Relationships Are Hard. Period.
As I have heard from both another therapist and from clients with the exact same words: “Relationships are hard”. Period.
As with so many aspects of what it means to be a person, we live in the tension between opposites. On the one hand, we are faced with the existential fact that we are on some level isolated in our own created worlds, with our own perspective, our own choices and responsibilities, and our own destiny. On the other hand, we as humans absolutely need relationship, without which we lose our mental health and ultimately our lives.
As with any existential issue, being aware of and honest about the givens of existence and the limitations they bring also paradoxically makes us more aware of our freedom, the places where we can create and express ourselves through the choices we make.
There’s an image that I often use with clients to help us picture the conundrum of relationship.
Imagine a bird and a fish, both observing and describing a sailboat.
For the bird, the sailboat is below them — it’s down. It’s tall, it’s pointy, it’s got these big white flappy things that you have to be careful not to run into.
The fish hears this description and thinks “what the hell are you talking about?” For the fish, the sailboat is clearly above them — it’s up. And what pointy, flappy things? There’s nothing to that boat up there. I mean, there’s kind of a couple of fin-looking things sticking down, but they’re not that big. What you really have to worry about is the sharp spinny thing that appears at the back occasionally and will chop you up if you’re not careful.
Clearly, neither the bird or the fish is wrong. They simply live, and are in a sense isolated from each other, in their own constituted world. And these separate worlds give them entirely different perspectives on, experiences of, and descriptions of the very same event. How can they, then, have relationship with each other?
The bird must be willing to hear the fish’s experience as real and as true for them, even if the bird can’t ever fully understand the fish’s world. And the same for the fish to the bird. Each has their real experience, their sense of reality, their unique perspective, and their own fears based on the threats that are part of their world.
We humans find ourselves in a similar conundrum. While the bird and the fish example shows two different worlds with two perspectives, we humans are currently at 7.8 billion different individual worlds and counting.
To relate to each other means to realize that in our relationships we are meeting someone with as different of an experience and perspective to our own as a fish to a bird. And so their description of events may surprise us.
And so, we must show up with the openness, the curiosity, the humility, and the willingness to hear about the other’s experience, to give them the space to describe the phenomena that make up their world.
If we can start with recognition of this challenge, we can then make choices to navigate this relationship with a fuller and free expression of ourselves, without needing the other to experience the same world we do.
