FTR, I’m not asking for myself. Just pondering past relationships.
Like say for example, jealousy. Your SO doesn’t like you being friends with people of the opposite sex (if you’re gay, make the adjectives or pronouns work as best for you).
I’m just using the above as an example, but really, I’m talking about any kind of insecurity. Should person A stop doing thing X because it makes their SO insecure?
If you have to stop engaging in some normal activity or maintaining contacts with friends of any gender because it makes you partner insecure, you are essentially submitting to being an hostage to emotional terrorism. People need to work on their own insecurities instead of leveraging them as restrictions on others.
Stranger
Question makes no sense as posited, but I’ll engage the best I can.
If someone is my (or one of my) SOs then their insecurities are a part of my interaction, and trying to position them as “her” problem or “my” problem are about as useful as debating how many quarts of swimming pool water are due to the pool’s depth and how many come from its length or width.
But that doesn’t mean any given issue or concern is not relevant to relationship-discussion about what IS and what is NOT a reasonable expectation or reasonable desire within this relationship. They all are, if they’re important to either party. To use your example, it’s a dealbreaker for me, as a poly person, for any partner of mine to dislike me having friends or companions of her sex. She can feel jealousy and express jealousy but it’s going to be against the backdrop of an established understanding that sexual possessiveness is NOT something either partner is entitled to. (Because I would not be in this relationship if those weren’t the ground rules, just as a monogamous person would presumably not be in their relationship if the ground rules didn’t specify sexual exclusivity. It’s why discussing the ground rules for a relationship are important!)
Someone else’s insecurities are part of their package. You decide if the rest of the package is worth it to adjust. If it is, then they are your problem - because being in a relationship with someone means their problems are your problems. If it isn’t, then nothing about that person is your problem.
My (gay) ex had the opposite problem. At the beginning of our relationship he made it clear that he was not monogamous, and I made it clear that I was. I also made it clear that I couldn’t care less whether he was monogamous. After a while, he started hinting that he wanted me to start seeing other guys. He even went so far as to answer a personal ad for me. But I was happy just being with him. I don’t know whether it was “insecurity” or something else, but he felt very uncomfortable with my monogamy.
We eventually broke up for unrelated reasons. The very next day, I met my future husband. We’ve both been monogamous for 34 years, and neither has a problem with the other’s friends.
Yep. It’s also possible to explicitly make the relationship conditional on the SO working to resolve their insecurities, because you’re willing to help them work through the issues but don’t want to have to deal with the insecurities forever. However, that kind of arm’s-length approach tends not to have a very high success rate.
Yeah. Both parties have an obligation to be the best person they practically can.
Someone who says “I’m me and I refuse to consider changing me in any way to be a better fit with you” is someone telling you how the future will be. They are however they are, be that hyper-rigid or wildly unpredictable or … . Your role is simply to put up with, bend to, tolerate, etc. Which doesn’t sound much like a partnership to me.
No one is in complete control of their own behaviors or their emotions or their hang-ups. So that’s where my “practically” weasel word comes in. And that’s also why you can’t just throw any two humans together at random and expect them to bond as SOs. The gaps to be bridged have to be reasonably small to begin with.
To @Dangerosa’s point, people are a package deal, and you sometimes have to take the less-good along with the real-good. But a smart person pays more attention to the less-good aspects since those will tend to be more irritating over the long run while the good points become simply taken for granted as part of the background.
Every problem my wife has is my problem too because we are always in this life together. But that means my problems are her problems too.
Insecurity is a tough one for me to imagine. Making each other feel secure in our relationship is important and, so far as I know, we both feel secure together. If I were doing something that understandably made her feel insecure, I would have to reevaluate and change my behavior. If she felt irrationally insecure, she would have to understand that I can’t control her feelings and her trying to control me isn’t going to get her better control over her feelings. In any event, her feelings of insecurity are something we would have to work through together but that is very different than saying I am going to give up my female friends.
I can’t imagine that I would have been attracted to a woman who is so insecure that she couldn’t contemplate my having friends of the opposite sex. In lots of ways, a woman that insecure just wouldn’t be my wife.
That’s it exactly.
Functional behaviors and attitudes can and must be worked on. Irrational behaviors and attitudes must be overcome by the person holding them unless they’re willing to be alone.
But it’s not usually that absolute. What if there is one person she worries about–for whatever irrational reason, she doesn’t like you spending time with one particular person? Or it’s women in general, but not “can’t be friends” just “can’t cross this line”, where you think the line is irrational.
What if it isn’t about infidelity? What if you want to get a midlife crisis motorcycle and she’s worried you’ll kill yourself or get hurt–a worry you consider irrational? What if she wakes up at night, insecure and anxious, and wants you to wake up and reassure her (or come to bed and reassure her, if you are a night owl). What if she worries about the kids, and wants you to supervise them more closely than you consider rational? (Like, she won’t leave the 10 year old at home alone for even a short trip to the grocery store; you think he’s ready. Do you indulge “her” rule? What if it’s a 16 year old?)
I think we basically agree–married means we work though our problems together. But insecurities aren’t simple, because there’s often a gray area about whether or not they are rational. Going back to infidelity: it’s easy to say 'I couldn’t tolerate a woman who wouldn’t let me have female friends". Sure. But what if the line is “I don’t mind if you have female friends, but you shouldn’t hang out alone in their house drinking beer late into the night, though I wouldn’t care if you did that with a dude friend”. LOTS of couples have that line. That’s a pretty reasonable line, I think.
I don’t like dealing with bureaucracy and I hate talking to the bank - taking about money in general stressed me out to irrational levels. So my wife deals with that stuff, and I do stuff she doesn’t like to do. Does that count?
That’s a really good example of the sort of thing I was thinking about. And it IS complicated. I do that stuff in my marriage, because it makes my husband anxious. And most of the time I am cool with it, and sometimes I feel unappreciated and put upon and struggle a little. It’s not a “get divorced” issue for us, but it’s a low key issue that ebbs and flows over the decades.
I have a COMPLETELY irrational dislike of ordering pizza over the phone (the internet has solved this problem). I recognize that its stupid and irrational, I don’t know why it happens, I’ve talked it over with a therapist…my husband always did the pizza ordering. Its a small price to pay to me married to someone who really doesn’t care that he is friends with most of his old girlfriends (and all the other benefits to being married to me!)
That seems pretty low-key, and comes down to who less bothered by certain chores, rather than insecurities/neuroses. My wife doesn’t mind doing all of the laundry, I don’t mind scrubbing the toilets, so we fill each other’s gaps.
But irrational attitudes toward other things can be a big problem. The OP gave the example of jealously regarding who a spouse maintains friendships with. Another interesting one is finances, particularly with regard to retirement savings. What if one partner is irrationally fearful of stocks, but the other knows that investing solely/mostly in bonds (or sitting on cash) is a sure way to end up spending your retirement eating cold oatmeal?
For a while I’ve had a weird mental model of marriage as being like an engine. When it’s new, there’s a breaking-in period during which the asperities on mating parts wear down and they gradually come into full agreement on how they’re going to fit together. The better fit the parts are at the outset, the less troublesome the breaking-in period is, and the better things will be over the long run. OTOH, if the parts are really a poor fit when new, then the whole thing will tear itself to pieces in a hurry.
Sometimes, insecurities are caused by the other party. A relationship can start out perfectly secure until somebody proves for Nth time that no, they actually can’t be “just friends” with the opposite sex. While I’m sure there are many people that can, some just can’t. At that point you have a few options, you can leave, you can suffer in silence, you can open your relationship, or maybe, just maybe, the other person stops hanging out one-on-one with people of the opposite sex, and see how that goes.
If one has a completely irrational dislike of getting shots, can one send one’s spouse to get them?
You’re atually afraid of meeting that 20-something hunk-o-man who comes to deliver the pizzas just as you’re climbing out of the bath, still all warm & drippy in your robe and he’s got that look in his eye and suddenly your stereo starts playing boom-chika-wow-wow music and … ???
No, that would be afraid of the pizza arriving (and honestly, that might make more sense). I don’t like the phone.