Life Lessons
The Irony of Having a Perfect Relationship With My Partner
Love that doesn’t look like love
Some of my girlfriends have been finding it incredibly hard to make their romantic relationships stick. They just keep filtering out the boys like water through a colander. I apologize for my bad analogies (there will be others).
These friends have a long list of criteria in hand; and any sign of nonconformity to said list makes them shift uncomfortably in their seat. Their disapprovals are compounded due to the marriage telescope they are using to view their romantic prospects. They have one foot into the future gauging how their marriage will look, and one tentative foot in the present date they are on.
Okay, I know I sound like I am judging them pretty hard, but that would be disingenuous because that is exactly what I was going through with my partner as well, except that at the time of my issues cropping up, we had been together for some time. He was no date number 3, we had been steady for a while.
Honestly, it was a painful phase where I couldn’t come to terms with the things he wasn’t able to provide me, things I had deemed as non-negotiables. But I didn’t give up on the relationship, I couldn’t.
The other day, one of my girlfriends asked me with doubt and hope (for answers) in her voice, “How do you deal with that though, if he isn’t really meeting up to your expectations? What makes you keep going?”
I thought long and hard about the question— this list of things I needed from a partner, that I wasn’t able to get.
You have to also understand — I am the sort of person who puts things she really wants in a cart- and leaves it there for a week to simmer so that she can be sure she really wants it. All decisions, mini and major, are excruciating to me in their finality.
And given that I just gave you an example of how I decide on ‘things’, and now we are talking about my Relationship, you can perhaps understand why I didn’t just let him pass through the colander.
There was something extremely final about that decision. So I dilly-dallied until it had caused me enough teary nights of self-pity and comfort foods. My brain and heart were bursting.
I began to sincerely dissect the expectations I had of my partner, and the expectations game we play with all of our relationships (even the ones we have with ourselves).
I don’t know if I have a perfectly worded answer to what happened next. I apologize if you were waiting for a point by point analysis on how to stuff your expectations into a perfect relationship.
All I know is that I had these hopes and dreams about what our relationship should look like on one hand, and how it actually looked on the other, and I was trying to make them merge so hard and failing so miserably. What happened next was I got tired of it all and just quit holding on so tight mentally.
When I dropped ALL my expectations of him ‘as my partner’ (and I mean all), my uncertainties were quickly substituted with that much more love for him. I was able to hold more love for him as himself- the essence of him, and not in the role of ‘my partner’.
I felt like I could finally sculpt our relationship from a place of understanding and acceptance of our complimentary nature together, versus the rigid ideologies that society and my ego had previously conspired together to form.
Imagine holding on for a long time to a heavy bundle of rocks in your arms, and all at once just letting go of all of it, and being free. It felt like that.
I suddenly didn’t require him to be what the books and movies had said makes a good partner. All I knew was that we had chosen each other for this journey and neither of us reeked of perfection.
We forget that all of us are stunningly imperfect in our own ways. We must honor that, not use it as an excuse to leave.
As this realization was slowly descending into my brain, another realization popped up. I started seeing all the ways in which he was providing value to my life that I had previously missed, being so caught up in my own needs. I realized that his ways actually provided more value to my life than what I had written down in my non-negotiables list. Bonus!
I don’t really want to provide examples of what this looks like because this isn’t just limited to my list of expectations. I want you to see how any sort of expectations on the fallible creatures that we are, is a burden out of which will come no good.
But okay, here comes one just for the sake of some imagery:
My imperfections should have given him more opportunities to skedaddle than his to me. But he didn’t leave, and he didn’t address my issues as things I would need to change so he could stay in the relationship.
In fact, he never mentioned them at all, even though they were staring at him in the face, and even though I knew intuitively that he didn’t adore them. I was always amazed at how he could keep all that in without any comments, and for some time I thought he was faking it (although I haven’t known him to be duplicitous in anything else in life, so this was out).
In his silent acceptance of my blemishes, I saw the love he held for my bigger picture — for the bigger picture of us. The unconditionality of his love made me innately want to do better and be better for him, without any instructions from him. I just needed to remember to extend that gentle courtesy to his flaws as well.
How ironic is it that once you take away the expectation of having a perfect relationship, either with yourself or with your partner, you suddenly make blinding progress.
When you can greet the flaws in your relationship and say, ‘This is the good enough I want to have, this good enough is great”, you sit in your abundance. And we all know the innate multiplying nature of abundance.
It is an effortless ascension to the perfection we crave. No heights can be scaled with the energy of lack.
So I say: Shed the frameworks the world provides you, make your own love language.
This story is a response to Modern Women’s prompt “Aspects of Love”. Thanks Adeola Sheehy-Adekale!
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