Relationships: How to make them last.

by Patrick Quanten MD

The alarming rate at which relationships break up in this culture is worrying mainly because it tells us something about the way people interact with each other and with themselves. This may sound a bit strange, but if we start off with two people who are madly in love, who would do anything for each other, why does there come a time when this is no longer true, or even worse when they start hating each other. The usual scenario is to blame the other. A statement often heard under those circumstances is "You are not the man/woman I married", implicating that, although time has moved on and lots of things have changed, there has been an expectation that the people involved should not have changed.

It seems to me that this is a widespread belief, expressed or suppressed. It paints a picture of life as static and non-changeable, but that, as we all know, is not true. Yet, when it comes to personal involvement it is a much used excuse. When it isn't used as an explanation for the break-up, we seem to accept that people have just grown in different directions, have grown apart, and it is therefore natural for them to dislike each other. Again, to me that seems a strange concept. Here we have two people who have entwined their lives together, are planning their lives together, are living their lives together and yet are not together. How did that happen?

At every stage of our lives we all have a blueprint of who we are. It is this blueprint that determines how we want to live, what we do and what our plans are. There are basically three categories within this framework that holds the fundamental information about us, at any given time. These are desires, routines and hates; in other words, the whole scale from love projection to I don't care to hate projection.

Our desires are the things we feel are a must in our lives. These are the must-have, must-do things that are the driving force behind each life. It is our desire that finds us a mate, one that can help us making desires and wishes come true. In order to make our desires, which are abstract concepts like "happiness, peace, safety, security", a real force in our lives, we project them onto "things" that for us represent the concepts in the best possible way. So we identify a financially rewarding job with security, for instance; or a kiss with peace; or a hug with safety. For most of us, from then on we seem to focus our efforts on pursuing the object rather than the abstract concept itself. The object is no longer a representation of the desire, it actually becomes the desire. At this point the concept is no longer an idea floating around, it has now become fixed, as it is a well-defined object. In time this will remain the same object, and the belief that this object is the desire means that we no longer see it as a stepping stone towards achieving the desire, but as the ultimate goal itself. Once the object has been obtained, the desire should now be fulfilled, for ever. Unchangeable. We have a result. In reality, of course, this is not the case. Almost invariably we find that once the objective has been achieved, it is soon realised that the object itself does not have the same value as the original desire. There may be disappointment and dissatisfaction, but more importantly, who is to blame. Oh yes, when something goes wrong in life, there must be blame attached somewhere, especially as we were led to believe that once the object of our desire had been acquired the desire itself would be satisfied. And interestingly, it very seldom is us who can be blamed, as we did everything that was required of us to get us where we wanted to go, but when we got there the reward was very disappointing. Why? If we never come close to getting the desired thing, we very often ask the same question as it remains hard to believe that all that effort has resulted in nothing. The reason for this must surely be that someone or something else has been successfully working against you. Why?

Our hates are the things in life we feel we must at all cost avoid. These are the things we move heaven and earth for to ensure they stay away from us. Again, they are basic concepts such as "illness, death, poverty, social outcasting" that we project onto things and situations that we identify as the concept itself. When our desires are the engines that drive us forward in life, the hates are the things we have allergic reactions to, in the sense that we panic and overreact if we even come near them or smell them around the corner. When they do happen in spite of all our efforts, there must surely be someone or something to blame for this dreadful disaster. It can never have been my fault as I did everything humanly possible to avoid it. So why didn't someone else do more to prevent this tragedy?

The middle road is taken up by all the things we don't care passionately about. Once again, we look at the concepts first, and these include ideas such as "equality, unity, compassion, truth". When these concepts are attached to objects they can either be seen as beneficially and benevolent, or as damaging and disturbing, depending on the object itself. A popular phrase used in this scenario is "But that is different", meaning that it is a different matter whether the principles of the concept is applied to oneself or to someone else. So, although we may feel passionate about these middle of the scale concepts, they don't always stay in the desire or the hate category; they switch whenever appropriate. Other aspects we may not have any strong attachments to at all, such as "religious beliefs or personal image". This category weighs in lightly on the balance scale of our personal life. Although it makes up the bulk of our lives and provides us with a stable platform, it does not drive us on like the desires do and it does not push us away from the pitfalls of life like the hates do. Nevertheless it is essential in making up the complete person you are and it is also the pool from which new desires and hates spring to mind, gain strength and prominence.

Now then, what has all of that to do with relationships?

It is the making up of these lists that essentially allows you to choose your partner. Someone who hates what you desire is not a likely candidate. The closer your list matches the prospective partner the easier the match and the stronger the bond. Simple enough, and yet the statistics show that we are getting it increasingly more wrong. Why?

The answer lies in untruthfulness. No, I didn't say "lying", I said and meant "untruthfulness". The difference is that lying is a conscious act, while untruthfulness is done subconsciously; or in other words, if you don't know you are being untruthful you are not lying, you are telling the truth as far as you know it. This is an important concept both here and in every day life. Ignorance may not be an excuse for breaking the law, unless you are a lawyer or a barrister, but it is a perfectly good reason for not knowing that you are not living in truth. For example, if you didn't know that the money you gave to charity was used to buy weapons to terrorise the very people you were intending to help, then you have not knowingly contributed to warfare and you have no reason to change your belief about aid organisations. It's the same in all aspects of life: if you didn't know that you can't catch an infection from somebody else, you can't blame yourself for incriminating someone.

The reason why so many relationships end up on the scrapheap is untruthfulness. People are not being truthful with themselves and others. If they are lying than they will know why their relationship has failed, so we don't have to elaborate on that. For all the others, for whom the reasons for their relationship failures are a mystery, start looking for untruthfulness.

The first requirement for a successful and long-lasting relationship is know thyself. Ha, that's easy, because we all know ourselves very well. No problem there then. Well, hold on for a moment, let's examine this a bit more in detail.

Truthfulness and self-knowledge put together means that we need to know who we are and what we want and that we need to be truthful about it. What we are and what we want is largely determined by the society we live in and the education we have received. The things in our lives that we perceive as "right" or "wrong" are shaped in that way by what we have learned as we were growing up. However, knowing that all of that is really "you" is a difficult and complex task. How can you be sure that all your value judgements and beliefs are not just copied from elsewhere, without them having been tested properly by you personally.

What we know initially comes from what we are told, the teachings from parents, schools and churches, mainly. We take the taught concepts on board as if they were our own and they will serve us as a template, a guidebook, throughout life. Now, all throughout that life we experience things that will challenge those concepts and it is through the personal experience that the learned concepts, the regurgitated principles and rules, will become "real" to us. Once we have experienced something the theoretical discussion becomes a distant memory and is replaced by the "knowledge" of experience. From here on, we can truly say that we know something. This of course also means that a lot of what we presume to be "us" is still unchallenged and unproven; it is simply a perceived part of us. So, we may see ourselves as a stereotypical father or mother, but we don't actually know that that is what we really are, until we are confronted with what it entails and we experience a like or dislike for the situation. Almost everything we do at the start of our adult lives is predetermined by the pictures and images that we have adored for so long. All the things we believe to be "us" are now ready to be challenged and evaluated as a true part of us or not. Only as we move through our lives and time passes, we have the opportunity of finding out more and more about who we really are and what we really want or need. Therefore, at any stage in our lives there are large areas of our personality that are still in darkness, still unexplored, depending on the willingness and bravery of the individual to face up to his/her personal challenges. To know one is to constantly change the image one has of the "self".

So, that already identifies one problem about the truthfulness in relationships: we don't actually know what the truth is! The closest one can come to truthfulness under these circumstances is to remain as open and honest as one possibly can. To do this one has to acknowledge that the true self is unknown and the discovery of the knowledge about the self is an ongoing project. The best one can hope for is to be prepared to accept a different piece of the puzzle whenever it is found. Be prepared to concede that new bits of who you are are being discovered all the time and that it would be foolish to try and squeeze them into old established frameworks that pretend to circumscribe the self; rather, decide to widen the frame and to accept new information about yourself as a truly beautiful gift, even when it totally disrupts the way you have organised your life so far.

A second problem arises right here. When we do recognise the new bits about ourselves, what do we do with them? If they tell a different story, if they don't fit into who we are supposed to be, if they show us we need different things than the ones we are pursuing, then we have a problem. Do we simply change our lives? Do we throw away everything we have worked for and believed in for so long? And what for? How do we know that this newfangled "me" is more real than the old one? Am I not kidding myself? Well, that is up to you to find out, but ones you have been truthful to yourself and you know it really is you, then you have the problem of being truthful to others.

Can we tell the truth? Can we confide in others that our lives really need a dramatic change if we are to find ourselves and to find happiness? Is it fair to hurt others when we need to tell them that their efforts are no longer wanted, no longer appreciated? I think that there are several options and it is important to study them carefully and to make a positive decision on each occasion and each individual for him/herself. No one can give you the right answer; others can only give you their answer and most of the time it is not even one backed up by experience. What are the options?

• Weighing up how much you want to move on on your own road and how much others want you to take a different direction, you may decide you cannot stand the pain of disappointing others. At this point it is important that you make a positive and conscious decision to let the exploration of the self go and to dedicate your whole life in the service of someone else's beliefs. In order to be successful at this, one needs to lose oneself completely and discard all one's needs and wants and replace them with someone else's.
• If you feel that the only real way to live is to live with yourself first and foremost, then you seriously have to look at what is holding you back and preventing you from being true to yourself. In order to find happiness and the true self, one then needs to make the changes that are necessary to discard the old belief and to replace it with the new found truth. This may involve a dramatic change in the practicalities of one's life and may be met by a wall of non-comprehension or total misunderstanding. Here one can be true to the self, but one has to sacrifice someone else's needs and wants for your own.
• And then there is what I see most parents do in relation to their growing children. It is also possible to allow another person to grow, even if it challenges your own beliefs and throws shadows of doubt over your own life. Allowing the other person to change, to want different things, to need different things and to be a different person, without having to fully comply with one rigid set of values that are no longer serving him/her. Here it is no longer a matter of either or; it is a matter of integration and understanding. Here we tolerate difference as the seed of life. We allow others to be who they are and they allow us to be what we are. It frees us from the constraints of the social framework: it is both ok to live within the framework and it is ok to live outside it. Life becomes an individual experience and is tolerated and revered as such by all.

When two people intertwine their lives it does not have to be a choice which of the two lives they both are going to follow. Nor does it have to be a compromise that invariably will satisfy neither of them fully. It can be a tolerated relationship in which both personalities are allowed to search for their true self and to follow their own path. Social structures restrict these movements as it would make people more unpredictable in their behaviour and that burdens authorities. Government and authorities are meant to "run" our lives. Each individual life, in principle, has to fit into the whole of society. It has to have a place and a purpose in relation to the rest of society. Your job has to serve a goal that has something in common with the goals of society. Your part in procreation has to help support the community, the group, the nation, the religion, you are part of. Authorities set up frameworks and aim to perpetuate their own power and control. In order to establish this, one needs to ensure that as many of your subjects walk in the direction you guide them into; that they want and need the things you instruct them to need; that they depend for their needs as much as possible on you, as the authority, providing for them. In other words, individuality with its vast array of different wants and needs is your enemy number one. You need to keep them all in line as much as you possibly can because your survival as the authority depends on it. In order to help you achieve that, you invent and implement social rules that serve the community, not the individual. The more you can cage the individual's development and control the individual's behaviour the more power you have gained.

But just as parents experience their teenage children challenging their own beliefs and values, an individual finding his/her true self challenges the established social values and rules. Just as the growing children find their own way of setting up a life for themselves, very often different from the template their parents are presenting them with, the individual finds the need to formulate his/her own rules and regulations about life. Just as most parents learn to accept their children's decisions, whether they agree with it or not, and learn to love their children in spite of them living lives built on values or beliefs so different from their own, one individual can learn to respect an other's changing beliefs and accept the need for change without putting his/her own needs above everything else. Just as parents accept that their children need to grow up, as an individual we need to accept that our partner also needs to be allowed to grow up. The growing process, the developing process, isn't finished when we become adults. In fact, the real journey only begins there.

Our relationships will be more satisfying and rewarding if we acknowledge that we all need to grow and develop. If we can then offer others the opportunity to do just that without making them pay a high price for the privilege, then we have a real chance to experience our relationships changing without breaking. In order to help the world to move towards a more realistic society where individuals are the centre of life, we need to start making elementary changes within ourselves.

We need to get to know ourselves a lot better.

We need to be honest about who we are and what we need. Honesty towards ourselves as well as towards others.

January 2005