A Scavenger Hunt For Love

How do you feel your career is going right now? We will be good, and noble, and our biggest and most powerful versions of ourselves only through the eyes and heart of another. What I missed, and what got me so lost in my personal life, was the emotional power of being seen for who I truly am. Love is someone seeing the fullness of you and wanting you to be the best possible version of you. It is for each person to do all they can to help the other express their uniqueness as powerfully as possible. Love’s goal is to make the other person bigger. You do not need the other person to love what you love. You need only for them to love that you love what you love, and to want to help you turn your loves into contribution. All of this starts with them seeing you. Because they cannot love what they cannot see. The research on love in relationships reveals quite a lot about what it means to see with love. Firstly, and weirdly, it doesn’t appear to mean seeing your partner with dispassionate accuracy. Each would see in the other what they saw in themselves.

Don't Let The Small Stuff Bog You Down

But this is not at all what the researchers found. The data showed that in the happiest couples, the partners each rated the other high on every single quality. Which you might think was merely a function of being in the throes of love on this particular day. But then the researchers tracked these couples over time and saw that the couples who rated each other high on every single quality remained happier across time. The researchers called this your benevolent distortion. Thus your partner isn’t disorganized, they’re spontaneous. Not flirtatious, but charming. If you see your partner through the lens of benevolent distortions, then you become more confident in your decision to tie your life to your partner’s. This confidence breeds intimacy, and this intimacy strengthens your love, which leads to yet more benevolent distortions, and so to more confidence, to more intimacy, in an ongoing upward spiral of love. Another aspect of seeing with love relates not just to your partner’s attributes, but also to their motives. In the best relationships, the researchers found, each partner always looked for the most generous explanation for the other’s behavior. And once they landed on it, they believed it.

Nobody's Fault

The belief in the most generous explanation served the relationship. It fostered confidence in each partner, this confidence bred intimacy, this intimacy fueled love. That finding is yet one more piece of evidence for why we need to tread carefully around feedback. The data reveals that the very best relationships are not those where one partner is digging like a detective for the real reasons the other partner did something, and then confronting them with the hard truth of this reality. Instead, the best relationships are built when both partners feel like the other will believe the best possible reasons for their behavior. We thrive only in relationships where our partner admits this complexity, and always tacks toward the explanations that show us in the best possible light. When Myshel noticed my tendency to initially reject an idea, she could have chalked it up to me being intent on making sure only my own ideas held sway. Or to my unwillingness to let go of something I had long believed. Or even to me having a deep distrust of anything that I didn’t come up with myself. And goodness knows, maybe if I was on the therapist’s couch, I would discover that, deep down, some of these unflattering explanations did indeed animate me. Have you ever been in a relationship where your partner fancied themselves a therapist? Where they’d decided that their role was to reveal you to you, warts and all? It’s exhausting, isn’t it? You find yourself permanently on the defensive, always ready to step back, out of the spotlight, out of harm’s way. And so you do, step back, and back, until one day you wake up and you’ve stepped so far back that you’re psychologically separated from one another.

A Voice In The Wilderness

But I do know how safe and lifted up I feel being in relationship with someone who sees a quirk of mine, and rather than tearing the floorboards up to look for the true cause of my behavior, takes the sting out of it by giving it a silly nickname. By identifying your partner’s weakness, you’re giving it definition, and weight, and therefore power. When they’re talking to you, they know that at any moment you might bring out their very clearly defined weakness and use it as a weapon against them. The data recommends that when you see a failing in your partner, you should recast it in your mind as an aspect of something they love. The same will be true for you. She knows she can’t rid me of Immediate Rejection Syndrome, because, if she did, then it would rip out all the stuff I so love about diving deep to the core of a concept. Diving deep in this way is my essence, my reddest of red threads, and the cause of much of whatever good I might do in the world. And I know she knows this. And she knows I know she knows. What a relief that is. My loves come from the very heart of me. On occasion, yes, they lead to unproductive actions. So, on your life’s journey, look to your left and to your right, and ask yourself whether you are choosing to travel with partners who are curious about you, who delight in your loves, and who want you to be the biggest version of you. All you will be is because they are. Just as all they will be is because you are. You might be just starting out, in that glorious and also overwhelming frame of mind where the entire world lies open before you.