There are no ideal relationships in nature.
When we come into this world, we have no knowledge of how to build relationships with others. We gain this knowledge through interaction – first with my mother, then with the immediate family, gradually expanding the range of interaction. We learn to do it somehow, as we succeed. Not good and not bad, just living such an experience, we create certain patterns of behavior that we use in contact with others.
The truth is that man is a social being, he needs others more than himself, but interaction with others has its price. On the one hand, we enjoy communicating with others, on the other hand, such interaction traumatizes us. Pleasure and trauma are two components of what we call relationships. We enjoy places where each other can be healed, and we are traumatized when we open each other’s painful points. If the relationship hurts – it does not mean that it is bad, it means that there was an interaction on the old triggers, where we split each other’s wounds. It hurts. And this is normal.
I propose to abandon the idea of an ideal relationship, because there is no such thing. If we love so much that we dissolve, it threatens to merge with our partner and lose our identity. And it’s not about love either.
What is love?
Normal, living love, it is not absorbing, but rather supportive, understanding and somewhat distant, where each partner in the couple remains himself, remaining a holistic and separate structure. “We are one” is more about a pathological model of relations, I would not agree with that.
If we talk about the form of the relationship, then in fact it does not matter much. Marriage, free relations, monogamy, polygamy, friendship, partnership – these are just the name, design, wrapper. Interaction remains the core and its quality is of fundamental importance. So it doesn’t really matter what you call what happens, it matters HOW it happens.
It is worth striving to improve the quality of interaction in the direction of increasing pleasure and reducing trauma, instead of moving horizontally, shifting the relationship from one status to another. Because it doesn’t change anything.
