Last night I was chatting with a friend who was studying for a PhD overseas. My friendship with him was close, but there was no romantic part at all. Although there are not many contacts, every year when he returns to China, he will come to Shanghai to visit me for a few days to exchange experiences and experiences of the year.
In addition to the daily greetings, a large part of our chats are exchanges of recent papers/books we have read, recent progress in our work with our own psychoanalysts/psychotherapists, reflections on ourselves and our lives. His spiritual world is richer than mine, and he sometimes shows me his recent flower arrangement work and the results of his research on Zhou Yi.
We usually communicate in words, accompanying each other, respecting and understanding each other's parts that are not in the world.
Yesterday I talked to him about a recent insight that I found quite valuable.
For those who have had traumatic upbringings, there may be a small percentage of them who are very lucky that they have stumbled upon an extraordinary lover and been healed by an extraordinary intimate relationship with full love and security.
But most people don't have such good luck. Like an English poem I love a lot: "He was the boy i once loved:a little bit messy, a little bit ruined. A beautiful disaster, just like me." He was a beautiful disaster, just like I was.
Most people experience two people with their own problems colliding and groping in a relationship.
On the other hand, what kind of intimate relationship a person will have (including whether or not to have an intimate relationship) is limited by his current personality state. For most people, it is not that intimacy heals them, but that they have such intimacy after they are more and more healed. Good intimacy is the fruit of self-ripening.
Just like life, whether two people can achieve a good intimate relationship, in addition to the "fate", which we can't control, is still largely caused by one "decision" and "choice".
Far more than we can realize – life is full of moments when you need to make decisions and make choices. This is especially true for the building of a relationship. What kind of person you choose to be with, what kind of criteria to define the ideal relationship, what kind of strategy to choose to deal with when encountering problems in the relationship, whether there is a complex enough worldview to understand people, whether there is a flexible enough personality to deal with and accept the parts of the relationship that do not match your expectations... Wait a minute.
Intimacy is first and foremost about yourself, and marriage is even more so. It is first and foremost a condensation of your personal values: what do you want your life to be like? What will be more important than others? Our satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the relationship depends first and foremost on the norms of our hearts. The criteria held by different people can be very different.
When a person's past wounds have not yet been healed, it may be chaotic to pursue things in intimate relationships, and he can't help but be attracted to someone who knows that he will hurt him, or because of some lack of the past, he excessively pursues something that is not important to his future happiness (such as conquest, such as recognition, etc.).
Even for those who have not been traumatized, it is only after they know themselves well enough that they will be able to reach an intimate relationship that satisfies themselves enough—you know the value of cherishing what is really important to you, and you have the strength and courage to give up what someone may think is good, but it is not the most important thing to you.
The value you value doesn't just affect your choice of partner — sometimes what you value is something that can only be built between two people through time and effort, such as full trust, good communication, tacit problem solving, deep connection, and even good sexual activity.
None of this happens overnight, no matter who you are with, you have to go through a run-in road - you must first be fully mentally prepared for this, and reasonable expectations can help you actively participate in the run-in process.
This requires flexibility in a person's mind: you must have the ability to not be rigidly bound by your past cognition in the process of getting along, actively have the motivation to solve problems when difficulties arise, and even break through some principles that you thought you would not break through in the past, and take some perspectives that you would not take in the past.
It is difficult for two people to reach a well-coordinated and close-knit relationship. It takes both people to have a strong motivation and make a real effort.
But at the end of the day, it's up to the real being of the two of you —what kind of state you are in, and you'll handle the relationship in a way that corresponds to it.
I'm not saying that I've already achieved my fruits on this road, in fact, my journey has only just begun.
But for those friends who obviously feel that they have a lot of things that have not been handled well, I hope that you will not be in a hurry and at the same time have hope.
Try to develop your personality, to stimulate the motivation that you instinctively have to develop towards a more perfect self, and then your changes will change your external relationships, and the good relationships you have long expected will become the fruits of nature.
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