Why Compromise in Relationships Is Overrated
You gotta have your limits
I spent my whole life listening to people talk about how relationships are difficult. How it requires a lot of sacrifices to make them work. It’s as if the relationship itself is the goal and not the added value it brings to our life.
I grew up in the middle east, specifically Lebanon, which tends to be a more liberal country compared to the region but is still more conservative than the western world. People, over there are huge fans of preserving the family, whatever that means.
A lady would live her whole life with a cheating abusive husband, and then preach about how she sucked it up her whole life not to break her family. She is so proud that she cast aside her dignity so that her kids can grow up in a home with a weak submissive mom and a toxic dad who cheats and yells.
A couple would marry young, fresh out of college with a heart beating with young love. As they grow up, they grow apart. They struggle for many years with the conviction that they should work things out. They persevere even if they do not have anything in common anymore. They are not happy, but they endure. Maybe, one of them eventually cheats, and that is how they finally call it quits.
People know deep down that they made the wrong choice, but why admit being in the wrong and choose the difficult path of separation when they can cling to the rhetoric that relationships are simply difficult, and their bumpy or cold relationship is what everybody else has?
This is exactly the rationale a person in a toxic relationship resort to when they want to back up their decision to stay. It makes them feel better in the short term but prolongs their doom and gloom. Had they never heard this anywhere, had everybody been saying relationships should make your life easier ever since they were a child, maybe they would have had higher standards for what a relationship should be. Maybe their doom and gloom would have been cut in half.
We should expect that life will be hard. That is why we look for a relationship. To have a refuge. To have someone to come back to and cuddle with at the end of a shitty day. Someone to comfort us. To make us feel better about ourselves. To hold our hand when life is cruel, not for them to be cruel!
It is true that no two people are one hundred percent compatible. Efforts should be invested to keep a bit of passion, to resolve disagreements here and there. Sometimes even to compromise. But this is supposed to be the exception, not the rule. These things sometimes happen. The big picture of the relationship, however, is supposed to be that of comfort and love and peace, not of struggle and friction and sacrifice.
You sacrifice your desires and convictions and peace for what? To be in a relationship? The relationship status is not the goal. The goal is a safe space you can cozy up in when life is hard. The partner who makes your gloomy day a tiny bit brighter. The friend you can share your good moments with. And to be able to do all that, you need to at least be in a relationship with someone whose values and beliefs are compatible with yours, who respects you, and who doesn’t make your life harder than it already is. Is that too much to ask for?
If your partner does not fit those qualities, and you still decide to be with them, please don’t insult your intelligence. Don’t justify your decision by the self-belittling idea that it is normal for relationships to often make your life harder than it would have been as a single person. Dig in deeper and try to figure out why the hell you choose hell every day.
