Sh!t.

10

Relationship experts insist that the most important relationship you'll ever have in your life is the one that you have with your significant other/partner/spouse. This contemporary truism flies in the face of the long-standing conventional belief that the children come first. Family comes first.

What's correct? Modern truth or the traditional wisdom of yore?

Inexplicably, we have the highest, practically unattainable standards for our partner. If he or she doesn't soar to these impossibly lofty heights, we are scandalized. We are sincerely surprised. We are genuinely disappointed.

But with family it doesn't matter how atrocious they are. It is of little consequence what terrible excuses for humanity they are. If they are less than perfect, you expect it, you can handle it. It is family afterall. Family is family, and that is that. We love them, no matter what. Unconditionally. (There are exceptions, but few and far in between). Yet these are people who have come into your lives as consequences of chance, of luck, of coincidental outcomes from the mysterious pairings of random sperm and eggs.

If the relationship you have with your partner is the most significant relationship you have, then why is it so easily discarded? Why do these words slip out smoothly and with little emotion- I don't love you anymore. I'm breaking up with you. We are not this cruel with our family. Yet we are this cruel with the person that we chose? This is the one relationship that is supposedly the most important one, the one that you get to choose yourself! If the relationship we have with our partner is broken, why is the first inclination to throw it out rather than try to fix it? Is our partner so replaceable, so expendable?

The beginnings of every relationship are easy and simple. These sweet beginnings get us accustomed to thinking that our relationships must somehow maintain this blissful state. But this is unsustainable. We live in a society intoxicated with the euphoric highs of love's first light. Like junkies, we are constantly on the prowl for a newer, fresher, stronger, better, higher high. We find this in the dizzying rapture and ecstasy of new love. At the first sign of a lull, or a tell-take flicker, we panic. We instantaneously and immediately wonder what went wrong. We doubt ourselves. We doubt each other. We doubt whether we truly loved each other in the first place. We feel tricked. We have that spontaneous awakening, the "Aha!" moment in which we triumphantly declare that we were duped.

Then we are suddenly justified in wanting, needing to move on, to move forward so that we can continue our naive and innocent journey from one exhilarating beginning to another and another. Never once realizing that each and every time we only ever skimmed the surface of love.

xx

ps There was some earlier version of this that was incomplete, and I was devastated that I thought I lost it all, and I didn't realize it posted. It has since then been deleted and replaced with this version.

VIEW 10 of 10 COMMENTS
adelina:
@crazytalk So, right back where we started: which relationship is more "important?" Trying to extrapolate from what is philosophically (or otherwise) important with humans and to what is important in lower-order species is beside the point. Humans are an anomaly. We have higher cognitive abilities which allow us to think things through. And a lunatic bonobo cannot gauge importance; the "lunatic" modifier implies the impairment of cognitive faculties. Which makes it all the more astounding when truth comes spilling out of its mouth. Anyhow, I'll take your bait and discuss the workings of relationships between lower-order animals. The most interesting bond in non-human animals would probably have to be between that of mother and offspring. I can't say whether you can jump from that and make the claim that it is the case that the strongest bond is between family in every species on the planet. That is a massively colossal claim. In fact, aside from the mother/child relationship (only until the child is able to take care of itself), I don't know whether there is any relationship in the animal kingdom which is held sacrosanct. For instance, it is often the case that animals find themselves in incestuous relationships. There are also instances when an animal is a "lone animal" (as in, a lone wolf) and not a pack animal, and is actually all the stronger for it. Are there wars waged between feuding families in the animal kingdom? Do the animals really have any consideration of what a family unit is at all, aside from the inertia which leaves them in a pack or group just because that is what they were born into?Do they have even have the most rudimentary loyalty to each other based upon what they consider "love?" Do animals "love" each other as we humans have come to understand this term? I don't know. I do know that many swans have a mate for life. Also, turtle doves and some vultures do as well. Maybe penguins too? (I'm no animal expert).The point is trying to compare what goes on in the animal kingdom with what goes on in the human world is ludicrous. It's like trying to compare a porsche with a ford pinto. The queen bee destroys the drone bee after they're done mating, same as the black widow. The preying mantis bites off her mate's head when she is done copulating with him.  Should we then extrapolate from those examples? No, probably not. But how about getting back to where we started? What I find particularly compelling about the modern belief that the relationship between partners is the most "important" is that it does turn all traditional beliefs on its head.  In the non-human animal kingdom, the main point of having a partner in the first place is to mate and produce offspring. But thankfully, with humans, we have the higher cognition to be able to want something even MORE meaningful in the relationship. We can pair with each other because we truly love each other. Two men loving each other. Two women loving each other. Or a man and a woman loving each other. There is so much more freedom in being able to think things through and not be entirely guided by instinct, impulse and intuition as lower-order animals are.
adelina:
If you put the relationship you have with your mom, or with your boss, or with your best friend, or with your children, or with ______ (fill-in-the-blank) ahead of the relationship with your partner/spouse, I do think relationship difficulties s are more likely to arise. But really, what the hell do I know? To quote Socrates:  I know one thing: that I know nothing.

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