Learning experiences: just broke up with someone recently. Part of the problem was that I had some very strong, specific and idealized expectations of what a relationship “should” be like – expectations which caused a lot of trouble, but which I hadn’t really consciously realized that I had, until now.
Digging up the expectations and beating them into mush with a baseball bat came too late to save this particular relationship, but it seems to have had an unexpected side effect: the thought of being single feels a lot less bad now.
I guess that while I had that idealized vision of “being in a relationship”, my mind was constantly comparing singledom to that vision, finding my current existence to be lacking, and feeling bad as a result. But now that I’ve gone from “being in a relationship means X” to “being in a relationship can mean pretty much anything, depending on the people involved”, there isn’t any single vision to compare my current state against. And with nothing to compare against, there’s also nothing that would make me feel unhappy because I don’t have it currently.
Huh.
Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.