “fix” them or change their true nature, or, that this does not hold for both of them. In more poetic terms:
There is communication,
or its absence…
There is willingness to understand and to love,
or its absence.
There are expectations of each other that are compatible with the true natures of both,
or there are expectations that are not.
This last statement brings up the question of what someone’s “true nature” is and therefore what (in my view) is unfair to expect of them in our quest to teach them how to love us. I don’t have a clear answer, but I can think of a few examples, and perhaps an easy test. I don’t think that it is fair to expect someone to shift their life goals for us e.g. wanting to have (or not to have) a child, wanting to live in a certain place, wanting to pursue a particular passion in work or play. I don’t think it fair to expect someone to compromise their sexuality, their interests (or lack thereof) in sex, or their need for freedom vs. partnership in relationship (i.e. where on the spectrum between solo polyamorous to strictly monogamous they lie), or the other loves in their lives (romantic, friends, family). You can be transparent about the expectations you cannot compromise on, you can ask your partner what their thoughts are, and it may arise that these are expectations they wish to meet, but it is not for you to change them on these points. Expectations that don’t clash with someone’s true nature relate to the routine practise of love: how and how often do you wish to communicate and spend quality time with each other, how can they help you to fee seen and understood, what makes you feel loved?.The relationship smorgasbord is a helpful tool to enable your partner and you to find your common and conflicting expectations from the relationship.
While I take exception to the default expectations we have of our most intimate relationships, and I reject the notion that compromise, specifically of your core values and passions are a necessary evil in relationships, I do mean for this rambling post to be a hopeful one. I mean to say that there are no bad listeners, but rather that there is a willingness to be attentive and to glean information from the clear and subtle signals your partner reveals, or there is not. I mean to say that someone is never “bad in bed”, but rather that the individuals involved in sex can communicate to each other what pleasure means to them, or they can fail to do that. I mean to say that we can learn to see through our own impatience or our partners’ impatience to the reality that this frustration conceals an unmet need, or we can retaliate with equal or greater impatience instead. I mean to say, that we can choose to learn to love someone as they want to be loved, and that they can choose to do the same, but that we cannot force this or expect it .
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