Whether It's Best to Stay or Go

Sigmund Freud, famous for seeing symbols in everything, is thought to have quipped, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Relationships in particular trigger us to try to see meaning in things. We want to know: Why he did that? What was she thinking? What am I supposed to learn from this? Is there a bigger picture here? Was it all fate?

The first and most important thing to know about relationships is they are what they are. No matter what we learn from them, what they were meant to be, what we do or do not become because of them, a relationship is its own thing. It has its own suchness. It comes into existence when two human beings decide to interconnect physically and emotionally. Mentally is often possible while spiritually is mostly up for grabs. Relationships end when the two people stop being interconnected intimately. A relationship doesn't need to mean anything more than this. They can and often do, but it isn't necessary.

With that said, when a relationship has meaning, the meaning often comes from the reasons why we interconnect with someone. Those reasons are rarely as straight forward and clear cut as we would like them to be. Often a relationship, for good or ill, is like a truly masterful painting or sculpture. You can look at it one day and have a defining experience with it, but the next day the light will have changed, or you approach it from another angle and how it impacts you is completely different. With a great work of art or a healthy relationship you can have it in your life for decades and never cease to enjoy it or to be amazed when it reveals something new in itself and/or in you.

There are functional reasons why we enter into relationships. Having a partner helps in having and raising children, can be essential to getting through higher education, climbing the corporate ladder, building a business, making ends meet when times are tough, creating a safety net medically, and/or smoothing the way socially within community. 

There are also emotional reasons because we are social creatures who are designed to connect. We are meant to see and be seen, value and be valued, create something new which is more than the sum of our parts, and grow within a context of being interconnected with the other. Without allowing ourselves to be vulnerable we never experience how deep and expansive we are and what we are truly capable of. Nor would we discover this in others.

There is also a spiritual aspect as relationships might become a harmonious part of our spiritual path. However, they may also challenge us to acknowledge or commit to our spiritual path in the face of adversity or simply benign neglect.

Often a relationship has a mixture of all these things or develops some while discarding others along the way.

What all relationships have in common is they take work. It's a lovely romantic notion to think an individual who has lived an entire life before meeting you will be a perfect fit, have no flaws or misconceptions, will see everything the way you do, understand you completely at all times, and everything will be joyous forever, but that's all it is. Romance and a notion. In reality, two adults coming together is a bit like a 300 step recipe which needs 82 ingredients - or an experiment in the college chemistry lab. Things could and should go well, but there's a lot of room for error, you should expect there might be some do-over moments, and there is every possibility things could go "Boom!" Hopefully, if they do, it's a comedy sketch moment and not a trip to the ER.

So many times we get into the middle of things, mixing and measuring, burning our fingers, dropping things on the floor, and periodically bumping into each other which starts us asking questions about the meaning of it all. "It's painful, it's a mess, there's no end in sight, so what is the meaning of all this????!!!!" The problem is, we've skipped past the question we should be asking, which is "Should I keep going or should I throw all this out and regroup?"

This isn't too surprising as human beings are problem solvers and meaning making machines. Our big human brains have developed specifically to glean and make meaning from absolutely anything and everything around us in every moment. So, no matter what, if we want there to be meaning in something, especially relationships, even if the cigar really is just a cigar, we will find it.

What we aren't asking, often because we're pain avoidant and so don't want to find more problems than we already have on our plate, is whether or not the relationship is supporting us on our journey in life or if it's a slow-motion train wreck which has been in progress for a while. Put another way, we're like Olympic gymnasts already in the middle of a routine. It's not about if we can stick the landing, because there's a high likelihood we can. Instead we should be asking ourselves what consequences there would be if we do from our current position or is stopping now and climbing down to prevent injury a better option.

So how do you know whether you should keep going and see what you end up with after all the work or if you should throw it all out and walk away? Well, the truth is you should trust yourself. All too often we know the truth, but we don't want to admit we know.

In general, healthy relationships are relationships, which mean they take work. After the initial adjustment where two unique individuals come together and figure out how to interconnect, a rhythm forms, which can either be fun or like two porcupines mating (How do they do it? Very carefully). I think of this as like two feet walking. One is moving forward in their life whether this is personally or professionally or spiritually or all of it at once. As this is happening the other is not moving, but affected by and aware of the other foot moving. One of the two needs to be planted on the ground creating stability and balance while the other swings through the air. Then the front foot lands, starts to normalize all of this new newness and meanwhile the back foot is moving forward. Of course, they don't just come up to meet the front foot, they move past and into their own forward trajectory and so on and so on.

This is why one partner may get totally engrossed and enthused in something and the other doesn't until much later when the newness has worn off. Or it can seem as if one partner is headed in a completely different direction spiritually or professionally and then once the dust settles things seem to have all worked out and make sense as their partner unfolds a new aspect of themselves as well. Often you hear people say, "Well I wish we could have done all this at the same time," or "I wish I would have known it at the time." Yeah, but you can only move one foot at a time or it's not walking, it's jumping/skipping/falling.

Healthy relationships are a journey where all the walking, talking, and interacting can and often does leave each individual with a stretchy pain at times, which means they did good and they're each going to be better off in the long run.

Relationships which don't take any work often aren't really relationships. They might have been so at one time or another, but the actual relating stopped at some point. These connections have usually devolved into something purely functional. Shared finances, mutual support logistically, social standing and access are now what's left like a train still running down the tracks even though there are no longer any passengers. There's no harm done if both parties are still getting their needs met, but often one or both partners feel the lack of intimacy alongside stagnant connection and struggle with how to solve the problem.

These relationships can leave people with phantom pain or a gnawing emptiness. The question is do they do something quick to dull the pain temporarily or will they deal with the root of the issue?

Unhealthy relationships come in all varieties like a rancid salad bar which all of us have dipped into at one time or another. And like healthy relationships, the purposes we enter into them are often as multilayered and tapestried as the reasons we stay. The thing about unhealthy relationships is, while they meet some of our needs, at least at the beginning, they rarely meet all of them or even most. At the same time, they are doing us harm. We might be able to convince ourselves what we're experiencing is stretchy pain, but it's often clear to everyone including our core selves what's really happening is damage. We're not on a journey, we're in a train which is crumpling up all around us.

While our problem solving brains might logic us into ignoring the train wreck and try to label it as just a bump on the trip, while our cultural understanding of who we should be pushes us towards praying harder and looking for where we need to learn/do/be more, and our family structure continues to reinforce the message that this is all there is for us, it is who we are, and what we deserve... yet our core self knows the truth.

In the book The Gift of Fear Gavin De Becker points out how our senses, our intuition, and our true self knows when things are not right. The problem is not we don't or can't know, it's telling ourselves we don't know what we know. We want things to be different than they are. We want our experience of the now to be something it's not and to feel we have a level of control over things without needing to acknowledge the decisions and actions of others or how they are negatively impacting us.

We are pain avoidant, often to our detriment and that of those around us.

So, in the end, the question is not "What does this relationship mean?" The real question is "Should I stick the landing?" Once you've asked it, the challenge becomes knowing what you know. The path ahead unfolds from there.