It seems to me that the only way a relationship is worth the necessary sacrifices is if it brings you happiness, all the time. If the relationship is not actively making you happy, what is the point? Why stay?
Yeah, there is “but we’re married, and I won’t break my vow!” or “We have kids”, but both of those only happen if you married someone in spite of the relationship being non-perfect, or (worse) had children with someone you were in a non-perfect relationship with. And we have thread after thread where people describe fundamental flaws in their relationships, that cannot be fixed, and still they stay.
So tell me: why deal with trust-issues, jealousy, conflict and other nonsense, when the much easier solution is to just be single and happy?
Note: “Perfect” is defined here as “makes you happy”. A relationship can still be perfect even if the people in it occasionally fight etc. The difference is that, in a perfect relationship, a fight flares up, whatever it is gets resolved, and the problem goes away.
All relationships are imperfect, of course. Nothing makes everyone happy all the time. Moreover, it’s possible for someone to think, rationally or irrationally, that the current unhappiness is worthwhile for whatever reasons.
Suppose my wife were permamently unable to have sex for some reason. That would make me unhappy. But I love my wife, and when I say that I mean that her well-being is essential to my peace of mind, not that I think she’s got a firm yet supple tight embrace. I want to be with her; I want her to be well and prosperous and safe. So long as she wants me to and I believe I am helping to make her those things, I’d stay with her regardless of any transient feelings of unhappiness.
Scarcity. They worry they won’t find someone else or someone better so they stay in shitty relationships and then complain about it down the road or tell themselves all relationships are terrible.
Low self-esteem and not having standards play a part too. If you wouldn’t put up with the behavior from an ugly guy/girl or from a casual friend, then why in the world would you put up with it from someone you’re dedicating your life to?
I have very adamant lines in the sand of behavior I will/won’t accept in a relationship (no drama, no headgames, no unexplained flaking (that’s just rude), no negative attitude, no jealousy, etc.), and I make those lines clear up front. If those lines are crossed, then as far as I’m concerned the relationship is done (well, I reduce it to a fuckbuddy situation where we can hang out but only for sex). There are billions of other women out there, if I’m not happy with one, I’ll shrug and go find another. There are plenty of beautiful interesting smart fun women out there.
Sure, but that’s a hypothetical. I realize that’s your thing, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Your relationship makes you happy now, so you want to stay, even if shit happens down the road. I get that. I get spending thirty happy years with someone and then staying even if something bad happens.
What I don’t get, and what I’m asking about, is people staying in non-perfect relationships that were never perfect to begin with.
I wasn’t doing a silly hypothetical. Not nice to introduce that into someone else’s thread. I was trying to give an example of a reason someone might prefer to stay in a situationthat is making him currently unhappy.
I won’t talk about my relationship with my wife hereabouts, but I think happiness is overrated in many ways. Contentment is a better aim.
Contentment is a more achievable aim but that doesn’t make it a better one. A lot of people shoot for happiness and then when they realize it requires effort and they might not get it instantly they lower their standards and declare that it’s a myth and that it’s overrated.
Same thing as in business, when people get stuck in shitty jobs because they don’t want to do the work to find their ideal dream job…they just convince themselves it was unrealistic to begin with and that being content is better than being happy.
And then like crabs in a bucket they try to convince other people happiness is some impossible to reach Mount Everest to try to dissuade them from aiming for it because if that person got it then they’d be forced to admit to themselves that it’s not that they couldn’t achieve it, it’s that they didn’t achieve it.
We may mean different things by happiness & contentment. I’d ask you what you mean, but first I’ll have to give some thought to express my own opinion on the issue.
I define contentment as basically nothing to complain about. You’re not happy but you’re not UN-happy, so it’s not a BAD situation, it’s just not as perfect as it could be.
I learned this definition when I was dating a girl and we had settled into the mundane stage of a relationship where you’re both just kind of around eachother but the honeymoon stage had died down. I was never UN-happy with her, she was a decent enough girl, but I was never ecstatic and busrting with joy and happiness around her. I was content, but not happy.
Same with work, I worked a job that wasn’t ideal but it paid the bills and it was fun here and there, so it wasn’t a bad job. I was content. But I wasn’t happy like I am now that I’m working my dream job. I’d metaphorically roll out of bed and stroll to work, vs jumping out of bed excited and running to work, you know?
Like I say, I think contentment is a lot easier to achieve, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. Why shouldn’t I want my life to be happy 24/7?
Skald, I didn’t mean to imply it was a silly hypothetical (nothing silly about it), I just realized it was slightly amusing to use “but that’s hypothetical” in a response to you.
I know nothing about your relationship whit you wife, and did not mean to drag your actual, real relationship into this. Sorry if I did.
You’re beginning with an extremely questionable assumption that, I think, needs to be defended before a reasonable response could be crafted. Why is a non-perfect relationship not worth the sacrifices? Why should I assume you’re correct?
I did it once (I’m a man, she was a woman, if that matters), and it came down to the simple fact that I was extremely busy working on my doctoral dissertation, and didn’t feel I could spare the time and hassle of moving all my shit and finding a new place. We ended up more like roommates (confused roommates), and it sucked. I didn’t really like her very much, anyway, and she was fed up with some of my shit for a long time (obsessive behavior, boozing, cigarette smoking, making stacks of books throughout the house many feet high).
What?? It seems pretty unrealistic to for any relationship to make you happy all the time. Hopefully people happy more often than not, although happiness itself is not just a product of the relationship itself but has a lot to do with the people as individuals.
Relationships can go through phases and periods of strife and the efforts of solving problems and personal issues , working things out can make things even better. How many unhappy days do you think warrant bailing on the relationship?
I will say that I don’t think all relationships are supposed to be permanent and knowing when to let go and move on without resentment and blame can be a beautiful thing.
The same way a lot of people are in love with falling in love (or lust), and so skip from superficial relationship to relationship. They don’t want to put the work into a relationship that creates one with any real depth of feeling. Then, like crabs in a bucket, they attempt to convince themselves and other people that they are not shallow - no, those in long term relationships are just “settling”, that they are lazy folks with low self-esteem, and that a relationship of depth and meaning is just a lie they tell themselves, that it’s a myth or overrated.
But more seriously - it is hard to imagine a person who is only focused on their own immediate happiness sharing anything of any meaning with others - just as it is hard to imagine anyone who is blind to their own happiness having a sense of self-worth necessary to create a healthy relationship with others.
A relationship is always going to be a give-and-take, and the best ones are those in which each partner fundamentally respects themselves and the other, and is willing, if the relationship is a long-term one, to both extend and accept a certain amount of foregiveness for annoyances of various sort - so long as that fundamental respect isn’t breached.
The notion that someone ought to abandon a person one has years of memories with because they intrude on one’s happiness with a “negative attitude” one day is just odd - people ought not to be disposable, and I can’t see how treating them that way would make anyone happier in the long run - if you do, certainly you will be treated the same when you come to a low point (and you will - everyone does).
Another reason people stay in shitty relationships is that they’re afraid to rock the boat. We’re raised in a very “don’t risk hurting other people’s feelings or disagreeing with anyone or making anyone feel any negative emotions EVER” society. So you have a lot of people in situations where someone crosses a boundary but the other person doesn’t tell them and instead just stews over it.
I was planning to go see my current girlfriend tonight, but I have work to do and she knows my work comes first (it’s just a normal dvd/dinner Wednesday night for us, no epic event planned). So I told her I can’t come over, I have work to do. If she throws a fit about it or gets passive-aggressive about it, I’ll remind her that my work comes first, that’s my rule. If she calms down, cool, I’ll see her Sunday and we’re all good like normal. If she continues to freak out or accuse me of not caring about her, etc. I’ll break up and find a girl who won’t bring me drama. (we’ve been together for 7 months so she knows my work rule, if we’ve only just started dating I’ll cut her some slack if she’s a cool chick)
People have to learn that it’s okay to set boundaries and enforce them.
Because I was afraid. I’d married at 20, and in the last 7 years I nearly lost my husband more than once to unexplained illness and severe health scares. I also tend to be a somewhat solitary person, with only a tiny handful of people I really trust to get close to, and the prospect of losing one of those rare people after I’d fought so hard to care for him and look after him terrified the shit out of me. Even though he’d checked out emotionally and was getting involved with someone else, I still bent over backwards to do things for him to keep him around, because we still get along very well and I was too afraid to lose that friendship, even though I was getting nothing else at all out of the relationship.
You can become so wrapped up in moulding yourself to fit someone else that the idea of uncoiling and finding yourself again becomes overwhelming and you can’t find the strength or the drive to do it.
My relationship doesn’t make me happy. I am happy and bring that to my relationship and become even happier.
I think we all have different standards for what we want from a relationship. Some people seem to need game-playing and drama. I can’t do that. That doesn’t mean they are actually unhappy with their choices.
I see what you did there. But where did the superficial part come in? Do you have to fight all the time for a relationship to be “deep” and “real”? Do I have to punch my best friend in the face for us just because we don’t have a shitty relationship, or is it possible to actually get along with someone AND have a deep relationship?
Why is it hard to imagine? They don’t have to be ONLY focused on it, but they should have it as a high priority.
Why? Our agreement was “we’ll be in a serious relationship together because you make me happy.” If one day you start making me unhappy, you’ve breached our agreement, so why should I stay in the relationship? I don’t have to cut you out of my life entirely, but I’m sure as shit not going to put a ring on your finger or have a kid with you.
This is the same “the other shoe ALWAYS drops, life is horrible and anyone who doesn’t understand that just hasn’t been hit drastically by it enough yet, they’re not realists and don’t understand that life is hard and no one has it good” argument people had in the “Is Happiness bullshit?” thread. It’s silly.
Why can’t things just be awesome all the time? My relationship is great, because I didn’t settle for someone who doesn’t make me happy. My career is great, because I didn’t settle for a job that doesn’t make me happy. My social life is great, because I don’t settle for friends who don’t make me happy.
It wasn’t until 2-3 years after I got divorced that I realized how miserable I was throughout our relationship. I was afraid I’d never find a relationship like ours until I reached “clarity” and then I thanked God I never found another relationship like that.
Took some time to see it though.
