thoughts, words, deeds

you can't choose your past

Prompt: What can be the source of relationship adversities and do you believe that relationship adversities (any kind of relationship: parent-child, lovers, husband-wife, teacher-student, etc.) can often spring from other earlier adversities or do they just happen on their own?

From my point of view, the most common source of relationship difficulty is lack of communication. That’s at the source of a lot of the problems that people face in any relationship. One or both of the people in a relationship are not communicating in such a way that the other (or both) can understand what the problem is. There are other issues of course, but lack of clarity is difficult to overcome because sometimes we don’t understand why the other person can’t see something that feels obvious to us.

The second question is more complicated because no one comes into a relationship without baggage. even the most fundamental relationship—a parent with a newborn—the parent is the sum total of his or her experiences and from the moment the child is born, starts imprinting the child with his or her own experiences. Because of that, any adversities that we suffer earlier are going to affect our present day relationships for good or for bad.

We are not simply a relationship. We bring baggage, carry it with us wherever we are and use that to color the world and our perceptions of people around us. It’s like medicine—doctors sometimes act as though the body were a series of organs. This person is a heart which is separate from the skin which is separate from the pancreas and the liver and the kidneys and the brain and the bones and the circulatory system and the stomach . . . treating each individual organ as though the rest of the body isn’t going to be affected by changes in the one being treated. There are no discrete systems in the body.

I notice that with T1—which is a disease of the endocrine system (and so is treated most often by an endocrinologist), but also affects circulation and nerves which affects digestion and kidneys. Not only that, the hormone imbalance caused by lack of insulin can affect other hormones—leading to depression among other things. You can’t simply treat the one thing and not expect the rest of the body to become out of balance as it tries to adjust to a new normal.

Well, we try to do the same thing in relationships. We see the person—the friend, the lover—and how they interact with us, but we can never assume that’s the only part of them. In a different setting, they’re going to behave differently—with their mother, with their best friend they’ve known forever, with their sister, with their brother. And if this is an important relationship, one that is going to last, we need to be able to accept more facets of the person than the one we get to see.

Which means (to get back to the question) adversity comes also from the meshing of two separate people with two separate backgrounds and personalities and experiences and friendships into one relationship. But those frictions can be healthy. After all, if I met someone who was exactly like me, I’m not sure what I’d be able to talk to them about.