// Black … All Black
Ambrose Pierce said love is a temporary insanity cured by marriage.
When it all goes black.
My life is either good times or bad times. There seems to be no neutral line here.
But the last 4 weeks have been a bit extreme. Ending a relationship, closing a funding round, moving to a new place and, to top it all off, my dad got hospitalised with stroke..
Sounds like a lot. But I see that many other people have a lot on their plates too. In the course of the coming months, I will write more about each of these highs and lows and my experience in them. This is the first one.
Our expectations of life and love have never been so high as in the last decade. The majority of people are still looking for everything: family, career, money, freedom, friends.
I am the same. I want it all and was on track… But then it collapsed. The woman who I loved like nothing else left me. It was time. Time to think about my limited beliefs, what happened, and what did I contribute to that?
After reflecting, learning and some extreme outside help, I have come to a list of beliefs which I think are issues for a lot of people.
The traditional family was meant to provide security, children, property and respectability. That's it.
But not in 2022. In the “Tinder time” we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us, help us build the business, see three countries a year – as there is so much to explore – and be happy and healthy too.
I myself wanted to “marry my best friend,” my confidant on all matters, a person to whom I should be able to tell everything, have the best intimacy with and, for that matter, she should not only be a potential parent, she should also be a good listener, a skilled chef (or know the best restaurants on Deliveroo), a financial helper, a motivated workout buddy and loads more.
Where did this come from? And what if you have difficulty providing all of that? Are you then not worthy of connection? I have had an extreme problem with telling everything behind closed doors to my partner. This is, as we all know, the basis of trust – which is the basis of any relationship, especially an intimate one. Does that mean I am not a worthy partner, or does that mean there is a hell of a lot of work to do on that part, and can you still enjoy the other parts?
To start… Where did we get this idea that one person is supposed to provide every facet of emotional and physical connection available to a partner?
For me, it was with this relationship. It started decades ago in my past. It was easy to blame the past for this, but it was not true. There were limited self-beliefs and traumas that all gave me an excuse to hide behind this (all men that relate to this, I strongly advise you read No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert A. Glover). I always hide behind the past.
So what happened?
When I met my dream woman I was deprioritising my life, our friendships, my finances and a lot more. That is normal when you have a mutual click with someone, and not just someone, but “the one”. The desire to lay in bed all day with her made me feel like the world outside had disappeared. But then I opened the door, and asked, “Did the world disappear, or did I?"
Ambrose Pierce said, “Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.”
Is this true? I have never been married but wanted it so bad as I believed that I then have the false security of never leaving. Which couldn't be further away from the truth.
But that is insane… It needs to come from inside you. For instance, it’s insane to think that our partner can provide for us the same level of support and connection that we once got from our networks of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, teammates. We spend our young lives building an entire network. In most cases friends come and go, but the latter tends to accelerate once we partner up. There’s a lot I learned from my single friends lately. One of the biggest? We don’t need to be in a relationship to have relationships. We’ve had them the whole time.
We have to remember this, especially when our primary relationship is experiencing high stress. One of the best things we can do for ourselves and our partners is take some pressure off. I see that now, but when you are in it is hard to see.
We should remind ourselves that we don’t live or love in a vacuum. Sure, it helps to diversify our expectations of our partner, but if we really want to make a meaningful and long-lasting improvement, we have to diversify our relationship.
Expanding our intimate connections does not automatically mean we’re taking the emotional energy out of our primary relationship. I think now it maybe should be the opposite…
My learnings:
Did I bring all of my challenges to her, or did I seek out advice from the person in my life who has the most knowledge or experience with the problem? In my instance, did I work hard enough on myself, whilst keeping our relationship in balance or should I have asked others for an open opinion?
Did I have a tendency to reach out to friends with only the things I felt I couldn’t talk to my partner about? If so, why? Why did I not tell my partner the truth on all things. And what did I do to create this dynamic?
What are the skills, traditions, or wisdom that I needed to look for outside without disrespecting my relationship?
Life is a game of risk. From the moment we come into this world to the moment we die, our survival instinct acts as a silent friend navigating every situation we face or desire.
And at every step, a subconscious calculation is operating in the background, I should have known that at my age this was the case…
A few other questions that lately come to my mind…
• Is this a harmful situation to avoid?
• Will I get hurt when I do this?
• Do I want to get hurt?
• Could there be a payoff and, if so, is it worth it?
• What if it’s great?
• What if I fail?
Was it It Worth The Risk?
Well I would say, “Yes.”
We are looking for red flags all of the time – and we should. If a former partner struggled with abuse, we might overly-chastise our new partner for occasionally overindulging. When we’ve had past experiences in which our partner was too needy or we felt too needy, we may find ourselves seeking “situationships” where we don’t have to get deep enough to develop any level of dependence. And when we’ve experienced trauma, we will either try to avoid anything similar—or find ourselves experiencing it over and over again without totally understanding why. I did all of the above. All. So I guess it’s hard to deal with.
It’s crucially important to look for red flags. But too much can also leave us feeling constricted and avoidant. I asked myself, have I really wanted to jump off the cliff with this woman and dive into the full potential of the relationship, or did I stop… just before jumping… only to stop ourselves at the edge because the proverbial water might be too cold, too murky, too mysterious? Stopped and then jumped too late… whilst at that time we couldn’t jump together anymore.
I thought that, when I wanted to jump, taking risks helped to build Trust Over Time. But it didn’t. It’s too much piled up. It’s major transgressions or minor mistakes that have compounded. Even small mistakes can be corrosive when they happen again and again. And I made a lot of mistakes. Relationships are run together but I can only take responsibility for my part.
And even when I (the offending partner) am working to heal the wounds, the other partner’s confirmation bias will insist, “they’re just going to do it again.” And would I blame her for that?
If any of this sounds familiar to you, the last thing you probably want to hear is that it’s on you to open back up to the possibility of being hurt or disappointed again. But taking that risk is the only way to build trust in a possible alternative: that things can be better.
Eli J. Finkel explained in The All-or-Nothing Marriage that love requires some tradeoff between relationship enhancement and self-protection. He asks, “Are you more willing to let yourself be highly vulnerable in pursuit of deep intimacy, or are you more willing to sacrifice some level of intimacy to avoid being highly vulnerable?” This paradox is also at the heart of the Catch-22 posed by trusted researcher Rachel Botsman, “Can we take risks without trust? Or is it the act of risk-taking that allows us to develop trust?”
Taking risks is not the same as being reckless. We all need both security and adventure in this life. It’s okay to stop at the edge of the dock and assess the dark waters below, but it’s just as important to take the leap of faith.
Most importantly, trust requires taking risks together that help us grow into better partners for each other. When I let my partner fall in the past, it was going to take a lot of trust falls to show that we're committed now to always catching each other, to really holding each other at our most vulnerable. The worst case scenario that happened to us is that I dropped her so many times that she finally understood, “I can’t trust him again". That was important to learn too. But if we don’t take the risk at all, we might never know either way.
I have learned and grown, and will always hold love for her always, because she is an amazing woman.
My dad survived his two brain strokes and is back home. I am packing to move. It's not always easy. It really isn’t. But I am sure I am not the only one…
Keep in there.
Romano