Traits that don’t fit our traditional narrative of what love should be are actually necessary ingredients for a healthy relationship.
NOTE- Article adapted* from https://markmanson.net/healthy-relationship-habits by Mark Manson
I wanted to write about issues that are important in relationships but are harder to face—things like the role of fighting, hurting each other’s feelings, dealing with dissatisfaction, or feeling the occasional attraction for other people. These are normal, everyday relationship issues that don’t get talked about because it’s far easier to talk about puppies and sunsets.
Well, I got solutions. Or at least ideas. OK, I should probably just say I've got ideas for solutions, because God knows I can't fix everybody's [stuff].
1. Let Some Conflicts Go Unresolved
There’s this guy by the name of John Gottman—he’s like the Michael Jordan of relationship research. Not only has he been studying intimate relationships for more than forty years, but he practically invented the field. Gottman devised the process of “thin-slicing” relationships, a technique where he hooks couples up to a series of biometric devices and then records them having short conversations. Gottman then goes back and analyzes the conversation frame by frame, looking at biometric data, body language, tonality, and specific words chosen. He then combines all of this data together to predict whether your relationship will succeed or not. His “thin-slicing” process boasts a staggering 91% success rate in predicting whether newly-wed couples will divorce within 10 years—a staggeringly high result for any psychological research.
And the first thing Gottman says in almost all of his books is: The idea that couples must resolve all of their problems is a myth.
In his research of thousands of happily married couples, some of whom have been married for forty plus years, he repeatedly found that most successful couples have persistent unresolved issues, issues that they’ve sometimes been fighting about for decades. Meanwhile, many of the unsuccessful couples insisted on resolving f**king everything because they believed that there should never be a disagreement between them. Pretty soon there was a void of a relationship, too.
People like to fantasize about “true love.” But if there is such a thing, it requires us to sometimes accept things we don’t like.
Successful couples accept and understand that some conflict is inevitable, that there will always be certain things they don’t like about their partner, or things they don’t agree with—all that’s fine. You shouldn’t need to feel the need to change somebody in order to love them. And you shouldn’t let some disagreements get in the way of what is otherwise a happy and healthy relationship. Sometimes, trying to resolve a conflict can create more problems than it fixes. Some battles are simply not worth fighting. And sometimes, the most optimal relationship strategy is one of live and let live.
2. Candid conversations, Including Being Willing to Sometimes Hurt Each Other’s Feelings
My wife spends a lot of time in front of the mirror because she cares about how she looks. Nights before we go out, she often comes out of the bathroom after an hour-long makeup/hair/clothes/whatever-women-do-in-there session and asks me how she looks. She’s usually gorgeous, but every once in a while, she tries to do something new with her hair or is wearing a pair of boots that some flamboyant fashion designer from Milan thought were avant-garde. And it just doesn’t work.
People often lie in this and similar situations to make their significant other happy. Don’t. Why? Because honesty is more important to me than feeling good all of the time. The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is another person I love.
When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then more often than not nobody ends up feeling good. And our relationships fall apart without us even knowing it. It’s important to make something more important in your relationship than merely making each other feel good all of the time. The feeling-good—the sunsets and puppies—they happen when you get the important stuff figured out: values, needs and trust.
If either of us feels the other is being cold and unresponsive, that’s a likely opportunity for us to learn to say it without blaming the other. It’s in our collective best interest to be capable of hearing it without feeling less-than or blaming the other. AND, I can’t make my partner do any of it. I can only model through my own behavior.
Candid conversations are crucial if we want to maintain a healthy relationship, one that meets both people’s needs. Without them, we lose track of one another.
3. Being Willing to End It
Romantic sacrifice is idealized in our culture. Show me almost any movie with romance at its center and it’s bound to feature a desperate and needy character who treats themselves like dog poo for the sake of being in love with someone. The truth is our standards for what a “successful relationship” should be are pretty screwed up. If a relationship ends and we view it as a failure, regardless of unhealthy emotional or practical circumstances present, that’s kind of insane.
Romeo and Juliet was originally written as satire to represent everything that’s wrong with young, romantic love and how irrational beliefs about relationships can make you do stupid s**t like drink poison because your parents don’t like some girl’s parents. But somehow, we’ve come to think of the play as a romance. It’s this kind of irrational idealization that leads people to stay with partners who treat them poorly, to give up on their own needs and identities, to make themselves into martyrs who are perpetually miserable, to suppress their own pain and suffering in the name of maintaining a relationship “until death do us part.”
Sometimes the only thing that can make a relationship successful is ending it at the necessary time, before it becomes too damaging for either person. And the willingness to do that allows us to establish the necessary boundaries to help ourselves and our partner grow together. “Until death do us part” is romantic and everything, but when we worship our relationship as something more important than ourselves—more important than our values, than our needs and everything else in our lives—we create a sick dynamic where there’s no accountability.
We have no reason to work on ourselves and grow because our partner has to be there no matter what. And our partner has no reason to work on themselves and grow because we’re going to be there no matter what. This all invites stagnation and stagnation equals misery.
4. Feeling Attraction for People Outside the Relationship
One of the mental tyrannies we face in a non-honest relationship is the situation where any mildly emotionally appealing or sexual thought not involving our partner amounts to high treason.
As much as we’d like to believe that we only have attraction for our partner, biology and psychology says otherwise. Once we get past the honeymoon phase of starry eyes and oxytocin, the novelty of our partner can wear off a bit. And unfortunately, human psychology and sexuality is partially wired around novelty. People in happy marriages or relationships can easily get blindsided by seeing someone else as attractive and they feel like horrible people because of it. But the truth is, not only are we capable of finding multiple people attractive and interesting at the same time, it’s an emotional and biological inevitability.
What isn’t an inevitability is our decision to act on the attraction or not. Most of us, most of the time, choose to not act on those feelings. And like waves, they pass through us. This nonetheless can trigger shame in some people and irrational jealousy in others. Our cultural scripts tell us that once we’re in love, that’s supposed to be the end of the story. And if someone flirts with us and we enjoy it, or if we catch ourselves having an occasional thought about that person, there must be something wrong with us or our relationship.
But that’s simply not the case. In fact, it’s healthier to allow oneself to experience these feelings and then let them go. When you suppress these feelings, you give them power over you, you let them dictate your behavior for you (suppression) rather than dictating your behavior for yourself (i.e., feeling them and yet choosing not to do anything). People who suppress these urges are often the ones who eventually succumb to them and suddenly find themselves doing something contrary to their principles, having no idea how they got there and deeply regretting it about twenty-two seconds after-the-fact.
People who suppress these urges are also often the ones who project them onto their partner and become blindingly jealous, attempting to control their partner’s every thought, corralling all of their partner’s attention and affection onto themselves.
People who suppress these urges are often the ones who wake up one day disgruntled and frustrated with no conscious understanding of why, wondering where all of the days went.
People who suppress these urges are often the ones who try to numb them with food, drugs, alcohol, sexual acting out and more.
Looking at and engaging with emotionally or physically attractive people is pleasurable. Speaking to those people is pleasurable. Thinking about attractive people is pleasurable. That’s not going to change because of our Facebook relationship status. And when you dampen these impulses towards other people, you dampen them towards your partner as well. You’re killing a part of yourself, and it ultimately only comes back to harm your relationship.
When I meet an emotionally or physically beautiful person, I can enjoy it, as any person would. But it also reminds me why, out of all of the beautiful people I’ve met, I chose to be with my partner. And while I appreciate the attention or even flirtation, I can reframe the experience to strengthen my commitment by remembering this important point: Attractiveness is everywhere. Real intimacy is not.
When we commit to a person, we are not committing our thoughts, feelings or perceptions to them. We can’t control our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions most of the time, so how could we ever make that commitment? What we can control are our actions. And what we commit to that special person are those actions. Let everything else come and go, as it inevitably will.
5. Spending Time Apart
We all have that friend who mysteriously ceased to exist as soon as they got into their relationship. You see it all the time: the man who meets someone and stops playing basketball or hanging out with his friends, or the woman who suddenly decides she loves every comic book and video game her partner likes even though she doesn’t know how to correctly hold the XBox controller.
When we fall in love, we can easily develop irrational beliefs and desires. One of these desires is to allow our lives to be consumed by the person with whom we’re infatuated, particularly early in a relationship. This can feel great; intoxicating even. The problem only arises when the irrational desire is confused with reality.
The problem with allowing your identity to be consumed by a romantic relationship is that as you change to be closer to the person you love, you cease to be the person they fell in love with in the first place.
It’s important to occasionally get some distance from your partner, assert your independence, maintain some hobbies or interests that are yours alone. Have some separate friends; take an occasional trip somewhere by yourself; remember what made you, you and what drew you to your partner in the first place.
Without this oxygen to breathe, the fire between the two of you will die out and what were once sparks will become only friction.
6. Accepting Your Partner’s Flaws
This is one of those things that is not nearly as complicated as it appears.
- Every person has flaws and imperfections.
- I can’t ever force a person to change.
- It’s in my best interest to accept flaws and imperfections that I can live with or even appreciate.
The most accurate metric for your love of somebody is how you feel about their flaws. If you accept them and even adore some of their shortcomings— Obsessive cleanliness, awkward social ticks— Etc., and they can accept and even adore some of your shortcomings, well, that’s a sign of true intimacy.
The artist Alex Grey once said that, “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.” Love is, by definition, crazy and irrational. And the best love works when our irrationalities complement one another, and our flaws enamor one another.
If we remember nothing else, consider storing this nugget of counsel:
It may be our perfections that attract us to another in the first place. But it’s our imperfections and how we deal with them that decides whether or not we stay together.
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*For KC CoDA purposes, articles are edited to come from an "I/me" perspective. They also may have edited content and format.