Trade You This For That
Recently, a friend of mine learned that his colleague’s son was on the show Love is Blind and married the woman he met. I hadn’t ever seen the show, but I can’t help myself from a great love story so, watch it I did-Season 8, all 13 episodes.
For those unfamiliar, Love Is Blind asks singles to form emotional connections without seeing one another. Couples who get engaged then move through a series of real-world tests before deciding whether to marry.
Watching the show made me wonder: What are we willing to trade away in relationships in pursuit of happiness? When we’re young, trades were made for things: stickers, baseball cards, and food at the school lunch table. As we get older, our trades get more costly: for example, loneliness for fleeting connection; discomfort for a quick dopamine hit; courage for complacency; and integrity for dishonesty. Childhood trades rarely cost us much. Adult relationship trades, however, can cost us our peace, self-respect, and precious time. To that end, I often hear clients rationalizing their relationship dissatisfaction to avoid change:
“She won’t take accountability for her part, but no one is perfect.”
“He shuts the conversation down when I express anything that makes him uncomfortable, but I don’t want to be alone and have to start over.”
“I’m worried because we have different values around money and financial responsibility, in general, but we’ll figure it out.”
Herein lies the greatest relationship trading error: Happiness and fulfillment in exchange for safety and security. Going with the flow of what feels good is comfortable and fun. We prefer to downplay incompatibilities (ie I want children and you don’t) when we feel loved, cared for, and less lonely. We’re quick to tell ourselves that their defensiveness isn’t that big of a deal or their criticisms are probably deserved. We chalk concerns expressed by family and friends up to “they just don’t know them like I do”. Point is, even when we’re “blind”, we see what we want to believe is true. That’s, literally, the power of love.
Not surprisingly, for most of the folks on Love is Blind, the fantasy doesn’t turn into reality. The romantic in me would have liked all the couples to have the same outcome as Taylor and Daniel, but the realist in me knows better. And I want you to know better too: often, love is blind at the beginning, but a clear vision rooted in shared values and the reality of who we are at our best and worst, is required to sustain it. Be brave enough to let yourself see the patterns - good and bad - and don’t trade becoming less of yourself for the idea of becoming more.