Kimberly Kael, a regular poster to our forums, wrote this recently & I thought it really stood repeating:
Here’s a question that has been bothering me lately and that I’ve been trying to put into words: does the social emphasis on happily ever after as the canonical goal for relationships do more harm than good?
Sometimes the notion of true love feels like the platonic ideals of male and female – it serves as an interesting point of reference but taken too seriously it becomes a source of frustration because none of us can really live up to the implied expectations. That’s not to say there isn’t merit in aspiring to a durable relationship. I’m sure it’s been reinforced in many ways. There are relationships that look perfect and effortless from the outside. There are times in our lives when we’ve had that kind of connection and we want to hang onto it forever.
Of course there are also good economic and emotional reasons to encourage stability by giving people an incentive not to split at the first sign of trouble. Indeed, I’ve never been in a rewarding relationship that didn’t involve working through rough spots. On the other hand, how many people fall into the trap of expecting love to be free of these kinds of challenges? I guess that’s a notion most of us take with a grain of salt by the time we get a little experience in balancing the needs of a partnership.
What’s more insidious is that society encourages us to make a lot of explicit or implied promises about the distant future that we simply may not be able to keep without making ourselves and everyone around us miserable. That sets unrealistic expectations for everyone involved, which evolve into a sense of entitlement: “Where’s my happily ever after?” It seems fundamentally implausible that so many relationships end in divorce and yet when people wind up there it seems to come as a complete surprise. They have no backup plan and only an incomplete set of life skills beyond those specialized for the role they played in the relationship.
At the root of it all is that unlike the male/female dichotomy there’s no spectrum implied by a single point. Where are the other archetypal relationships? Okay, so there’s the affair. The one-night stand. But is there anything else that doesn’t have a strong negative connotation?
I’ve personally been talking to an old friend about this idea a lot as she’s been unhappy recently & wondering if the source of her frustration was her relationship or the compromises it implies. That is, she wasn’t necessarily unhappy with her partner himself, but unhappy at the kind of compromises she’s made due to being in a relationship at all, with anyone. Her “pattern” – if she has one – is one of serial monogamy: relationships of several years that end when the compromise:satifaction ratio starts to fall short.
As someone who once was poly – although initially somewhat unwillingly & eventually quite happily – I’m not sure why we persist in believing that one person can be all that we need emotionally, sexually, romantically. We often expect someone (1) we have good sex with, (2) get all tingly around, (3) whose conversation & company we enjoy, and (4) with whom we can build a life, a home, a family. It’s kind of a lot, no? I remember many years ago, before meeting Betty, at feeling astonished I could manage even two of those with the same person in a short period of time — but over a lifetime? In speaking with more & more poly people, and perusing Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up
, the way that people “use” poly in their lives seems endlessly variable & creative. Still, though, it generally means to people “having sex with whoever you want.” Which I know, poly folks, is not what it means at all – but that’s still the popular perception.
I know, for someone like me, no one really bats an eyebrow if I mention missing having a male husband. Betty & everyone else knows I intended to be in a relationship with a man. So while Betty & I are still happy as two peas in a pod, there are days when what I’ve lost, and what I miss, is pretty acute. I don’t suspect I will ever stop missing having a male husband, even if the missing grows less acute and less chronic over time. As someone who has always had strong emotional relationships with men – the adoptive “older brothers” I talked about in She’s Not the Man – I miss some kind of masculine energy in my life (and not just sexually, you big perverts). This stuff is gendered because I’m the partner of a person who transitioned from within our marriage, but it strikes me that there are about a million things that a person might miss, or need, over time.
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