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Well, it’s time to bring more structure into my life. Writing at 2 a.m. isn’t working. I used to wake up early at 6 a.m. to take my daughter to school. Writing at 2 a.m. and waking up at 6 a.m. is not sustainable.

I’ll try to write while waiting for dinner to arrive. My daughter got me hooked on Hawaiian Food, and I have just ordered it. I’ll try to finish everything before the food arrives. Let’s add some excitement and race against the clock.

Regarding relationships, I confess I haven’t read much about the subject. My main source of information I’ve got is YouTube.

Now, let’s get to the topic of this post. It seems there’s a social idea of how a relationship should be. The younger generations don’t adapt well to this standard, and many things are happening, leaving parents confused. I won’t discuss the new types of love that are emerging. I’ll focus only on the basic idea “when two people are in a relationship, whether dating or marriage, they become one.”

Everything I’ve seen indicates that this is the worst possible thing that can happen in a relationship. The idea of two lives merging into one, solely focused on the couple, leads to doing everything together, and the “I” disappears from the sentences, replaced by “we.”

This type of relationship wears out over time. People think they’ll be in a relationship forever and won’t need anyone else besides themselves.

There are several issues with this idea. It usually stems from the fear of loneliness. If the idea is to have someone to take care of you (and vice versa) for the rest of your life and avoid loneliness, this idea does not work because it only serves one person. In this model, the couple will inevitably split up, and one of the partners will be left alone. Even if they spend their whole lives together, in general, one of them will eventually die before the other. So, the one who remains will face an extremely lonely old age. They will be alone at an age when forming new connections becomes more challenging, especially due to physical limitations imposed by advanced age. From this perspective, an exclusive and closed relationship limited only to family members ends up being selfish. So, how could we avoid a lonely old age?

By cultivating our own lives and keeping many friends.

In other words, for a relationship to succeed, both individuals need to continue their separate lives and add a shared life together. Each person maintains their own friends and also makes new friends from their partner’s social circle.

The most important thing is for the couple’s life to remain healthy, without erasing each other’s personality. For example, if one person enjoys fishing and the other doesn’t, that’s okay. One can go fishing with friends while the other goes to a theater with their own friends. Both will be happy and also enjoy moments together, like having a warm soup on a cold night while watching Netflix.

==== Dinner has arrived, exactly 30 minutes after I started writing… Let’s see if I can be faster tomorrow 🤣 ===

Each person can have different preferences. The problem with becoming a closed couple is that it always results in excluding certain preferences. For example, if I enjoy fishing and my partner doesn’t, that activity gets excluded from both of our lives. This situation gradually undermines the relationship to the point where neither person knows each other as individuals anymore. Without their own personalities, they become uninteresting.

So, here’s a tip: support your partner in remaining an individual. After all, you fell in love with the person he/she was. Trying to artificially turn them into a reflection of yourself will make the person you fell in love with cease to exist.

And let’s not forget the traumas that will remain open and poke at the relationship over trivial things. After all, you “gave up your dream for your beloved one”. How can he/she not even help you washing the dishes? We’ll discuss this type of trauma further in the psychoanalysis section.