Relationships
What’s the Whole Point of Your Relationship, Anyways?
The goal of a relationship should be to live together…
One of the things that used to drive me crazy about my old relationships was the feeling of stagnation. It’s a sign and symbol of the death of a relationship in progress. The slow, aching death that doesn’t just strike suddenly. Sometimes, the opposite is worse — you slowly drift apart, going through the motions until one day you wake up and realize how deeply unhappy you are.
I’ll never forget one relationship I was in with a person I cared about very much. I was merely twenty-one when the relationship began, full of hope and full of naivety. I thought I knew better than anyone else in the world. I landed my dream relationship with an incredible woman. She was smart, funny, stunning, beautiful, and responsible. I respected her.
But as the years went on, we slowly drifted apart. I was an insecure young guy who didn’t take things seriously when it suited my ego. It’s an ugly trait that I see everywhere now that I’ve grown and learned better.
As time went on, it began to feel like my relationship didn’t have a point. There was no purpose. And in retrospect, I now see that the purpose I thought relationships were supposed to have was hedonistic. I thought the whole point was to settle down and enjoy yourself with someone you loved and cared about.
I stupidly believed that everything would be rosy once that happened.
Hint: it wasn’t.
In fact, it was the opposite of rosy. I grew tired and restless. I wanted more. I started noticing other women wherever I went, but I felt conflicted about this. I started taking her for granted and spending more time with my friends than my girlfriend.
She was always going to be there, right?
Wrong.
I would go out with friends and drink until the early morning hours. Having fun was my number one priority, like most young Americans. I was flagrantly, painfully irresponsible.
Looking back, I can only ask myself, “What was the point of it all?”
I think this is an important question that we should all be asking ourselves. And it’s a question that virtually nobody I know asks themselves. We sometimes begin to just float along the course of life with someone attached to us and we forget our main purpose.
Did you know your relationship has a purpose? Well, if not, I’m here to inform you, it does. Your relationship has a purpose whether you’ve acknowledged it or not.
Whether you’ve made a conscious choice of what your purpose was or not, you have a purpose for what you’re doing with your significant other(s).
It may have been something you adopted from the culture, as I did. I just assumed what I’d been told my entire life growing up was true, that the purpose of life was to “be young, have fun, and enjoy yourself.”
This is almost the American motto of irresponsibility. And I lived it unwaveringly.
But this isn’t good enough for a relationship. And I have a long chain of failed relationships to prove it.
Nowadays, I believe that the purpose of a relationship is to live together.
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes marriages unhappy.”
This quote from the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is as true today as it was in the 1880s when it was written.
Most people approach their relationships as if they should just simply be, with no particular goal in mind, and requiring no particular action to make them the rich, fulfilling, and rewarding experiences they can and should be.
And, when it comes to setting a goal for what our relationship is supposed to represent, living together is one of the best and most all-encompassing goals that any composition of people should strive for.
After all, what is a commitment in our relationships if we’re not committing to living out our lives with another in a purposeful way?
I don’t mean that we should physically live together, in a house (though this is an option), I mean that we should actually view our relationship as a medium through which we may live our best lives, and craft it so that it’s something that can foster and nurture the expression of our real selves and the outcomes of our lives in preferable ways on a daily basis. Our partners should be the persons there most to help us in fulfilling our dreams and should be excited to walk with us through the challenges of life and live out those dreams with us.
So what is your relationship goal? What has it been for the last, say, 6 months?
I’ve learned through the years that for me, it’s best to wake up each day and ask myself:
How am I actually going to live with my partner? How are we going to facilitate leading good lives with one another, experiencing the world together and sharing that experience with one another, as well as constantly getting in touch with one another on the deepest levels, finding out what new and different information our partner possesses about life itself.
I think a lot of people view relationships as an end-game, where they can just stop living, stop striving, stop becoming — but the reality is, that’s when our lives are just beginning to be lived to their fullest if we’re doing it right.
We should get out and do all the things we’ve wanted to do as a kid that we weren’t able to do yet, we should take to the park and enjoy the scenery together, we should paint an oil painting, or go to a museum together; I’m always amazed at how many people view dating like this:
- Be single and lonely
- Seek out someone to commit to and keep
- Go out and about, actually, live for a couple of months
- Settle down, never have a want to go out again
- End up right where they were single and alone, only this time dragging someone else down into their misery
I’m always amazed at how content most people are with their discontent, a discontent which is easily remediable with a little bit of initiative, by going out and hitting up the local fair that’s in town, rather than spending another weekend at home watching television. The sad reality is, that most people are their own worst enemies. And even more sadly, they often bring their partner down with them.
I believe that people should do what makes them happy, but if what their doing is making them unhappy, they should probably take it upon themselves to create a life worth living.
In life, one commits one’s self and draws one’s own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
The 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre highlights an important concept, here, that a life of fulfillment isn’t possible without creating it ourselves, and we can’t rely on others to create it for us. He’s entirely right on this being the source of discontent for most people, as he says elsewhere:
“One can will nothing unless one has first understood that they must count on no one but themselves; that they are alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of their infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one they set themselves, with no other destiny than the one they forge for themselves on this earth.”
This is what a successful relationship is, two paths of destiny forged by each individual person involved which traverse together, which enjoy a considerable amount of overlap, enough that they may respectively create their lives while empowered by a force that’s greater than they themselves could alone achieve.
So yes, our goals should be to actually live with our partners, not slowly rot away watching time pass while we’re consumed with a sense of gnawing anguish — let us get out and live, and live greatly.
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