Life Is Not An Auto-Subscription

Life Is Not An Auto-Subscription

My best friend is my ex-boyfriend. We were together for ten years.

Sounds strange, right?

Your idea of life is like a giant form full of boxes that your environment ticks off for you automatically.

Every concept is a big box. There is a box for "romantic relationship", one for "success", "good daughter", "wonderful mother", "awesome dad", "happy person", and lots of other things.

All the big boxes have sub-boxes. For the box "romantic relationship", you have "move in together", "buy a house", "have kids", "be monogamous", and many, many more.

In our minds, the big concept boxes light up whenever we approach a certain marker. Often, the marker is age. But it can also be meeting someone new or doing something specific.

Once we unlock a new box, it comes with all the sub-boxes automatically ticked off. When we meet someone and fall in love, for example, we unlock and tick a box for "romantic relationship". The rest happens on autopilot. We think we have to move in together, get married, have kids, buy a house, and paint the old picket fence a lovely white.

Whenever we struggle with a particular sub-box, we question the whole concept. For example, when we're in love but moving in together doesn't work, we start doubting that our partner is really the right person for us.

This automatic subscription to all the parts a concept can have makes many of us very unhappy. We never really picked a lot of what comes with a big concept. We just go along with the idea.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

We can untick the boxes that make up a big idea individually.

It is not all or nothing, even if we think that at first.

Let's get back to "true love". At first glance, that involves marriage. But if you look at it more closely, you can see that marriage and love are not the same. There are people in this world who have a very loving relationship with their partner but are not married. Other people are married, but everyone can see that they do not love each other.

Some people have both. Other couples have neither.

Regardless of what your beliefs about the institution of marriage are, you can be in love. Completely independently. You can also get married without being in love.

Maybe you want romantic love, but you do not want marriage. Perhaps, you want to marry a good friend without romantic love in the picture.

That's fine.

Keeping all the components of a big idea separate is most difficult when it is about ourselves.

We think earning money is the same as having a traditional career, which requires being in the office from nine to five. Well, COVID-19 certainly unticked the "in the office" box that most of us just got with "job".

Turns out, you don't need to be in the office to do your job.

You don't even need a traditional job to earn a lot of money or have a successful career.

The closer these boxes come to our core values and ideas, the more paralyzing it feels when there is a problem with one of our sub-boxes.

For example, it is hard to think about raising a family with someone without being romantically involved with them if "mom and dad are in love" is the idea of "family" we experienced growing up.

And yet, being wonderful parents to a child doesn't have anything to do with sleeping with each other.

We also think that when the romantic involvement with our partner stops, the family connection also has to stop.

Sometimes, this means we stay in romantic relationships with all the boxes ticked, even when some of those boxes are not working for us. We are afraid that ending the romantic relationship or changing it will take away everything else that connects to it.

I am still best friends with my previous romantic partner. I was deathly afraid that I would lose the friendship if we broke up. So we teetered on the edge of our breakup for years. We didn't fight, but we kept going in circles around this "should we or shouldn't we". It was hard.

It's funny because our relationship is now much, much better than it was before. It turns out we can be friends and work together without living together or sharing a bedroom.

"Romantic partners" was the only box that didn't work for our relationship, so we ditched it.

Often, we can get precisely what we want if we narrow down on what boxes we really want to have ticked and which ones we'd rather skip. Unticking those boxes is hard, but it is worth it.

Life gets a lot better and much less stressful when we do.

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