How do you balance being true to yourself with being “teachable,” or open to your partner’s influence? Simple: pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. This will give you a sense of what you’ll need to do psychologically and emotionally with your partner. Being true to yourself and being flexible requires developing two different skill sets that aren’t so easy to do at the same time: being true to yourself and being flexible.
The Problem With Only Being True To Yourself
If you only know how to be true to yourself you’re a one-person system. When you’re a one person system, you will run into many different problems. Here are a few of them:
- You can’t really evolve to take in new information
- It’s hard to connect deeply with others
- Your relationships tend to be about power and dominance.
The Problem With Only Being Flexible
Okay, but what if I’m super flexible, and I let my partner decide on things that aren’t a big deal, like what movie we see, what couch we buy and where we go for dinner? What if I don’t really care that much about the small stuff, and I just want my partner to be happy? If they’re happy, I’m happy.
Isn’t this kind of flexibility always a good thing?
Too much flexibility at the expense of yourself and your own needs harms relationships and can lead to resentment and feelings of loneliness and emptiness. A few of the relational problems that come with being too flexible are:
- it’s hard to know who you really are
- you can get lost in others
- you can feel overwhelming grief later when you realize you abandoned yourself
- you’re often in the submissive position
- It’s hard to set limits and be your own person
Balancing Selfhood with flexibility
Balancing “selfhood” with flexibility is another way of talking about interdependence. It’s like juggling two very different objects with different shapes and weights. It takes practice. How can I be me and you be you without either of us winning or making the other person wrong? If you want to go to the beach for vacation, but I like the mountains, do I ignore my beach preference to keep the peace with you? If I do this regularly, there’s a chance my resentment will build, and the part of me that wants to have a voice will languish. Do I insist on beaches and steamroll your mountain hopes and desires? Then, chances are, you’ll feel disregarded, and our relationship will stop feeling equal and safe.
So what’s the solution? Do we refuse to take vacations together? I go to the beach, you go to the mountains? For some people that might be the solution, as long as it doesn’t lead to living parallel lives, or feeling disconnected from each other.
Facing Your Fears
Learning to juggle these things begins with seeing our fears of being eclipsed or swallowed up by our partner–or abandoned by them. Once you’re less afraid of losing yourself or disconnecting you can get curious about who your partner really is, what they need, what their preferences are about, and why they believe certain things. Their needs aren’t as threatening because you understand them. Your partner is human, like you. You can listen to them with your heart rather than hearing them through a filter of fear.
You may try out the mountain or the beach experience out of love rather than resentfully ticking it off on a ledger sheet. And you may discover the mountain person in yourself, or the beach person. Our partners guide us to expand ourselves beyond who we think we are.
