I’m going to admit up front that I’m writing this article from a prompt, which is not my usual style, but hey, change is good, so I’m giving it a try.
The prompt, from Lance over at Honey and Lance, goes like this:
“How do you define successful relationships, and what does it take to achieve that success?”
I have a lot of trouble with this question, mostly because I’m a bit pedantic, and the question raises more questions for me. Questions like, “What do you mean by successful? Successful by whose standards? In whose eyes?”
And what type of relationships are we talking about, anyway? Is the term to be defined in the sense of the planet Earth’s “relationship” to the planet Saturn, or the alcoholic’s “relationship” to alcohol — or the more conventional sense of the word, like Angelina Jolie’s relationship with Brad Pitt?
Maybe the whole framing of the question is what’s screwing things up here. Maybe this article should be titled, “What Makes Relationships Good“.
That’s an easier question, and one that can be answered much more quickly.
Simply put, good relationships are those in which both people are happy. Full stop.
If one or both parties aren’t happy, the relationship is not good, or only good part of the time. Now of course there is always (usually always) tension in relationships. This is natural and healthy. If the overall hedonic tone of a relationship, however, is more negative than positive, you have, by definition, a bad relationship.
Since that question was so easily dispatched, let’s return to the more thorny question posed by Lance, the question that gives me the willies.
A relationship, by definition, I think ought not to be successful. The moment you define a relationship as “successful” versus “unsuccessful”, you’ve fallen into a losing frame.
The concept of success vs. failure is only helpful, in my eyes, in the context of specific goals.
So if the goal of a relationship is to make a baby, then you could count the relationship as “successful” as soon as the little ball of mucus and pink popped out.
If the goal of a relationship would be to add 250 hectares to the Enwilmington Estate, or to ensure the ascension to the throne of Spain of the Moorish line, then the relationship would be successful (or unsuccessful) in proportion to whether or not those goals were accomplished — and how long they remained “accomplished”, if you get my meaning.
It is thus that, in my view at least, the concept of success, when applied to relationships, introduces the concepts of time and task limitation, and thus inherently limits the scope of the same.
To be fair, we no longer (often) give our daughters and sons in arranged marriages designed solely for political or economic purposes. Yet our culture still persists with conceptions of “successful” vs. “failed” marriages, and the gold standard there seems to be — if they stay together, relationship is successful — if they split up, it is “failed” (which serves to underscore how deeply entrenched our cultural habit of monogamy and pair bonding actually is).
If you’ve read this far, you have already figured out my answer to the question: when it comes to defining successful relationships, I don’t. A romantic relationship ought not to be a goal, and if it has to have a goal, I feel the existence of the goal will reduce the potential scope and depth that the relationship might otherwise develop.
A relationship between two human being always exists (even if they aren’t speaking) and has qualities and traits that inhere in it even it when they are living on opposite sides of the planet — indeed, a relationship could be said to exist between every single human being on the planet and every other single human being on the planet, and the degree to which we deny this is just one measure of our ego strength (but that’s a topic for another article).
Let’s leave the goal-oriented relationships by the wayside for now. I feel like we as people have enough goals and priorities, without adding an X-quality relationship to the list. Let’s let our relationships be what they are, and evolve as they may. Let’s think more about being happy and pleasing one another than being successful or right.
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And now for something completely different: your weeknight treat, an excellent article from Esquire about eye contact that trumps anything I’ve seen written in the seduction community. If you’ve come across a better article on EC, please point it out.