What We Can Always Do to Improve Our Relationships

We don’t need to be especially self-righteous or particularly obtuse to settle on the view that – on balance – most of the problems in our relationship are really the responsibility of our partner. After all, we’re pretty good at housework; they leave crockery and towels in the wrong places. We love to talk; they’re often too tired. We remember their birthdays; they’ve twice forgotten ours. 

We can wind up feeling that, insofar as our relationship will ever improve, they have to be the ones to change. We’ve done everything we can. We just have to cross our arms and wait for them to see the light.

Our stance may be logically impeccable – but it isn’t, for that matter, especially on point if what we’re trying to do is continue to have a relationship. Being strictly ‘right’ all the time has its deep satisfactions; but they generally have to be enjoyed singly.

In reality, wherever the faults may have started, there is a great deal we might do to improve the dynamics of our love. We don’t have to wait passively for our ‘opponent’ to come to a full realisation of their intricately erroneous ways. We have the power to change the collective weather right now even if it is they who may have darkened it in places. 

A shift can begin by a small, always surprising reminder of an essential truth: that we too are in areas distinctly monstrous, appalling and mistaken. Not necessarily in the very areas our partner is, but somewhere and for a very basic reason: because we are human. Folly, sinfulness, mania and blindness are not randomly scattered problems, they are the basic lot of every creature who has ever walked the earth. 

Therefore, though they have undoubtedly messed up in ways, and though we may have written very lengthy manuals (in our minds) about where exactly their errors lie, we are in the end and by necessity equally dishevelled and flawed. We too are idiotic and vain, blinkered and proud; we too need a lot of charity to be endured.

Such background pessimism may not directly solve our problems, but it can help hugely to dissipate the mood that entrenches the worst of our conflicts. Once we know we’re not facing a uniquely misfiring human, only another version of our own broken selves, we can abandon once and for all the delicious yet ruinous sense that there is only one mad person in the couple. By definition, by an ineluctable law of nature, there are always two wholly insane blockheads, in the sense of beings heavily afflicted by irrational forces dating from their childhoods, unable to see important truths about themselves, subject to an array of over-intense fears and defensive patterns of behaviour and needing much courage and love to be tolerated. To know ourselves better should be to want to say ‘sorry’ to pretty much everyone who has ever crossed our paths.

Furthermore, of course, at points we want them dead and wouldn’t mind if the pavement opened up to swallow them. But we have the self-righteousness of people who have never properly thought through what loss would entail. Our critical nature bears the imprint of an implicit belief in the partner’s permanence. But if we properly picture their heart attack on the way home or the letter declaring their wish to go off with someone else, a very different set of emotions would likely come to the fore. We’d bargain with the universe to have them back, we wouldn’t for a second care that they failed to listen to our anecdote about their mother and bought the wrong jam three times in a row. We forget the extent of our love because we have lost sight of their impermanence; we are ill-tempered because we are ignoring that we are all going to die. 

None of this is to deny the serious pleasures of feeling certain that the other is to blame; just to insist on an even greater satisfaction that lies to hand: that of reconnecting with the love that still far outstrips our disappointment and anger.