Buy or Make: Theories of Romantic Relationships

relationshipsEvery once in a while  we find ourselves reflecting on lessons learned in a lifetime of coaching and counseling people. How we might have lived our lives differently had we known then what we know now.

This afternoon, talking to a young man about romantic relationships, we found ourselves thinking about our own relationships, and the relationships of the many people we have known in a very intimate way because of our work as counselors and therapists.

It often seems that the entire focus among young people, and certainly most of the focus in TV and other media that deals with relationships is all about what we’ll call the: buy the right one theory.

Basically the notion is that successful relationships happen when a young person manages to get a “catch,” a young man or woman who perfectly embodies the traits of desirability.

In this model of long term relationships, their success or failure is mostly determined by dating experiences in one’s early 20s or 30s. Specifically whether or not one is able to land a desirable romantic partner.

This idea certainly fits in with the American ideals of capitalism and competition. But in fact it has a very long history.

For example, fairy tales are all about this theory of successful relationships. The whole idea of “and they lived happily ever after” is that once you’ve found the right person, everything is going to turn out great.

Of course, we all realize this theory of finding the perfect catch is not true, right?

The young man that we were speaking with understood that this is of course a fiction and one that had some very potentially negative effects and that it was important to focus on building relationships, at least as much on finding the perfect partner.

Nevertheless, each time we tried to turn our conversation to the topic of building good relationships and how important that was and what those skills looked like, we were impressed with how quickly the conversation came back to the idea of matching a shopping list of traits … and who really meets that list …and whether they really are available etc, etc.

In other words, although we may think that we’re immune from this simplistic theory, we suspect that most young people really are caught up in it. That was certainly the case when we were young.

However, what does the reality of our experience teach us.

The relationships that lasted and succeeded, endured, even flourished, were not relationships between two people who met the “ideal” image of a perfect partner.

Maybe we were exposed to a bias sample, but most of the good relationships were between decidedly imperfect people who did in fact mostly focus on the hard work of building good relationships.

And the perfect people who got married? Those relationships tended to disappear when a challenge showed up or a disappointment about the other person became apparent. Not that that was always the case, but it’s just that we don’t think that the shopping list and the idea of finding the perfect partner as it is commonly understood has much value at all.

Then we found ourselves wondering what are the traits that are important, if we were to throw away the traditional shopping list, what should be on the revised shopping list:

The things we would focus on are traits that have allowed couples to deal with unexpected situations and adversity.

All of the couples that we know well came upon a place in their life when a big change took place that really changed the relationship in ways that would have been hard to predict.

For example, in one relationship, when they were young both partners knew they never wanted kids, one of them in fact decided that he or she did want kids. Other examples were a medical illness or a legal problem, or a job loss.

For every couple, challenges came up that really could not be predicted. The key to the successful relationships was the ability of the couple to deal with this adversity in a positive way without turning to anger or recrimination.

Intelligence is probably important but more the practical intelligence of dealing with relationships than any kind of academic knowledge.

In a future post, then, we are going to talk about how to build a great relationship.