I’m taking a psychology class at SFU called “Close Relationships”, which as you can infer from the title, is all about your most valued intimate relationships, generally focused on your romantic relationships.
I read an interesting article this evening called “We always hurt the ones we love”. It is a research based paper, and while obviously cannot be proven as 100% fact, has a strong sense of truth and reliability to it, however much we may not want to admit it.
The main premise of the paper was based around an idea, that if we all think about it, we can probably most agree. They studied hundreds of peoples interactions, with strangers, and with their spouses, in casual conversation and in problem-solving tasks. Surprisingly (or perhaps not at all) people’s treatment of strangers was far more pleasant and polite than in their dealings with their spouses. They were more likely to criticize their spouse, and to speak to them more sarcastically and caustic. They were more likely to complain about things directly to their partner, such as a bad meal, or bad breath, which were things that they wouldn’t dare mention to someone they didn’t know very well.
Most people take it as a given to be polite to strangers (however ,I definitely know many exceptions to this rule, especially given the fact that I am in the service industry, and spent 3.5 years serving in Yaletown!), but in general, it is something most people abide by, and how they expect to be treated themselves.
So what makes us so quick to be harsh and even downright mean to the people that we supposedly love, care for, and even fear abandonment from? I find this a strange concept that most people ignore, even myself. If we are supposed to be polite to people we don’t know, but we are creatures that need intimacy and relationships, what on earth causes us to be so damaging to the very thing that we crave, and need?
One of the sources of this aversive behaviour is that over time, as the relationship grows, and trust begins to build, people begin to self-disclose. Self-disclosure is an amazing way to develop and nurture a relationship, and give you those warm fuzzies that you so desperately desire. But it is also a way to build a unique and deadly arsenal of weapons that are designed to directly target your partners individual weaknesses, intentionally or not.
As you “let people in”, you reveal secrets, and thoughts that few other people know about you. This opens you up to painful intrusions of these secrets at any given time, based on the emotions, and perhaps, irritations, of your romantic partner.
Now this is not to say I believe that you shouldn’t share things with your partner; this is in fact one of the most wonderful things about a close relationship, one in which the rewards often far outweigh the costs. But it can be a double-edged sword, and there is not a lot you can do about it. Hopefully you have found a partner who doesn’t like to dip in to their secret stash of personalized weaponry all too often. I know that I have, and I am lucky, but I myself suffer from the hoarding of weapons in my ever growing task force, however unknowingly (and unwillingly) I may do it.
Another source of disappointment is the fact that things that once attracted you to your partner, can after a time, be the exact thing that deters you from them. For instance, an attentive and care-giving partner can suddenly seem possessive and controlling, and a care-free, fun loving partner, can then seem irresponsible and unwilling to “grow up”. As the relationship changes and grows, we continue to discover things about our partner, and not all of it is going to live up to our expectations.
Similar to above, the loss of illusion also creates unwelcome discoveries in our close relationships. The term “love is blind” is quite true, in the sense that at the beginning of a relationship, when everything is going swimmingly, we often tend to overlook minor indiscretions and irritations, as we are still wearing the “rose coloured glasses”. After this wears off, the same things that were small problems in the beginning that we overlooked, 2 years down the line become the core problems of the relationship.
The most common factor that is talked about in most women’s (and men’s) magazines, and advice columns, is losing that “magic”, that “spark” that you used to have. To put it bluntly, the novelty has worn off. An interesting study of novelty on rats has helped to confirm my suspicions about men, and because I am a woman I am of course biased 
I will lay it out here quickly for you.
“When a male rat is paired with a receptive female, he will copulate repeatedly until he seems to be sexually exhausted and is uninterested in further mating; however, if the original partner is replaced with a new female in estrus, his interest and energy are renewed…The generalizability of this effect to humans is uncertain, but it’s not unlikely.”
LADIES, take note. Take from this what you will! Little segway here, back to the main point…
Another age old complaint, mostly by women I suspect, is that once the partner has “won”, by securing the relationship, the partner no longer makes an effort, or as much of an effort, now that they have made the conquest. This one should be pretty self explanatory. However I will include another quote from this article that I liked particularly.
“…it is a curious irony of intimacy that we are typically more concerned with impressing those who do not know us well than we are with impressing those who already like us.”
So far in this post, I have been occasionally paraphrasing this article, and giving a lot of my own thoughts and opinions; however this next paragraph I take directly from the article as it struck a chord with me as something else that we all sort of inherently “know” but don’t actually seem to realize.
“In fact, people are generally lazy social animals. Much of their social behaviour is rather mindless, they constantly take shortcuts in reasoning and fail to think things through, and they reduce effort on group tasks when they can get away with it. Our default strategy is to coast when we can. This means that, everything else being equal, the active, effortful things that people do to pleasure their partners and maintain their relationships are likely to diminish over time.”
Keep in mind that I am not being cynical here, I am just pondering over something that I believe to be quite commonly true; people are just not nice to each other. I’m not saying that there aren’t happy marriages, or relationships out there, of course there are, but with the divorce rate in North America at 50% and rising, this issue is something that I think a lot about.
People in my age group (I feel) are in this strange transitional age where marriage is no longer a major pressure, a lot of us have divorced parents, and we have a lot more freedom than ever to choose who we want to be with and/or marry. However I still notice this lust for it, as a western society. The whole “white wedding” thing, perhaps more suppressed as a rebellious late 1990′s teenager, seems to come back in our late twenties, as we feel that our individual relationships are “different” than everyone else’s, and not as likely to end up in divorce, as is so common of late.
On top of all this, western societies, and even then only recently (the last two hundred years at most really) are the only societies that really believe in marrying for love. Marriage was traditionally based on an alliance between families, what would be best for a family socially, politically, and economically. Love was considered a folly, something that was generally “unrequited”, and love for the family was considered the most important thing.
It’s equally as easy to come up with a number of reasons why arranged marriages aren’t good, or happy ones, but there may not actually be any more truth to that than marrying for love has. So I’m stuck. Confused. Where do we go from here? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…
I personally would like to believe that these generations around me are “safer” than others, that we have learnt lessons from watching so many of our parents be unhappy and get divorced, sometimes more than once. I would like to believe that we are experimenting more, therefore really getting to know what we want in a partner, and perhaps being more true to ourselves when we choose one. I would like to believe that because we are getting married traditionally later (late twenties, early thirties), that these marriages will last.
But who am I to say that every generation didn’t go through some change in the traditional marriage processes and feel the same invincibility to common marriage woes? Research also shows that most people acknowledge the divorce rate, but feel that they are unlikely to end up divorced despite the numbers. Interesting. Like they say…love is blind.
Nicki Minaj is rad.
