A new kind of love

 We have a very contrived notion of compatibility and what relationships are supposed to look like built up in our minds. Our collective, inherited romantic culture likes to imagine healthy functioning couples doing more or less everything together and being the center of each other's lives. The good couple is, we are told, one in which two people mean more or less everything to one another. 

In a sound relationship, we are supposed to meet our partner's needs in every area of existence--from being a good listener, financial advisor and fulfilling needs in the bedroom to being a good cook. We are supposed to lead our social lives alongside one another. Be the primary drawing board for one another's problems and complete each other in spirit and in matter. 

If they engage in pickleball with their friends over the weekend, we are supposed to take up interest in it or the least we could do is come and support their team or if we are interested in taking up a trip through the valleys of New Zealand, they're supposed to follow along enthusiastically with us. Our friends are meant to be their friends. 

We also forget about our failures in love that stems from our twisted views of compatibility. We believe it's when someone shares the maximum number of our tastes and interests. Oh! We both like strawberry picking, we both like linen duvets, or share peculiarities in not having a middle name, have similar views in politics. It is all fantastic until we reach that threshold. Inevitably, there will come a point where we’re always going to hit a wall where there’s something we disagree upon, something they don’t like.

What are we going to do then? 

It all sounds sweet but it is, over a long term, a recipe for disaster. No two people can ever match each other across all areas of existence, and the attempt to do so is an open invite to bitterness and contempt. 

The black and white textbook definition of compatibility is when two people’s core values, life goals, conflict patterns and communication styles can coexist without constant friction.  

But what really marks the functioning of relationships is not that we agree on everything but that we know how to disagree. We know how to negotiate in our incompatible elements. That is the true sign of compatibility. That’s a sign that we have got somebody who is not operating through the immature lens that either we are like them or we are against them. 

We have, as a society, given ourselves a hugely unhelpful manual of how love should go. Any independent move is read like a sign that we can’t actually love one another: it is taken to be a sign of eminent danger. Our partners are met with rage when they find out we want separate bathrooms or we actually lied about our similar tastes in antiques or vice versa. So we end up pestering each other to do things that we don’t really like; we force them to a tedious hike or drag them to meet our friends, whom they find boring. This is not even because we inherently want to do so but because any other arrangement has come to seem like evidence of betrayal. 

A more realistic and in my eyes, the proper romantic view of couples would suggest that there have to be a few strong areas where we can meet each others needs, but that there should also be plenty of others where we are clearly better off pursuing our goals on our own. 

Expecting that a romantic partner could answer all of our needs might sound very beautiful but such idealism is in reality rather brings frustration and resentment brought on by minor annoyances. In reality, we should practice expecting a less of our partners in order to love them properly.

It can feel very weird, and a bit threatening, to talk about taking the pressure off a relationship. But we should recognise that a degree of independence isn’t an attack on a partner: it’s a guarantee of the strong commitment one has made. 

Truly stable couples aren’t those that do everything together, it’s those that have managed to interpret their differences in non-dramatic, agreeable terms. Ostensibly, a reduction of dependence doesn’t mean a relationship is failing: it means that we have learnt to focus more clearly on what the other person can actually bring to the table and stopped blaming them for not being someone they never were. 

More than that, it is a monstrously selfish ask to try to mold our partners into what we expect of them or the other way round. We must realize that we are not puppeteers trying to manipulate our partners into our conveniences, rather we must learn to value them for the areas where we truly see eye to eye. 

For many of us, we don’t tolerate dissent very very well, but to be able to think someone is different and yet still on our side is the very achievement of love. 

To enjoy a harmonious relationship with someone, we should ensure that we have plenty of sources of excitement, reassurance and peace outside of them. When we hit problems, we should be able to lean on other supports. 

The demand that another person must compensate us for all that’s pensive, decaying or deficient in our lives is a mechanism for systematically destroying any relationship. Our conflicts and disappointments will at once feel more manageable when we stop asking our partner to serve as our long lost other half. The more we can survive without a relationship, the greater will be its chances of fulfillment. 

We will truly give love a chance when we stop believing it can single-handedly save us from our vain, wearing lives. 

-Sahana