If your partner is not championing your story, by default s/he is rejecting you. Our stories make us who we are. They are the most valuable thing we will ever own. If s/he loves you but doesn’t support and embrace your story or the one you are trying to write, s/he actually doesn’t love you; s/he loves the idea of you. Because you and your story cannot be separated. You are your story.
No. 3. Does your partner accept you as is?
Many folks fall in love and/or date “potential” thinking they can change somebody. Then they put a shit ton of pressure on the person to change and to be someone s/he is not. Maybe subtly. Maybe over time. And maybe s/he is not aware of this “more about them than you behavior.”
But there are consequences to loving somebody this way. Everything, I mean everything, will be loaded. Enter eggshell territory. The space will not allow people to be themselves. Love will have conditions. You won’t be good enough. S/he will love you more if you are being who s/he wants to you to be and love you less if you are not. S/he will put pressure on you to be a certain way, act a certain way, do things that s/he thinks are best for you—not what you think is best for you, which comes from his or her own insecurities and/or the worth s/he gets from “fixing” someone. But it’s not yours to fix because there is nothing to fix. You get to decide what you want to “fix” about you. Not your partner.
I know first hand the damage this has on relationships and one’s self-esteem because I was someone like this. I have put pressure on exes to live up to my definitions. I wasn’t aware I was doing it at the time. I disguised this behavior as love and convinced myself of it. But it wasn’t love. It was fear and control, and I wasn’t creating a safe space. Without a safe space, nothing can be built.
Except fear.
4. Do both of your definitions of love line up?
The definitions don’t have to line up perfectly. But generally speaking. Broad strokes. You don’t have to agree on everything and if you do, somebody’s not being honest. You will definitely have different definitions about things in life. But when it comes to love, there has to be overlap.
For example, if s/he believes, like I once did, that love means you do everything for your partner no matter what, even at the expense of self, that two lives come together and dissolve into one life. And you believe that loving someone means two people with separate lives coming together as two but choosing to share their lives with each other. Here’s the deal with this: someone in this relationship isn’t going to feel loved, based on the gap in definitions. We pull from our definitions—from what we believe about love. They are blueprints that create our guidelines and direct our actions. If you and your partner have very different definitions of what love is and looks like, you are both following different recipes and your love will be mush.
For real,
Paula
