![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4I don't need to know, but I'm interested to know:
What (if anything) do people regard as essential for a successful relationship?
(I'm thinking more in the general sense than the personal -- I'm not really interested to know whether individual people couldn't possibly have a relationship with somebody who worked for Microsoft, or whether they need somebody who will accept and indulge their Swarfega fetish.)
Or do you think relationships are so individual that they're impossible to generalise about?
(20 marks.)
Further questions:
Do you think there's a (moral?) judgement implicit in a suggestion that anything is "essential" for a successful relationship? By stating the question in those terms, are we imposing our own definition of "success" on other people? (I'm assuming a broad context of Western culture; at the moment I'm not really interested in hearing, say, how the Mgosh tribe regard a "successful" relationship as one where the female bears twenty children and then eats her mate.) Or do questions like this merely make us disappear rapidly up our own solipsistic arses?
(40 marks.)
Note: You may define "relationship" as broadly as you wish, but please make your working definition explicit. Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.
What (if anything) do people regard as essential for a successful relationship?
(I'm thinking more in the general sense than the personal -- I'm not really interested to know whether individual people couldn't possibly have a relationship with somebody who worked for Microsoft, or whether they need somebody who will accept and indulge their Swarfega fetish.)
Or do you think relationships are so individual that they're impossible to generalise about?
(20 marks.)
Further questions:
Do you think there's a (moral?) judgement implicit in a suggestion that anything is "essential" for a successful relationship? By stating the question in those terms, are we imposing our own definition of "success" on other people? (I'm assuming a broad context of Western culture; at the moment I'm not really interested in hearing, say, how the Mgosh tribe regard a "successful" relationship as one where the female bears twenty children and then eats her mate.) Or do questions like this merely make us disappear rapidly up our own solipsistic arses?
(40 marks.)
Note: You may define "relationship" as broadly as you wish, but please make your working definition explicit. Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-17 01:58 am (UTC)To say that anything is/was successful is to say that it fulfills its intended purpose: that's what "success" means. So for a relationship to be successful, we have to ask what its intended purpose was.
The obvious first question is, intended by whom? Intentions are a property of individual human minds, not (in general) a collective property of groups. Now it's entirely possible that someone not directly involved in the relationship might have their own ideas of what they intend its purpose to be (for example, a dating agency looking to compile statistics about how well it does is likely to have its own set of criteria for listing a couple it introduced as a success story). Also this suggests that it's perfectly possible for a relationship to be successful from one partner's POV but not the other's, if they intended it to achieve different goals (e.g. if I want a week or so of casual sex and you want marriage), and in this situation it is largely meaningless to ask whether the relationship is successful in any absolute terms, because the only useful meaning of success necessarily refers to the intentions of some specific person. Then there are other weirdnesses, such as marriages of convenience to entitle one partner to claim the nationality of the other.
Having disposed of those slightly pathological cases, we can concentrate on the more reasonable situation where the partners' intended purposes for the relationship are broadly compatible, and think about what aspects of the intended purpose are likely to be universal or nearly so.
Foreverness seems to be a reasonably common intention in a relationship; certainly when it comes to marriages, you hear a lot of talk about marriages "failing" if they end in divorce or separation. I'm not 100% convinced about that as a general case, since if a relationship gives me two years of blissful happiness and then ends, it seems clear that it was a large net benefit to me, and to label it a failure for not having given me even more seems downright ungrateful...
But it seems to me that the fundamental reason why practically anyone who goes into a relationship is that they want to, which isn't too far from saying that they think they will be happier in the relationship than not in the relationship. I think that has the best claim to be a close-to-universal purpose for a relationship, and hence is a universal measure of success. Of course, you don't have to be happy in absolute terms; you just have to be happier than you would be without that relationship.
Oddly, this suggests that the concept might be much harder for a monogamist than a polyamorist, since a monogamist in a relationship which is making them only marginally happier can always wonder whether letting go and finding someone else might be a net benefit, whereas polyamorists have a greater ability to just find someone else without letting go. Hmmm.
Also there's the question of how painful the split-up is and whether it drags the relationship as a whole back below the break-even point (for one or both parties); perhaps ten years of bliss followed by six months of aggravating divorce is still above the line, whereas one night of fun followed by a week of one person pestering the unwilling other one for a repeat performance might not have been worth the hassle...
Hmmm. I have a nasty feeling that this is actually as far as I can go with this line of reasoning. None of the obvious suspects other people have mentioned (communication, clear agreements etc) seem to me to be necessary from first principles to make both partners happier in the relationship than out of it; I'm sure they turn out in practice to be helpful, but they still feel to me like solutions to problems which only might crop up, so I don't think I could call them universal from this perspective. I'm sure there's some couple somewhere who get on famously without any of this sort of thing, just by sheer good luck.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-17 09:40 am (UTC)Or possibly harder for a polyamorist, because they have to weigh up a whole host of possible options: if I go out with person B, will it damage my relationship with person A? Will A remain my primary but B become my secondary? Or do I want B to become my primary and A to become my secondary?
And poly people have the "grass might be greener on the other side" thing too.
None of the obvious suspects other people have mentioned (communication, clear agreements etc) seem to me to be necessary from first principles to make both partners happier in the relationship than out of it; I'm sure they turn out in practice to be helpful, but they still feel to me like solutions to problems which only might crop up
If you don't communicate with somebody at all, to what extent is it a "relationship"? (Genuine question!)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-17 11:13 am (UTC)I think when I said "communication" I meant it with the mythical capital C, in the sense of talking about Us and talking through Issues and Difficulties and emerging with the relationship stronger.
I'm sure there are people whose long-term, long-lasting relationship-looking-thing has survived for decades simply on the strength of things not happening to go wrong that need Talking About in that sort of way.
(Fair points about poly; I don't think I really intended to imply that poly people never had that sort of dilemma, only that there were some situations in which they had other ways to avoid it. Though I suppose in some cases that might merely turn a dilemma into a trilemma or worse...)
Re:
Date: 2004-02-19 08:25 am (UTC)I think a relationship can definitely have too much of that sort of "communication". If you're always talking about Issues and Difficulties, you're not actually getting on with having a relationship. Maybe this is just me? I've certainly more than once ended up feeling that I and $partner talk a lot about The Relationship, but don't have anything else to say to each other.
I'm sure there are people whose long-term, long-lasting relationship-looking-thing has survived for decades simply on the strength of things not happening to go wrong that need Talking About in that sort of way.
Hmmmm. I strongly suspect (though I could be wrong) that that sort of "it-just-works" success only happens if people do communicate -- and Talking About The Relationship isn't the only way to communicate. It's a feedback thing, and not all feedback is verbal. Does that make sense? I think it's dangerous to assume that "communication" == "talking" -- mostly because people draw false conclusions from that equation ("if we're talking, we must be communicating" and "if we're not talking, we can't be communicating").
I don't think I really intended to imply that poly people never had that sort of dilemma, only that there were some situations in which they had other ways to avoid it.
I think every type of relationship has some advantages and some disadvantages, really.
"Trilemma" is a great word, and should be used more often. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 08:47 am (UTC)Yeah, that makes sense, and I don't think I'd disagree. It's just that, well, if you widen the definition of communication to the point where any successful relationship can be argued to have some, then it won't be a terribly surprising result if you end up concluding that every successful relationship has some! :-)
"Trilemma" is a great word, and should be used more often. :)
It was either that or "trichotomy", and Gareth's insistence that the latter ought to mean "haircut" is disturbingly convincing...