Friday 4 April 2014

Perspectives, Musings & Questions on Relationships That Are Considering Using Anti Aging Cream

Justin Timberlake wasn’t really on some scandal-laden Illuminati fuelled psycho-distortional binge when he sang the lyrics of ‘Mirrors’ because, just like looking into a mirror, a relationship can be presented to the eye in one way – but be interpreted in a completely different sense. This post attempts to discuss some issues in relationships: from walking completely past the person you love, to overflowing with love, to our need for validation and a bit of other emotional gunk that I’ve scraped out from between the bricks of the dammed up walls of my heart-river. (Gaaay.)

You can be with a person for quite some time – to a point where the qualities that attracted them to you in the first place become almost commonplace. To you and your partner, both: a beautiful woman’s partner neglects to compliment her beauty, and maybe she herself tends to neglect the occasional maintenance act of waxing. It could be said that the relationship has dragged itself out until you begin to walk past your love. Or it could be said that the relationship has deepened to a point where you’re not taking each other for granted in as much as being in a deeply communal existence, where you’re no longer seeing her beauty but you’re seeing the lady beyond her qualities, and have come to value and feel her essence as a person. How to explain this… you’re not in love with her qualities or actions anymore. You just love her.

This isn’t cheap logic to use as an excuse to not compliment your partner, by the way!

Continuing on this trail of compliments comes the need for validation. A very wise guru said that we should, for our own sake and for the sake of our relationships, always assume the other person in the relationship loves you. It’s easy to come a year along and wonder whether your partner feels the same. It is hard to push for affirmation. We want this affirmation to reinforce our stance in a relationship. We want to feel wanted to know we carry some weight and that the other person would notice if we don’t come home one day. Why? Our ego needs satisfaction. Our identity, the fragment based on our partner, needs to be validated. We want to validate ourselves. What pressure to put on another person! I’m terribly guilty of this. Of paying a compliment and also wanting to hear something just as nice as back. I’m still trying to work out whether this makes me a weaker person, an insecure person or a person so vain that she needs to hear that you think that she’s just as amazing as she thinks you are (all this in addition to being a normal human being, you know) .

Just as being at the bottom of a well, almost near drowning,  is a difficult place to be at – being very much in love is an engulfing situation. A year later, still being completely fascinated by the person you’re with, the way he speaks, smiles, laughs, puts you in a position where every action you undertake and most of the emotions you feel move from the bottom of the ocean of love with such unnecessary force and immensity that it could overwhelm. One of the hardest things I’ve found is trying to control my emotions and affections in a way that are palatable, easily and readily, for my partner.

It must be a terribly awkward position for someone who has their act together to be the recipient of regular love-smacks across the torso by a partner wielding a tonne club of affection.  Where the occasional pinch once in a while may be pleasurable, controlling your club may be useful.

Why is everything so hard? Why are there so many rules? Why can’t we just be? Why are there invariably so many nuances and over thinking traps to fall into? To respond, does doing everything the way you want it to always lead to happiness? Say for example, you are an early riser. And you like to practice the cymbals every morning. You do this every day on your own path and you expect your partner to wake up and praise your playing. But instead you’re dating Father/Mother Time and they tend to rise when the clock hits noon. You’re going to be in an unhappy position. Thus, consideration of loved ones and the impact of our behaviour on their happiness would be a logical facet to factor into our daily decisions.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be yourself. If it is in your true nature to rise early, by all means do so. And occupy yourself with an activity more considerate of your partner’s need for slumber. Ideally, however, you would want to be with someone that would enjoy the clinging of the cymbals regardless of the time, place or sleep depravity. Right? Who ends up waking up with you is something you can control.

Something I’ve yet to figure out, though, is what the ideal is when it comes to hobbies and passions. I would love some input on this, as I assume it varies in different relationships as people hold these things close in a number of different degrees. How important is it for you to participate in your partner’s hobbies? For example, let’s say there’s a typical man: wholly interested in soccer – watches every match, has a fantasy football team, tracks players from their waking moment to bed. And there is a female who enjoys flower pressing – selecting the flowers, preserving them, musing over old albums of flowers and such. She has little to no interest in soccer. He has little to no interest in flowers. But they’re both really important to the individual.

I suppose if she lived in hope that he wouldn’t make her watch every single match, and if he lived in the hope that she won’t make him identify each flower by texture in her book –there wouldn’t be an issue of fairness if they both decide to not involve the other in their hobby. The problem that arises, though, is when she secretly hopes he would view and appreciate her work in a way similar to him wanting her to watch sport with him, it’s a question of sharing worlds and wanting to form such a world together. Tricky, hey?

On the other hand, it is critical to maintain an individual identity in a growing relationship. So by the individual pursuit of hobbies, their individual personas are strengthened and thus the fraction of their happiness that is dependent on their partner grows smaller. The smaller this fraction, it can be said, the greater the overall happiness in the relationship because there is no ‘need’ for the other person. It is a warm, tingly, “I want you, with me.”

What do you think?

When things grow into comfort, I think, they take on a special sense of intimacy. A night in with pyjamas and tea, sitting at a desk and your partner chilling in the other end of the house can be just as emotionally fulfilling as a night out on the town dressed up head to toe. Comfort shouldn’t be scorned nor devalued in relation to specific appreciation – but where there are gaps in that appreciation deficiency, I feel, it’s a chance for you to work on your own self esteem: “I’ve been with this person for a year, they must see something amazing in me. Why do I doubt this and demand to hear it from them, when they’re free to walk away tomorrow if they really wanted to?”

And if my relationship ends tomorrow or next week, you guys will all think I’m an idiot with unfounded opinions  - but I feel that I have learnt an immeasurable amount in this past year. Immeasurable.