This article explores the common frustration people feel in long-term relationships and argues that our expectations of love are often needlessly complicated. It proposes a simpler perspective, focusing on five essential needs that make relationships fulfilling.
Many people, after they’ve been in a couple for some time, will privately admit that they are – in many ways – frustrated and disappointed by the person they’ve chosen to share their lives with. If pressed for details, they will have no difficulty coming up with a list.
Their partner, they might complain, is: too loyal to their irritating family, doesn’t share their views on the layout of the living room, never wants to go on camping holidays, plays tennis every Wednesday evening, has a friend who laughs for no apparent reason, drinks coffee from a big mug with “1984” inscribed on the side, has a habit of adding “actually” to every second sentence when it’s actually redundant, and so on. As the list gets longer, they sigh – they still love their partner and long to be happy together, it’s just that it seems impossibly complicated to make this relationship work. What’s driving the frustration isn’t that they have sadly fallen for an idiot as a mate, it’s rather that we have all inherited needlessly complicated ideas of love. We are told that love is meant to involve the almost total merging of two lives: we expect that a loving couple must live in the same house, eat the same meals together every night, share the same bed, go to sleep and get up at the same time,, regularly see each other’s families, have all their friends in common – and pretty much think the same thoughts on every topic at every moment. It’s a beautiful vision, but a hellish one, for it places an impossibly punitive burden of expectation on another human. We feel the partner must be right for us in every way, and if they’re not, that they must be prodded and cajoled into reforming. But there’s another perspective from which to evaluate our needs: relationships don’t have to be so complicated and ambitious if we keep in view what in the end actually makes them fulfilling. If we boil matters down, there are – as we have seen – only five essential things we want from one another
Relationship Problems Love Expectations Needs Fulfillment
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