Accepting The True Reason We Want Relationships Will Set You Free
A relationship is only as successful as the need at the heart of it — knowing that need is the key to a successful relationship
Why do you want a relationship, and more importantly, what do you want from it? These are the profound questions of our age and are the most important questions to ask if you want to have a successful relationship.
This point was really hit home to me a couple of weeks ago. I was at a conference focused on the difficulties of modern relationships — through my work as a therapist I often attend conferences like this. Some are interesting, some are bores.
This one was the latter, however, after one of the speakers finally finished, I found myself in conversation with the person I was sitting next to.
Her name was Jessica and like me, she worked as a therapist and had got into that line of work later in life. She even got into it for the same reasons — in desperation to understand herself, people and the world.
As we talked, what was amazing was just how much we had had a similar trajectory when it came to self-destructive relationship behaviours and working to overcome them. What was also brilliant was how she came to identify the real reasons why her relationships kept failing, and the monumental part she was playing in it.
With this in mind, I wanted to share her story, because I think it’s a brilliant example of an easy trope that many of us can get trapped into these days of chasing the wrong thing in a relationship.
A little bit of background
Jessica told me that she had had three failed heterosexual relationships and two failed same-sex relationships. They all ended for the same reason, she complained none of her partners contributed enough around the house and felt that they didn’t contribute enough anywhere else either.
She even told me she started dating women because she was so angry at men for not playing their part, she started looking for solace in women and even though she at first thought she found it, she ended up with the same problems.
In terms of what those problems were, she felt that there was an imbalance, and she blamed those imbalances and thus her partners for the ends of her relationships. She constantly felt her partners always ended up taking liberties with her when she got into a relationship with them.
She said, “It was like the relationship was amazing at first, but then we move in together and everything falls apart because I always end up doing everything.”
However, she told me that it was only once her son reached adulthood that she realised that the problem had never per se been her partners, it had more been her. I should add at this point, most of the time when it seems like someone is taking liberties, they probably are. But not always, that’s important to acknowledge when self-reflecting — it also is one of the most difficult mental battles we go through i.e. trying to work out whether they are or not.
Returning to the story, Jessica explained to me that she was — and in a way still is — one of those mothers who likes to do everything for her son, the cleaning, the washing, literally everything she can. She takes great joy in it and fair play to her for that.
Many mothers are like this, my partner’s mother is still like this and he’s now in his 50s. I hope I won’t be quite so much so for my son, but I worry that I will be which is why I give my partner’s mother a lot of leeway. Besides that, who’s going to complain at an extra hand to help around the house — not my son, that’s for sure.
Anyway, Jessica told me that once her son hit his teens, she used to always be on his back about chipping in more, but she would always do everything for him anyway. Her reasoning she told me was that he never got around to it, and she wasn’t going to wait around for “eternity” for him to do so.
I was preaching to the heavens when she said that because that’s exactly the battle I go through with my teenage son. He always tells me that he would have done it, but by the time he gets round to it’s already done. I sometimes don’t blame him for waiting, because I always do it in the end if he does, which perhaps is on me.
Though I always say that once he is 18, things will change. Jessica told me that she thought the same with her son, she said she became adamant the moment he turned 18, he was going to start helping out more around the house.
However, once he turned 18, the same pattern continued, even when he did do a household chore, she kept deciding he had not done a good enough job and so would always redo it. This continued even when he moved out, she would still do his washing, clean his house — everything.
She treated him like he was helpless — incapable of surviving without her. She knew he was not, but she treated him as if he was anyhow. Once he got married though, she was not able to help out as much and shortly after he got married, she broke up with her partner, who she felt had been taking liberties by not helping out around the house.
It was at this point that she decided to go to therapy and through her sessions with her therapist, it dawned on her who was at fault in all of her relationships, not her partners, but her.
The reason, she had treated her partners the same way she had her son — as if they were helpless. Even if they did something, she would do it again anyway — not that they ever got the chance because the odds were she would have already done it.
That’s why they never did anything around the house — because she never let them. She spoke to a couple of her ex-partners, and one said that they had actually been afraid to even load the dishwashing machine for fear that they would do it wrong.
Another said that they had been afraid to do the vacuuming in case they did it the wrong way — Jessica liked the vacuuming done in a certain way, so that in her words the carpet didn’t get messed up.
Her son vouched for each of these factors and told his mother a hell of a lot more as well, most tellingly, he told her that she told him off more for helping out than for not helping out.
People cannot do things for you unless you firstly let them, and secondly, accept the way they do them for you
I always complain about my son for not doing things around the house, I tell him that it is not a woman’s job, and then when he doesn’t do it immediately, inevitably I do it and so what do I teach him? That I will shout and say it’s not my job, and then I will do it.
At least that’s what most people will say I’m saying, but it’s not. By doing what I’m doing what I’m saying is, that I want to do these things for him but for some reason I want to make him think that I don’t.
That’s the underlying message I sell. The crazy thing is, that’s actually the truth and that’s on me and it’s something I plan to work on. What I also plan to work on is not telling him off for actually having done the things I asked him to, because I don’t think he has done them in the way I wanted them done.
After all, how can I ask a person to do something, punish them for doing it, and then not expect them to become tentative about doing that thing again in future? Especially if I also proved that if they don’t do it, I will do it anyway?
I learned this from Jessica, because she told me that that was what she felt she was selling to her partners and her son. That it was better to let her shout at them for not doing it than to actually do it.
She told me that once she had acknowledged that she was doing this, shouting at people for not having done things she would simply do again even if they did them, she concluded that perhaps she was just a control freak and a bit of a clean freak and wondered whether she had OCD, and that was why she couldn’t let people in her life do things themselves around the house.
However, with the help of her therapist, she came to a rather startling conclusion. It was none of the latter. She told me that she realised doing all these things for the people she loved made her feel needed, and so she actually liked doing it. Except there was a problem, she wanted something from doing it that she wasn’t getting. Something more than gratitude.
When her son was younger, she got that something in abundance but when he got older it no longer was there, and the reason she desperately couldn’t stop wanting to do everything for him was that she was desperately trying to find that something again.
In terms of what that something was, to feel truly needed.
The desire to feel truly needed is unbelievably strong in all of us and makes us act in weird and strange ways
We all instinctually want to feel needed because if we are needed it boosts our survival chances i.e. if people need us for survival purposes, they are less likely to abandon us.
So, instinctually we do — at least on some levels — want people to be dependent upon us for their survival because that makes us feel needed, and when we feel needed we feel more secure.
Historically, one of the ways women would make a man dependent on them would be by giving them children and doing everything around the house. On the flipside, one of the ways men would make women dependent upon them was through finances i.e. providing women with the resources needed to raise the children and keep the house.
This setup would create a world of equal dependency i.e. both parties would be equally dependent upon the other for survival. So, this setup — at least in a world with a high child mortality rate — would boost the survival chances of both.
However, we no longer need each other for survival purposes because we have society. Society sustains us and as long as we keep working for society i.e. earning money, society will keep us alive and protect us. That means we never need romantic partners — or anyone for that matter — for survival per se.
Jessica told me that she had concluded that this was her problem. She was angry at her partners not because she was doing everything for them around the house, which she actually wanted to do because she likes looking after people that way — each to their own — she was angry because she was doing everything for them around the house, and yet she wasn’t getting what she deep down wanted. The knowledge that they couldn’t survive without her i.e. their dependence on her.
This was why she was starting to feel more frustrated and afraid as her son got older; that was why she was fighting so hard to desperately hold on by keeping doing everything for him, because she was losing this feeling. That he couldn’t survive without her.
Final words
It’s very easy to forget that modern relationships are nothing like relationships from the past. Not in the case that the man can’t be the breadwinner and the woman can’t be the housewife, that can work fine, same as the reverse can and everything in between. But in the sense that no modern relationship will ever have that feeling that you can’t survive without each other, because you always will be able to. Society has seen to that.
That means we must accept that relationships are no longer about mutual survival but instead about mutual improvement. That means we need relationships just as much, but for different reasons.
It can be hard to accept that simply because for our entire history as a species we have needed each other on an individual basis, especially romantically, for survival. But now we don’t, we need each other for different reasons.
Acknowledging that is one of the keys in my view to having a happy modern relationship. This is why asking yourself what you want from a relationship is so important, you have to make certain that what you want is not a dependent, but an equal.
The reason, in this world we live in, if you’re looking for someone who could not survive without you, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.
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