Relationship Pain: How to Stop Shooting Yourself in the Foot
Falling in love is as natural as sleep. Staying in love is as natural as regular exercise and a healthy diet. We can eat and exercise healthfully, and we can love well in the short run, but over the long haul of everyday living together, we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot. Mistake # 1: The illusion of sameness The biggest mistake we make in love is assuming that our partners’ experience is the same as ours and that events and behaviors mean the same to them as they do to us. The illusion of sameness allows us to create some measure of safety in the face of the vulnerability that intimate connections evoke. To ward off feelings of inadequacy, we talk ourselves into pleasant delusions: “Our hearts beat as one.”“We’re soul mates.”“We’re so close that we complete each other’s sentences.”“She really believes in me.”“He really gets me.” The illusion of sameness is sometimes disguised in the rhetoric of universal equality, regardless of gender, race, religion, etc., as if we marry a gender or …
