What i've learned from my first relationship
It has been almost 3 months since I broke up with Aileen. It took an extreme toll on my emotional health, but I think I'm a lot better now. This breakup has made me gain a lot more clarity about romantic relationships, and I'm going to write about it for the future me.
Lesson 1: premarital-romantic partners are not family
Definition of family: Somebody you can't give up on, even if you want to.
Premarital romantic partners do not belong in the "family" category. They deserve their own category, which, on the priority list, should be above "friends" but below "family."
This might seem like an incredibly unromantic statement at first glance, but it is true, and it helps prevent the following things:
- It prevents you from over-committing to the relationship.
- It prevents your partner from feeling pressured in the relationship.
A relationship starts with exploration. Both you and your partner need to figure out if you are compatible. Over-commitment can create insane pressure for both parties. You might feel trapped due to the sunk cost fallacy. Your partner might feel trapped because they feel the need to reciprocate an equal amount.
A healthy relationship should progress with a gradual increase of commitment. This is the same as eating food. Food is only enjoyable when you eat it at the right pace and time, and less so when you try to force a lot down in one go.
This was the biggest reason why my relationship with Aileen failed. Looking back, I realized that after the relationship became official, I immediately put her in the "family" category. I started trying to accept everything about her without second thoughts. There were already signs of incompatibility during the first year of our relationship—our communication habits were pretty different, for example—but I promptly ignored all of them.So, almost four years later, we were still fighting about the same things during the breakup.
So, romantic partners need their own category, but what does that mean?
Lesson 2: Suitable premarital-romantic partners have the prospect to become family
A suitable long term romantic partner should bring 2 essential things to the table:
- Intimacy (Both physical and emotional)
- The Prospect to become family
The need for intimacy differs greatly for different people: some only need either physical or emotional intimacy, while others need both. In retrospect, intimacy itself was never the problem during the majority of our relationship. However, intimacy was greatly affected by the long distance near the end and the lack of in-person contact, which effectively destroyed a lot of the connection we had for each other.
This brings me to the second part: the prospect of becoming family.
The second biggest reason why the relationship failed is that we no longer had the prospect of becoming family to each other.
Our life paths diverged greatly after I graduated college. I came to Chicago to pursue my master's, and she was finishing up her last year of college while looking for jobs. This put us in a long-distance relationship with huge uncertainties, making it hard to have high hopes in.
After she graduated, her job took her on a path that was even further from mine, which grew our division drastically. We both wanted each other on our train of life, but the tracks pulled us further and further apart, which forced our eventual separation.
Similarly, our backgrounds are very different. I come from a Chinese family, but she is very much a Midwestern American. One of the most painful differences was our view on close relations like family. I'm close with my parents and extended family, and I'm comfortable going into deep and frank conversations with them. Aileen, on the other hand, follows the Midwestern focus of maintaining niceness and establishing boundaries, even with her family. I often felt the distance between us during conversations, which made me anxious and made me doubt her honesty. In retrospect, she was quite uncomfortable when I talked to her like I talk to my family, often going straight to deeper topics without a lot of 'cushioning.' This directness many times made her believe that I was picking a fight. We had different methods of communication with family, which made it harder for us to become family.
Lesson 3: Have low expectations
This is not my quote, by the way, it's Warren Buffet's . From the breakup we can clearly see that I did not follow that statement during the relationship, which makes that the third biggest reason why the relationship failed.
I had high expectations, and so did she. We both expected each other to have compatibilities on everything, and when that wasn't the case, we would get angry, and try to force the compatibilities out of thin air. This caused resentment, which only grew until it cannot be contained anymore. Instead, we should have had lower expectation, stop trying to "fix" everything, learn to accept, and maybe the relationship could have gone a lot more smooth sailing.
This also sort of ties back to lesson 2. Higher compatibility means fewer differences you have to accept in the other person. This could save a lot of time and energy for both parties and increase the probability of the relationship continuing.
At the same time, luck plays a huge role in meeting 'the one.' Life doesn't give us many opportunities to experiment with true love, so don't force compatibility where it doesn't exist. Look at the big picture: if your relationship has been mostly good up to this point, lowering your expectations might help you better accept the difficulties. However, if you find yourself having to constantly lower expectation and to 'accept' the difficulties, perhaps you are not with the right person.
Lesson 4: Be self-aware of power cravings
It is human nature to crave power over something, or someone. This is why politics exists. At some point during a relationship, one may find themselves deep in a power struggle. Either you or your partner could be trying to get power over each other over a specific issue or in general. It is important to have the self-awareness to recognize this struggle and find a way to stop it. Remember, a healthy relationship should not be about obtaining power over each other; it should be about working together and obtaining power over the outside world.
Unfortunately for my relationship, we fell into the power struggle trap. Instead of focusing on working together, the relationship turned into who could get more power over the other person. The struggle eventually turned cancerous and spread to almost all aspects of the relationship. "Why don't you listen to me" became a daily phrase that was applied to almost everything. This is toxic and controlling, of course, since a person shouldn't have to "listen" to their partner on every tiny thing.
In retrospect, the spread of that power struggle was partially due to our life paths diverging. The prospect of becoming family from lesson 2 was slowly shrinking away, and that made both of us anxious. I did become self-aware of the problem, but I wasn't calm enough to recognize the reason.
So in the future, if you realize that you are in a power struggle trap, and you can't seem to stop it, look from the outside and see if there's a reason other than your partner's personality. If you realize you can't get out of the trap, then maybe it is time for you to leave.
End
I don't regret my first relationship. It was exciting and joyful, and I learned a lot. When the breakup happened, I felt like I had forever lost a piece of what was good in me. Pain was all I could experience for quite a long time, but I've waded through. Like in lesson 3, I learned to accept the reality of the breakup. In the end, acceptance is the first step to let the light shine anew.