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We have some control over how we experience ourselves, our lovers,
our world. Why not, then, choose a more positive version out of the
many possibilities we can imagine? When we perceive our partners,
it's not as if we can see their qualities directly or objectively.
They do something, you figure out what it might mean, and then you
decide what their personality is as a result. It's not an exact
science.
If you're going to idealize your partner, which most of us tend to
do anyway when we're first together, it's best to do it in such a
way that the qualities you imagine your lover has match what he
himself likes to think he has. Idealizing, however, is a delicate
balance that may lean too far in the direction of fantasy. A
certain amount of reality is useful. Many of us, realists
especially, like to know we're fully seen, enlarged pores and all.
Otherwise we'd feel like imposters when our partners over-idealize
us.
When I met my first husband, I had recently enjoyed Kahlil Gibran's
pocket-sized classic, The Prophet, and my brain played tricks on me:
since he was from Lebanon just like Gibran, I projected my favorite
values and qualities, as they'd been so sweetly epitomized by Gibran,
onto him. To my barely post-high-school sentimental self, it seemed
a perfect match. In that case, my imaginings turned out to be an
unsustainable illusion. Sometimes we do need to do the cold-eyed (if
not cold-hearted) work of recognizing and toning down such
delusional thinking about our partners.
Generally, though, it's been found that being (reasonably) idealized
by
one's partner, being seen in a more positive light even than we see
ourselves predicts the most satisfied marriages. It takes a certain
wisdom to integrate the annoying with the delightful, totaling up to
a big picture perspective that keeps the positive in the foreground.
We like those who see us at our best. Bea, 61, provides an example.
Her sixty-five-year-old gregarious husband Herb will be sitting
across the aisle from her at breakfast and suddenly say, "God,
you're so beautiful."
"I look like shit," responds Bea in her typical blunt fashion.
Tilting between seeing Herb's hyperbole as a
minor failing she's gotten used to and recognizing it as his way of
loving her, Bea is nonetheless pleased to have her own best version
of herself thus confirmed.
Letitia and Lenny, in their late thirties and married eleven years,
are busy with their jobs and a three-year-old daughter. Letitia
tells me that Lenny says something almost every day "really nice or
deep or thoughtful about how amazing I am to him. I say, 'Stop
telling me that!' Of course I don't want him to stop, and he knows
it."
If the particular attribute we're talking about is a more-or-less
observable one, say hand-eye coordination, or cooking ability, then
it's suitable for a partner's judgment to be close to objective
reality. We like our perceptions verified by the person we love
most. We need our weaknesses as well as our strengths recognized. If
the way they see us is beyond reasonable, we tend to withdraw. It's
not intimate or real.
But when a long-married wife says her husband is the smartest and
funniest man she knows, and that he's always the most stunning man
at any gathering, who are we to argue? Why debate how much of that
glitter is in her love-filled eyes? Especially since he returns the
idealizing favor by telling her repeatedly how beautiful and
wonderful and fabulous she is. If you're not in a relationship
where you find a lot of idealizing going on, no need to fret. Many
happily married men and women can name their partners' flaws as well
as their good points, and they see those negatives and positives and
their own as complementing each other for a harmonious balance.
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