Relationship Equality

Some people are searching for a partner who is better than themselves.

They want someone who has done more therapy, has more experience with intimacy or sexuality, has figured out better some area of life.

While of course you want to admire your partner, perceiving them as better than you is just as dangerous as the much more common mistake people make once they’ve been in a relationship for a while: thinking their partner is worse than them.

It’s almost universal to think that the relationship would be better if only your partner would change. If only they would go to therapy, or read the Love Languages book, or stop drinking, or stop with their denial, or assert themselves with their parents, or stop being lazy, or stop complaining…The list is endless.

The revelation of the couples therapy research is that thinking that you’re parter is more destructive to the relationship than you are is a form of contempt. It’s cultivating the idea that you’re better than your partner in some fundamental way. This is almost never actually true. It’s also almost always more destructive to a relationship than whatever the complaints are.

It is almost guaranteed that whoever you’re in relationship with, is truly and literally just as fucked up as you are.

Even if they had more “trauma” or have a “personality disorder” or an “addiction,” we generally don’t get interested in people who are actually better or worse than we are. We are drawn to people at similar levels of development and we stay with these kinds of people.

Relationship is opportunity for both people grow, starting with the understanding that while the deficiences may look very different, it is virtually assured that they are equal in destructiveness.