There’s a common thread that I’m noticing in relationship talk that I’d like to address. It’s not necessarily polyamory specific, but I’ve never let it stop me before, so here we go:
“Relationships are hard.”
I first ran across this in a Focus on the Family publication back in the 1980s when I started reading about sex, families and relationships. I was a teenager and was still in the David St. Hubbins mode of believing virtually everything I read. So I bought it.
Then as I got older and married, I was told a good marriage was hard from all sorts of quarters. Then when I started being involved with the online polyamory community in the mid-1990s, I was still being told relationships were hard with the added caveat that polyamory is hard.
I’m less inclined to go with this common wisdom these days. What’s hard is when you don’t know yourself well enough[1], haven’t yet developed appropriate emotional self-sufficiency[2], and are making decisions from wishful thinking rather than facts[3].
I just don’t buy that relationships are anywhere near the hard work that self-development is. Once you start focusing on the self-development part, the relationship part seems to be a pretty nice side effect of that.
Is self-development hard? I’m sorry to say I find it so. Perhaps others don’t. I’m even a little embarrassed to admit that when I realized (well into my thirties) that I was not being a grown-up, that it wasn’t about romantic relationships at the end of the day that got me to try to clean up my act. It was about setting an example for my kids[4].
The only thing that made relationships hard were my own foolish choices and expectations. When I cleaned that up, a great deal fell into place.
[1] Been there
[2] Done that
[3] Bought the T-shirt
[4] When my son was born, my father said, “Children will not pay attention to much of what you say, but they WILL notice EVERYTHING YOU DO.” I do find this so. It is also why I started eating my vegetables. No, seriously!
As I understand it, people tend to remember the bad more/easier than the good. This has been explained to me as a survival mechanism (eg. ‘I touched the fire and it burned me!’) I think that a part of relationships being though of as “hard” is that when you’ve been involved in one for a long period of time, this can color your feelings of things. Another thing that I have found is that people tend to equate lots of ‘work’ (in this case, compromising and, er, working with people) as being automatically “hard.” We can then add in that poly relationships are (just due to how many people are involved) more complex interactions than a one-to-one relationship.
With all that, though, I think the question of if they are hard is more of a question for specific relationships, and the expectations that the participators bring with them to the table. The more you want to change (others, or yourself, willing, or not) in a relationship, the harder it’s likely to be. I think that a basic mistake that a *lot* of people make is getting in to a relationship with the idea of changing the person/people involved, instead of accepting them.
When everyone involved is acting like a grownup, relationships can be pretty easy. Easy =/= fun all the time and by “easy”, I mean, “doesn’t feel like trying to walk through sucking pool of mud and blackstrap molasses in a pair of rubber boots”, I do not mean that it is totally effortless.
That sensation of wading through molasses and mud? Pretty clear indicator that something is wrong. It is not a sign of a healthy relational situation.
Also, it helps if people act like effing grownups and it helps if people can avoid getting caught up in the ideal of what they want as opposed to what is real.
Where can I find a Wishful Thinking t-shirt?
@The Prince: The dresser upstairs. Middle drawer on the right.
I totally agree!
I’m really used to hearing people say that relationships are hard, and practically never hear people say they’re not. But recently when I went around asking people individually to tell me if they think relationships are hard, almost half said something a lot like what you have written here. I guess this opinion is more common than I thought, but for some reason the opposite opinion gets voiced way more often. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised; after all I don’t speak up about it either. When people say that relationships are hard, I typically just smile and make understanding noises even though I don’t exactly agree.
When I first got married, I didn’t know what people meant by “working” on a relationship. Then I had kids, and now I know. Suddenly my wife and I had so much less time and energy for each other, we had to be much more conscious about sustaining the relationship.
I think people say “hard” when they mean to say “takes effort”. Relationships definitely take effort. They require active participation, to avoid taking things for granted. But being in love and being with the person you love shouldn’t constantly be difficult and trying.