It’s taken me a long time to realise it, but my husband doesn’t want to hear the unfiltered contents of my head.
I used to think it was a mark of a successful relationship to tell him the unvarnished truth about everything — no matter how small, no matter how significant.
So when he asked me how my day was, I would tell him all the juicy details. But it turned out all he wanted to hear was: “Fine. Would you like a gin and tonic?”
And when I started recounting details of that week’s therapy session, he took to rolling his eyes.
Relationships, it turns out, are a lot like writing. All-consuming, but oftentimes the end product is beautifully succinct and to the point. We provide to our readers the best of us, distilled to an essence. And so — I’m coming to realise — it should be with our partners.
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The business of living is invariably messy and brutal. A lot goes on in the world that we would rather didn’t. There are people we have to deal with we’d rather not. The whole business of getting through the day is heavily transactional, and it ain’t gonna change. Life makes hypocrites of us all.
Our partners are not our therapists, or a vehicle for venting, or even a sounding board. We are playing a role — authentically, one would hope — but it is a role nonetheless.
A decade ago, when my husband was advertising himself online, he sought applications from: “A knight in shining armour. Slightly tarnished will be considered.” I’ve always been rather pleased with myself, and quite surprised, I even got an audition, let alone the part. But it is a part.
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All of us are taught, these days, a highly specific version of what a relationship is supposed to be.
Gone are the days of the arranged marriage (at least for most of us). Gone are the days of marrying within one’s “class” or marrying for money or marrying the nice-looking boy next door.
Not for us such conservatism! We are more enlightened, and only the complete merger of two lives will do!
What a beautiful hell we have created for ourselves.
For the problem with the “Two Become One” paradigm is that relationships like that are commonly used as a shield from personal growth. We abdicate personal responsibility in favour of co-ownership. My problem is your problem.
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What we need to do is figure out a better formulation of what a relationship realistically can be, and what we are (and are not) entitled to expect of our significant other. If we did that — if we really committed to it — more of them might actually survive.
That’s where the lies come in. The occasional barefaced lie hurts no one, and it is enormously freeing. It frees us from conflict. Conflicts over money, or your husband’s dreadful friends, or where you should spend Christmas.
As Kierkegarard warned us in Works of Love (1847), by focusing solely on the most romantic incarnation of love, we develop a narrow and impoverished sense of what love can actually be.
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There is an urgency about this. The “warts and all” merger of two souls simply does not work, and it causes terrible misery. Blind infatuation gets you nowhere. Adoration, ditto. It’s important to take off the blinkers.
Sure enough, people who operate with that level of expectation usually end up in a right old state, because when trouble emerges, they think that of itself is a sign their love is doomed.
It turns out there is an incentivising joy trying to present the best version of who you can be to your partner. In the spirit of reciprocity, it encourages them to raise their game too.
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Lies get a bad rap. As a society, we show a concerning lack of curiosity about why people lie, despite the fact that everyone does sooner or later.
Liars are hated, by and large. They’re cheaters, they’re heart-breakers, they’re — economical with the actualité. They’re pathological.
There’s a small number of people like that, and they (and the people foolish enough to love them) deserve our pity. But for all the rest of us, lying happens all the time too. Lies help grease the wheel.
Try telling someone what you’re really feeling when they ask you how you are to see the value of this. We only want to hear that you’re fine. If you’re not, most people would prefer you keep it to yourself, thank you very much. In an average ten minute conversation, it is said you’ll be lied to at least twice, and more likely three times.
Life has made accomplished liars out of all of us, and that’s OK.
There’s a terrible consequence of not lying. Unadulterated, unedited honesty brings with it inevitable conflict and that’s especially problematic these days because the new trend in relationships is to demonise all conflict.
It’s part of the ongoing infantilisation of our culture, the reduction of human interaction to the complexity of a WikiHow article. As a result of which, arguing well — The Good Fight, if you will — is becoming a lost art.
Similarly, no one has a superhuman tolerance for emotional pain. We don’t want prolonged exposure to it. Family court judges, for instance, are often encouraged to do a three year stint, then move on, such is the emotional devastation of long-term exposure to the hell of other people’s traumas.
Our partners don’t need to know all about our past pains, or indeed all our current pains.
It is hard enough processing our own traumas without exposing ourselves to the daily tumult of someone else’s.
Don’t get me wrong: being real selves in our relationships is essential. But we need to mindful of what actually constitutes authentic selfhood.
The world is a pollutant and also an intoxicant, and so much of our energy is (understandably) devoted to navigating it. Is that really who we are, at essence? Is that the best we can hope for?
“Communication is key” is perhaps the most deeply annoying of the many annoying relationship mantra of our life and times.
You know what? There’s such a thing as too much communication. Sometimes, people can be too chatty. We need to learn to curb it.
There is a reason our ancestors spoke in a formalised language with one another. Speaking without a filter has always been discouraged. Not every thought is worth articulating. And the opposite of truth is not always a lie. We all have private thoughts and behaviours. Most of them aren’t even that interesting to other people. Other thoughts are best directed at our journal, or saved up for a “big reveal” in our memoirs: “What I Was Actually Thinking: The Unvarnished Truth!”
Ours is a suspicious age. We question the motives of others. We are less trusting. We want to see the receipts.
Yet secrets and lies are wired into our DNA, even if we’re only lying to ourselves, even if we lie to preserve the privacy of others. The social cost of breaching this unwritten code aren’t usually worth it.
So we have to come to terms with a more nuanced understanding of what honesty in relationships actually means.
Too much honesty is rarely helpful. And it’s more productive knowing which lies to take seriously.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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