Meet My Needs
Something I've chortled at frequently these years is the idea in women's psyches (including my own) that I enter a relationship, and within 3 months can make a claim that it is "not meeting my needs."
The funny part is, where were these needs when my partner wasn't around?
How did I suddenly acquire all these needs?
How could adding a nourishing resource to my life suddenly seem to cost and require so much, to leave me so depleted?
Shouldn't my nourishment sources remain relatively stable as I add a generative element to a stable system?
This is what it means to transition from wanting something to having it, and this is a required reconciliation when we transition our relationship to the desired outcome from "wanting it" to "having it."
When I'm wanting a relationship, I'm thinking of something that doesn't actually exist and may contain zero real-world elements. I might have a negative vision, all the things I will NOT have to face because this relationship is now here in my life.
Rarely do I, in my desire, truly consider the holistic breadth of what relationship will ADD to my life. Sure, I can imagine the sex, but can I imagine the snoring? I can imagine the devotion, but can I imagine the nights I watch him sleeping, crying for his mortality, fearing the inevitability of losing him?
Having a relationship shines a light on existential truths which are simply lit from a different angle when we are single. And which, when we are single, we have more trouble assigning to another person.
Unfortunately, it has become commonplace to demand that relationship or, worse, our partner, CHANGE—improve in some way, when new angles of existential pain come to light, as if this is a bug infecting devotion, when it is a FEATURE of devotion.
This is the actual "hard" we might talk about, if we want to talk about how truly hard relationships are.
It is hard to see the harsh truth of existential pains in a whole new light.
It is painful to feel love enter the Places That Have Not Known Love.*
It is hard to finally HAVE the resource which you were sure would solve all your problems, and still have all those problems it was never going to solve.
It is hard, tragically, painfully, sharply, gut-wrenchingly hard to have something, something so wonderful, something expansive and enormous and great—it is hard to have so much to LOSE.
It is hard to be around someone all the time, and be hurting, and not somehow associate them with the hurt, blame them for the hurt, accuse them of conspiring in the hurt. On an ontological level, their presence IS the cause of this new presentation of pain, and it is HARD to know causality without assigning fault.
If I am committed to carrying myself, I see myself in this difficulty, and I know it for what it is. I apply the practices I used in singlehood, when I had no one to blame, and I meet my pain and my fear without blaming this person who would be INCREDIBLY CONVENIENT to blame.
I am not trying to do what is convenient. I am cultivating *actual ease.*
Ease does the whole thing easily. Convenience cuts corners.
Ease begins with clumsiness, it is a humbling process, at times humiliating. Ease in a new situation requires fresh eyes and a willingness to try new things in a new way.
What would I want of relationship, ease asks, if I had no need to speak of?
*Grief Gate #2 in
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
