I truly believe that it is possible to be in a relationship where both people's "best I can get" is "me and my partner are both getting what we want", like you can love someone in a way in which your own preferences recalibrate to be compatible with theirs.
Not sure if this is a state everyone can reach, or would want to, but I'm quite sure it's attainable for lots of people.
(Aside, I have some friends who are bad at asserting themselves in the ways I was talking about, but about, like, everything. They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously, e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it messes up my sleep when we eat late".
(You can imagine the kind of relationships (family or friends or romantic) they might have had in their lives which trained them to act this way...)
So they act like they have to give a sufficiently good reason for their preferences to be taken seriously.... which is, IMO, the degraded state I'm talking about.
In a respectful relationship, the fact that you want something IS a reason to do it; you don't have to provide a logically adequate reason to get what you want as well. And if two people's desires are incompatible, both will happily compromise to find a way to make them compatible again.)
I think you don't really know what you want if you don't know why you want it. Learning to understand oneself is a huge part of one's personal growth. When you don't know the "why", it's easy to be mistaken about what you actually want, and push for a superficial projection of it, not the real underlying thing. (And therefore lose out on relationships you didn't know you'd be happy with.) But we speak in generalities of course.
They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have
to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously,
e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it
messes up my sleep when we eat late".
This is really interesting.
On one level this could be a really bad sign (either about the relationship, or just one person's self esteem) where a person can't just want something. They have to "justify" it.
On the other hand, I don't know if that's necessarily bad?
Like, if we always eat dinner at 7ish and now you want to eat at 5pm I feel it's just natural that I'd want to know why? Because we probably had reasons for eating at 7pm, and maybe I want to kind of weigh them against everything else? Because maybe I can't take my lunch break at work until 3pm, so eating dinner at 5pm really sucks for me. etc. etc etc etc
And if two people's desires are
incompatible, both will happily
compromise to find a way to make
them compatible again
Amen, absolutely. Let's say you can't eat at 7.... but I can't eat at 5.
But what is the point of eating together? Is it really the act of forking nutrients into our mouths... or is it spending time together? Maybe we can just chill out and talk at 5pm. You can eat... and I'll just hang out and we can talk about our day or watch some netflix or w/e.
I probably have just always picked shitty partners but in my experience that kinda happy compromise problem-solving attitude seems so rare. kudos to you for that attitude.
I wasn't super happy with that example, it's vaguely based on something that happened to me recently but I can't quite remember what happened well enough to make it sound compelling. But I do notice this phenomenon of "justifying one's preferences" in people pretty regularly. When it happens, it sounds odd... like it stands out as insecure, but they seem to not be aware it's odd at all.
I guess the way this usually manifests is not that a person gives reasons at all, but rather that they seem to give too many reasons. Like offhandedly saying "I feel like doing this" is normal. But going on about the reasons, making sure they're very clear and crisp and agreed upon by everybody is more like the aberrant/degraded thing I'm talking about.
Not sure if this is a state everyone can reach, or would want to, but I'm quite sure it's attainable for lots of people.
(Aside, I have some friends who are bad at asserting themselves in the ways I was talking about, but about, like, everything. They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously, e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it messes up my sleep when we eat late".
(You can imagine the kind of relationships (family or friends or romantic) they might have had in their lives which trained them to act this way...)
So they act like they have to give a sufficiently good reason for their preferences to be taken seriously.... which is, IMO, the degraded state I'm talking about.
In a respectful relationship, the fact that you want something IS a reason to do it; you don't have to provide a logically adequate reason to get what you want as well. And if two people's desires are incompatible, both will happily compromise to find a way to make them compatible again.)