Its not unreasonable that we have high expectations from love - we are constantly fed stories through TV and film of couples who perfectly understand each other. We also see ourselves as easy to live with, very reasonable people but of course we view the world around us through a lens. That lens is our beliefs and assumptions; these make us blind to our unkind behaviours that, to be blunt, drive other people up the wall. Our friends and family aren’t going to tell us - they’re too nice. You -like me and everyone else - can be irritating sometimes. But we’re not always aware, so when we’re annoyed by our partner’s behaviour of course it feels unbalanced.
Love is a skill, its a training that needs to be learned. A big part of that is having the willingness to see sometimes unpleasant behaviours on the surface - like being grumpy or going on about taking the bins out - as more than they are. More than simply annoyances but revealing something about the mental state of your partner, revealing needs that they have, suffering that you can address.
And thats difficult. Really, really difficult. Because when someone is snippy or short with you our natural reaction is to get defensive, man the barricades and fire back, fight your corner. But this turns a relationship into a war, a series of tit for tat battles where someone is a winner and someone is a loser. It takes effort and discipline to look more deeply, ignore the perceived rudeness and see that they’re suffering, see that they’re having a bad day, see that they’re struggling to cope with work. Could it be that they’re angry that the bin wasn’t taken out on time? Of course its possible. But its not reasonable to get angry about the bin not being taken out. The roots of the anger will lie in the past, we need to have the willingness to see that.
Alian de Botton puts it brilliantly inhis TED talk on the subject: he says that love is to apply a generosity of interpretation. This is not just good relationship advice, its a fundamental practice of mindfulness - to see the world as it really is below the surface, building our peace and seeing the suffering of others. Sometimes that can be hardest to do with the person you love the most precisely because they are the person who loves you the most and you feel they’ve hurt you.
Our partners aren’t saints and neither are we - so part of the deal of being in a relationship is being prepared to cut the other person a bit of slack. Everyone we love is going to disappoint us to an extent at some point and - believe it or not - we will disappoint other people as well. The practice of love is the ability to look past this and see the child within them (and ourselves) that is doing the best they can and wants to be loved.
So in a sense we all marry the wrong person - because we are flawed and they are flawed and that’s OK. We find it hard to understand why they get annoyed and that's OK. They can’t always interpret our behaviours and that's OK. What matters is that we practice love by trying each day. Over time that understanding will increase and deepen.
Of course this is not a rationale for tolerating abuse. If you are physically or emotionally abused please look for help from friends, family, local charities and government. Noone deserves to be mistreated by their partner or anyone else.
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