March | Love and Relationships | Week 11 | 3/19/2023
What are the critical learnings from the spectrum of your relationships?
In the realm of all human experience there are learnings to be gained, some cliché and quickly transmissible, others which have a long and arduous aging process. Love, heartbreak, and the capacity we have to oscillate between the two, contains a remarkable wealth of wisdom, one which should be carefully analyzed and reflected upon by any individual seeking self-actualization. I've covered these two extremes and what it feels like to experience both, but have yet to delve into the learnings one can obtain existing in a relationship - in the indeterminate space between two extremes. The day to day, month to month living. The good nights and bad. The courting process, the honeymoon phase, the Sunday errands, Wednesday long-day-at-work and Friday alcohol-induced argument. Since age 16 I've collectively spent 6 years in relationships, about 50% of the time between that age and my current. With the goal of offering a slightly different perspective, I've distilled a lengthy catalogue of robust tribulations and posthumous revelations which comprise my 'critical learnings', into a series of dichotomies. This intentional categorization method lends itself to the obvious conclusion, and my most critical learning of all, that successful relationships require balance.
Dichotomy 1: Temperance vs Indulgence
A variation of hedonism, gluttony, and addiction, indulgence is a natural tendency. But unlike the aforementioned list, we are not taught to practice temperance with regards to love because love is not often considered a variation of those things. Love is passion, we're taught. We're also taught, 'Find your passion and make a living out of it.' Believe me, utilizing this heuristic will lead to the dissipation of the very passion you sought to prioritize. Temperance is the counter-balance to passion, the natural antidote to oversaturation of and toxicity by an extraordinarily potent incentive. However, employ too much temperance and the spark of spontaneity will be snuffed. When this happens, interest will wane and minds will wander. A good relationship must have good management but it mustn't become stagnant and stifled. It is the moral duty of both individuals in a relationship to find balance between indulging their mutual passion and serving as arbiters of discipline.
Dichotomy 2: Triviality vs Profundity
Depending on personality predisposition and transient mood, one can tend to see most things in a relationship as either trivial or profound. I've been guilty of indexing too heavily on the ladder. Jordan Peterson said, "life is a very serious business, it's fatal. Nothing is trivial, everything is profound." I think that's correct. Because there exists a natural end, everything we do matters. Scarcity, in this case time, creates value. However, it's worth mentioning that some things are more profound than others, by quite a large margin. Your breakfast choice doesn't matter as much as your parenting decisions. This acknowledgment creates room for a proximal scale of profundity which renders much to be trivial. It's critical to keep this conceptual truism accessible in a relationship due to fact that love is involved and the stakes are raised, making everything seem more profound. TLDR: Your partner's yawn in the middle of your story doesn't necessarily mean they aren't compassionate about your boss's ill behavior towards you this afternoon. It might simply mean they are tired. Comparatively, watching the bachelorette once a week doesn't mean your partner is shallow and unintellectual, it might simply be a form of escapism and low-stakes cognitive relaxation. That said, patterns are important and mustn't be ignored. A yawn or wandering eyes every time you talk about your day might be a signal that your partner is uninterested in receiving a story and more interested in telling one, in other words, self-absorbed and narcissistic. The Bachelorette on Monday, Love Island on Tuesday, The Kardashians on Wednesday, Too Hot to Handle on Thursday, and Selling Sunset on Friday might be an indicator that your partner is untethered to reality and vain. It's crucial in a relationship to create a scale of profundity through experience and benchmark the compatibility of your connection against that scale.
Dichotomy 3: Rigidity vs Malleability
Preference is a sticky word, it tends to create contentiousness in the modern dating dynamic. We all have preferences, no one denies that, the debate is over moralistic preferences and the deeper rationale behind them. Plain and simple, no one likes to be told that they have undesirable characteristics by someone that they want to desire them, particularly when those are the result of uncontrollable circumstances, prior lifestyle choices, or firmly held philosophical stances. To be as explicit as possible, it's critical to examine your own preferences for a partner and a relationship, and to assign weights to them as more or less malleable, then pursue a partner and relationship that matches those preferences with rigor. The most unproductive and painful thing one can do is engage in a relationship with someone who fails to meet their preferences, often being temporarily blinded by hedonism, and then be tormented by those preferences in the face of developing love and connection. However, it's also important to be self-critical and to ask oneself why they hold certain preferences, if they're derived from unhealthy origins, or worse, are unproductive for their own mental wellbeing. In other words, it's critical to the success of your future relationship to have a clear understanding of your preferences and then strike a balance between rigidity and malleability with regards to those preferences. Too much rigidity and you will find yourself alone, frustrated and incompatible. Too much malleability and you'll find yourself haunted by the ghosts of your subconscious.
Dichotomy 4: Masculinity vs Femininity
Locating and embracing the balance of this dichotomy is perhaps the least understood, most obvious, least challenging and most crucial task to a successful and healthy heterosexual relationship. Rooted in our biology, undeniable in our psychology and foundational in our sociology, the nature of this dichotomy is one of symbiosis not amensalism. The risks of getting this wrong are worth stating; masculinity in its unbalanced form is tyrannical and unempathetic. Femininity in its unbalanced form is devouring and vacuous. Discouraged-masculinity by overbearing-femininity creates weakness in the man, which in turn creates apathy in the woman. Weakness turns to resentment and apathy turns to disdain. Rebuked-femininity by domineering-masculinity creates insecurity in the woman and ambivalence in the man. Insecurity turns to infidelity and ambivalence turns to detachment. The results are the same; failed relationships. The rewards for getting this right are worth stating; masculinity directed properly towards the correct vector creates stability, leadership, safety, and strength. Femininity, when embraced, encouraged and employed creates satiety, beauty, habitation, and warmth. When they are intertwined, the result is progress, love and family.
Dichotomy 5: Transcendence vs Destruction
With each new person that contains the potential for a relationship, stands two doors, both closed, both labeled 'Adventure of a Lifetime.' Behind one door is some chronical of transcendence and behind the other is some factorial of destruction. This person could be the one who bears your children, who shares the opposite end of a tombstone with you. This person could also be the one to take the house and the kids, to doom your progeny through infidelity or lurking psychosis. Bukowski wrote, "If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life." The possibility of any relationship leading to transcendence or destruction is equivalent. We can only do so much to forecast the future. Moral of the story, you must choose a door - you don't know what's behind that door, but before opening either, you must come to terms with the fact that it could be destruction, and then commit anyway. Jordan Peterson makes a very interesting distinction between courage and naivety. We see the plethora of people who've gotten a taste of destruction one too many times, and now choose to stop opening any doors at all. While we think of these individuals as jaded, we do not fault someone who's chosen this standoff with life. Opposite of that, we tend to think of a person who's had the taste of destruction and continues to open more doors as being naïve. But this is simply incorrect. If someone has never been hurt and they put themselves out there voluntarily, with total optimism, then we are witnessing naivety. But, if an individual, who's marked by the scars of destruction, still decides to put their trust in someone or something, with the full knowledge that it could destroy them, that is courage, not naivety. To face the destruction head on, is courageous not naïve because behind that door, is the potential for transcendence, and that is worth the risk. Finding balance in this dichotomy is in practicing intelligent caution, utilizing the wisdom of experience to make the best move on the chessboard, but not exercising too much caution to the point of paralysis by fear. To more concisely and eloquently summarize a very complex balancing act, I turn to Maya Angelou - "First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love."
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