Do you find yourself spending endless time with your best friend, dissecting, discussing and evaluating your last date? Are you gauging your date against a personal checklist made up of predetermined ‘essential’ qualities? And, more crucially, is your checklist written in stone?
It’s perfectly understandable to be asking yourself a few questions, such as:
- How might they fit in with your friends, family, job, dreams?
- Can you trust them?
- Is this relationship worth committing to exclusively?
Answers can be useful ‘pointers’, but they are only pointers. It may not be wise to follow them too rigidly; merely clinically ticking boxes and adding up the score at the end denies any emotional, subjective feelings towards the person, which is of course what distinguishes a truly satisfying personal relationship from just finding a suitable flatmate.
Besides, you also need to consider that your prospective partner may also be sizing you up and ticking off the boxes on their list!
Ask Yourself Who/How YOU want to be in a relationship!
Rather than focusing on who/how you want your partner to be, try to visualise who/how YOU want to be with your next partner. What will YOU be bringing into the relationship? How do YOU envisage your life evolving and developing in the partnership? Ask yourself how you fit together, how you complement each other’s differences, and how each makes up for the ‘deficits’ in the other. Make sure that your primary values are in synch. From there on, learn to savour the friction of growing together – the very essence of a healthy, organically ever-changing relationship.
Checklists need to evolve over time
As partners get to know each other, they need to be ready to handle conflict and challenges. Paradoxically, the things that draw us together at the start of a relationship are often the very things that will irritate and annoy the hell out of us later on down the line! Checklists need to allow space and flexibility for ongoing negotiations and adaptations as they emerge, and for each partner to be able to enjoy personal as well as relational growth over time. There are bound to be contrasting desires, needs, wants and habits. It is vital to gauge, in yourself, your willingness and, indeed, your ability to adapt, compromise, and make space for the other’s character traits, their needs and wants.
Healthy relating requires an element of risk
Holding on to a fixed ideal might make you feel safe and secure in your quest but, where there is no spontaneity, risk-taking, surprise and playful tension – all key features of a healthy relationship – any nascent rapport is likely to hit stalemate even before getting off the ground. By sticking rigidly to your checklist, you could end up painting yourself into a lonely corner.
The bottom line is, healthy relationships are not a prescribed clear-cut contract, and neither partner ‘owes’ the other. They are not just a one-sided deal, and they can’t be ‘made to order’. Relationships need to be built jointly, over time. They grow and evolve organically, in the space ‘between’ two people.
You may be trying to keep yourself from being hurt again, like in your last liaison. You may be seeking validation, or searching for someone who will fulfil childhood yearnings and soothe your developmental pain. Unfortunately, a check-list filter cannot guarantee that your partner will keep you emotionally safe, nor that they will fulfil all your needs. Knowing what we want, isn’t the same as living it.
If you think you may be experiencing relationship problems, why not get in touch with me to see how I might be able to support you to find a more healthy and satisfying way of being!