In the search for love we tend to oscillate between a fear of being too demanding and an equally intense horror of compromising too readily. What, then, should we be firm in wanting? And what, correspondingly, can we afford to let go of?
Being demanding – drawing attention to a problem and not giving up until it is addressed and even, if need be, making a scene – cannot always be unwarranted. It can be just as unwise to back down as it is to keep pushing ahead.
What then, in relationships, should we be demanding about? What are the deep, potentially fatal threats to mutual existence that we must strive never to compromise over? The things we have to make an intelligent fuss about concern our core emotional requirements. Although these present in infinitely varied individual versions, they broadly give rise to our five fundamental demands.
Our requests to our lovers might sound like this:
1. I need you to accept (more often and more readily) the possibility that you might be at fault, without this feeling like the end of the world to you. You have to allow that I can have a legitimate criticism and still love you. I need you to be less defensive.
2. I need you to own up to what you are embarrassed or awkward about in yourself. I need you to know how to access the younger parts of yourself without terror. I need you to be able to be vulnerable around me.
3. I need you to respond warmly, gently and compassionately to the fragile parts of who I am, and to listen to and understand my sorrows. We need a union of mutual tenderness.
4. I need you to have a complex, nuanced picture of me, to understand the emotional burdens I’m carrying – even though I wish I weren’t – from the past. You have to see me with something like the generosity associated with therapy.
5. I need you regularly to air your disappointments and irritations with me – and for me to do the same with you – so that the currents of affection between us can remain warm and our capacity for admiration intense.
When we’re not getting what we need around these foundational themes, we have every right to notice, escalate and explain our requirements. If the other tries to brush us off, we would be wise to keep pushing. If they never engage, we should accept that we are on a path to untenable difficulties.
There are several entirely understandable – but not irremovable – obstacles in the way of becoming constructively demanding about our needs. One is that we often fail to swim sufficiently far upstream to reach the problems we are trying to target.
We don’t carefully search out the underlying issue that is powering our disappointment and stick instead to its surface triggers. We might, for example, get immensely worked up that a partner arrives for lunch at a restaurant nine minutes late, and we might then berate them at length for their tardiness. However, what we could in essence be trying to complain about – if only we could realise it – is something more complicated and prior to the issue in our sights: a feeling that our lover is not emotionally trustworthy, that despite their charm they are somehow flighty and unresolved.
Yet this real explanation for our mood and our fear might elude us. We might stick to levelling our complaint at a practical issue as opposed to picking up on the psychological trait that animates it. We risk coming across as unfairly and oddly worried about timekeeping, tidiness or spelling when, in reality, our worries are motivated by a more poignant, global and legitimate fear about the other’s emotional capacities.
We also stumble when an insecurity about our right to make a demand renders us alternately too quiet and then overly angry. We say nothing for too long and then give way to a pent up expression of frustration and bitterness that, in its wild intensity, is guaranteed not to win us the careful attention of the partner that we were seeking.
A patient explanation of why we need them to understand a piece of our past and grow less guarded in their description of their family can disappear because of a snap decision to call them a cock and slam the door. We may want to say certain things very badly – and yet we have to learn how to explain them to our partner as if we didn’t especially.
Our childhoods may not have helped us in this regard. They may have chiefly introduced us to outbursts, entitled indignation, brutal put-downs and wild accusations. We may seldom have seen a mature version of being demanding in action: the judged lead-up, the calm but clear tone, the broad atmosphere of appreciation, the assumption that misunderstandings can – with time and goodwill – be resolved and the sure faith that the other is not a monster if they have let us down. We may have failed to pick up on the distinction between assertion and aggression – the latter motivated by a desire to hurt the partner, the former by a hope of educating them.
All this being said, we shouldn’t neglect the risks associated with being naively hopeful too early on that we must have landed on the right candidate. We may be so frightened that we have not met “the one” that we neglect to explore whether or not we have actually done so.
We have to be substantially at peace with the idea of being single for many years in order to ride out the ups and downs of dating life. The horror of needing to restart the search can bend our minds unwisely towards the wrong kind of compromise and acceptance. We should be wary of dropping our demands too lightly: the consequences of an unsuitable candidate make themselves felt over long and very lonely years.
The character trait that began as a minor source of irritation will, compounded over time, acquire the power to wreck our lives – like a proverbial pebble in a shoe that, when we walk with it around the house merely scratches our heel, but over the course of a ten-mile marathon can shred our foot to a pulp.
We certainly don’t need anyone to be perfect, but we should learn to run away very early from those who cannot listen to feedback, who cannot be tender, who have no sure grasp of their or our psychological histories and who have no interest in the work of rupture and repair. To insist on these points isn’t to be fussy; it’s to be rightfully aware of the terrifying consequences
of emotional misalignment.
This is an edited extract from The Secrets of Successful Relationships by The School of Life.
The School of Life is a global organisation that aims to help people lead more fulfilled lives through useful resources and tools
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