Relationship experts insist that the most important relationship you'll ever have in your life is the one that you have with your significant other/partner/spouse. This contemporary truism flies in the face of the long-standing conventional belief that the children come first. Family comes first.
What's correct? Modern truth or the traditional wisdom of yore?
Inexplicably, we have the highest, practically unattainable standards for our partner. If he or she doesn't soar to these impossibly lofty heights, we are scandalized. We are sincerely surprised. We are genuinely disappointed.
But with family it doesn't matter how atrocious they are. It is of little consequence what terrible excuses for humanity they are. If they are less than perfect, you expect it, you can handle it. It is family afterall. Family is family, and that is that. We love them, no matter what. Unconditionally. (There are exceptions, but few and far in between). Yet these are people who have come into your lives as consequences of chance, of luck, of coincidental outcomes from the mysterious pairings of random sperm and eggs.
If the relationship you have with your partner is the most significant relationship you have, then why is it so easily discarded? Why do these words slip out smoothly and with little emotion- I don't love you anymore. I'm breaking up with you. We are not this cruel with our family. Yet we are this cruel with the person that we chose? This is the one relationship that is supposedly the most important one, the one that you get to choose yourself! If the relationship we have with our partner is broken, why is the first inclination to throw it out rather than try to fix it? Is our partner so replaceable, so expendable?
The beginnings of every relationship are easy and simple. These sweet beginnings get us accustomed to thinking that our relationships must somehow maintain this blissful state. But this is unsustainable. We live in a society intoxicated with the euphoric highs of love's first light. Like junkies, we are constantly on the prowl for a newer, fresher, stronger, better, higher high. We find this in the dizzying rapture and ecstasy of new love. At the first sign of a lull, or a tell-take flicker, we panic. We instantaneously and immediately wonder what went wrong. We doubt ourselves. We doubt each other. We doubt whether we truly loved each other in the first place. We feel tricked. We have that spontaneous awakening, the "Aha!" moment in which we triumphantly declare that we were duped.
Then we are suddenly justified in wanting, needing to move on, to move forward so that we can continue our naive and innocent journey from one exhilarating beginning to another and another. Never once realizing that each and every time we only ever skimmed the surface of love.
xx
ps There was some earlier version of this that was incomplete, and I was devastated that I thought I lost it all, and I didn't realize it posted. It has since then been deleted and replaced with this version.
