5 ms·

I agree with his characterization of relationship breakdowns. I think the scar tissue is a bit of a tortured analogy. At some point you just have to let shit g

I agree with his characterization of relationship breakdowns. I think the scar tissue is a bit of a tortured analogy. At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” It’s important to have good communication skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit there’s still some underlying pattern that you know is going to come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not? The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I’ve spent years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but it’s better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it’s going to drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can’t just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in its proper place, etc. High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of their life. This is not the norm.

ryanjshaw 3y ago
> But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Use it as motivation to become wealthy enough to afford a cleaner who packs the dishes the way you need them to be packed! Joking aside, I'm not sure if you can meaningfully let go of these kinds of things if you don't address the control issues underlying them.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  This seems like quite an uncharitable reading of the situation. They talked about the manner of packing. If things are packed incorrectly then they may block other things from being cleaned or require another cycle of cleaning, which presumably moves to work onto the other partner or in extreme cases could be indicative of weaponised incompetence.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dymk 3y ago
The author sort of touches on this, although doesn't state it outright (but does refer to compromise) - > And that's really hard to do; I don't have any perfect answers for that; it's communication and compromise. But I generally agree with you. There's a big difference between compromise and letting things go. The author kind of implies that they can't do the latter, and that it's bad to do so ("Well, that seems generous, but it's a really bad idea."), and so to make up for that, they rely on communication instead. Truly letting things go is harder than outright communication (at least, for me). How do you determine what's small enough to let go? I have to make a gamble every time I think "Well, I'll just let this little thing go", because I need to make sure I've actually totally gotten over it. If I don't, then it becomes another paper cut.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  IME I've truly let go if something bothers me less over time. My SO and I were taught to bring things up immediately. Yet that led to (what seem to me) a torrent of complaints that felt very one-sided. My guess is there is a balance. Where little things can be overlooked, yet if they accumulate then it's best to talk about them at the point it's clear they can't be "let go". Ideally before things have gone on too long. Having a qualified, independent third party can also help provide some perspective. Of course all this assumes there isn't evidence folks are just petty and manipulative. Compromise does take two and ideally both will feel there is an equal amount being sacrificed or gained by all. Also I would recommend avoiding faith based counseling. IME their faith often taints their objectivity and generally pollutes both their advice and critical thinking skills. Even for couples who are of the same faith it can be helpful to get help outside the bubble.
hosh 3y ago
Letting shit go is more or less what I hear from those 25+ year Indian couples with arranged marriages (from Netflix show, “Indian Matchmaking”), though they call it “tolerance”. The thing is, how many people truly and honestly let shit go?
- hosh 3y ago
  Continuing from above — in “Indian Matchmaking”, what pops up over and over again is that you will never have “100%” of what you are looking for in a partner. Every young person she helps with always start a list of qualities of their ideal partner, some of them are really small things. Yet despite telling them, it is not “100%”, they can’t let that go even before dating starts. And then you see how it sets the tone for the dates and all the drama that comes of it, and they have not even married yet. I remember watching that and thinking, yeah, that’s obvious. Glad I know better. But thinking about all of this, I realize, it doesn’t end at the dating. Your partner wasn’t “100%”, and as people grow and change, they are not “100%” different ways, over the years. There are different things that comes up in which to let shit go. It might be why arranged marriages and strong cultural values around it works. There is no illusion of an ideal partner to begin with. (And you get the shadow side too, like anything else when there are bad actors)
  - laratied 3y ago
    No doubt. The people I have known in an Indian arranged marriage actually understand relationships. They aren't trying to live in a Disney movie or Goethe novel. My understanding is that Goethe and romanticism really messed up our views in the West about romance. We have unrealistic beliefs from trying to live up to fiction.
    - superposeur 3y ago
      Yes, and music and all other parts of culture too: the lone genius model of human achievement, suffering=greatness, the primacy of emotion, and many other tropes that are now our cultural “defaults”. It’s hard to see clearly because we’re still inside the romantic movement.
ricardobayes 3y ago
Exactly. If you love someone, you need to accept that person fully, flaws included. Trying to "correct" or change someone will never work out.
pdonis 3y ago
> At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. I think this is a very important point that is not addressed in the article. The article basically describes avoiding scar tissue as resolving conflicts so there is "zero lingering animosity". And sometimes (actually quite often, I think), only one person of the two in the relationship is prone to feeling any animosity about how a particular conflict got resolved. And in most (if not all) such cases, the best way to avoid the scar tissue is exactly what you say: let it go. Is it really worth feeling even a little smidgen of animosity towards this person, with whom you have a relationship lasting many years or decades, because of this one little thing? At the very least I think one needs to ask oneself that question, before embarking on the kinds of conflict resolution that the article describes.
- zenonu 3y ago
  Letting go is so important because it what lets you move on. Without letting go, I've seen people who anticipate the situation happening again every time the context is the same. They relive the stress/situation even though nothing bad is actually happening, and then resent their partner once more for it. It's a never-ending cycle of pain and anger. Please just make the decision to leave it!
celeritascelery 3y ago
I had a relationship counselor tell me once “there are three secrets to a successful long-term relationship: forgive, forgive, forgive.” It’s kind of the antithesis of the scar tissue theory where you need to make sure every grievance is addressed.

ryanjshaw 3y ago

> But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Use it as motivation to become wealthy enough to afford a cleaner who packs the dishes the way you need them to be packed! Joking aside, I'm not sure if you can meaningfully let go of these kinds of things if you don't address the control issues underlying them.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
This seems like quite an uncharitable reading of the situation. They talked about the manner of packing. If things are packed incorrectly then they may block other things from being cleaned or require another cycle of cleaning, which presumably moves to work onto the other partner or in extreme cases could be indicative of weaponised incompetence.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

dymk 3y ago

The author sort of touches on this, although doesn't state it outright (but does refer to compromise) - > And that's really hard to do; I don't have any perfect answers for that; it's communication and compromise. But I generally agree with you. There's a big difference between compromise and letting things go. The author kind of implies that they can't do the latter, and that it's bad to do so ("Well, that seems generous, but it's a really bad idea."), and so to make up for that, they rely on communication instead. Truly letting things go is harder than outright communication (at least, for me). How do you determine what's small enough to let go? I have to make a gamble every time I think "Well, I'll just let this little thing go", because I need to make sure I've actually totally gotten over it. If I don't, then it becomes another paper cut.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
IME I've truly let go if something bothers me less over time. My SO and I were taught to bring things up immediately. Yet that led to (what seem to me) a torrent of complaints that felt very one-sided. My guess is there is a balance. Where little things can be overlooked, yet if they accumulate then it's best to talk about them at the point it's clear they can't be "let go". Ideally before things have gone on too long. Having a qualified, independent third party can also help provide some perspective. Of course all this assumes there isn't evidence folks are just petty and manipulative. Compromise does take two and ideally both will feel there is an equal amount being sacrificed or gained by all. Also I would recommend avoiding faith based counseling. IME their faith often taints their objectivity and generally pollutes both their advice and critical thinking skills. Even for couples who are of the same faith it can be helpful to get help outside the bubble.

hosh 3y ago

Letting shit go is more or less what I hear from those 25+ year Indian couples with arranged marriages (from Netflix show, “Indian Matchmaking”), though they call it “tolerance”. The thing is, how many people truly and honestly let shit go?

hosh 3y ago
Continuing from above — in “Indian Matchmaking”, what pops up over and over again is that you will never have “100%” of what you are looking for in a partner. Every young person she helps with always start a list of qualities of their ideal partner, some of them are really small things. Yet despite telling them, it is not “100%”, they can’t let that go even before dating starts. And then you see how it sets the tone for the dates and all the drama that comes of it, and they have not even married yet. I remember watching that and thinking, yeah, that’s obvious. Glad I know better. But thinking about all of this, I realize, it doesn’t end at the dating. Your partner wasn’t “100%”, and as people grow and change, they are not “100%” different ways, over the years. There are different things that comes up in which to let shit go. It might be why arranged marriages and strong cultural values around it works. There is no illusion of an ideal partner to begin with. (And you get the shadow side too, like anything else when there are bad actors)
- laratied 3y ago
  No doubt. The people I have known in an Indian arranged marriage actually understand relationships. They aren't trying to live in a Disney movie or Goethe novel. My understanding is that Goethe and romanticism really messed up our views in the West about romance. We have unrealistic beliefs from trying to live up to fiction.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    Yes, and music and all other parts of culture too: the lone genius model of human achievement, suffering=greatness, the primacy of emotion, and many other tropes that are now our cultural “defaults”. It’s hard to see clearly because we’re still inside the romantic movement.

ricardobayes 3y ago

Exactly. If you love someone, you need to accept that person fully, flaws included. Trying to "correct" or change someone will never work out.

pdonis 3y ago

> At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. I think this is a very important point that is not addressed in the article. The article basically describes avoiding scar tissue as resolving conflicts so there is "zero lingering animosity". And sometimes (actually quite often, I think), only one person of the two in the relationship is prone to feeling any animosity about how a particular conflict got resolved. And in most (if not all) such cases, the best way to avoid the scar tissue is exactly what you say: let it go. Is it really worth feeling even a little smidgen of animosity towards this person, with whom you have a relationship lasting many years or decades, because of this one little thing? At the very least I think one needs to ask oneself that question, before embarking on the kinds of conflict resolution that the article describes.

zenonu 3y ago
Letting go is so important because it what lets you move on. Without letting go, I've seen people who anticipate the situation happening again every time the context is the same. They relive the stress/situation even though nothing bad is actually happening, and then resent their partner once more for it. It's a never-ending cycle of pain and anger. Please just make the decision to leave it!

celeritascelery 3y ago

I had a relationship counselor tell me once “there are three secrets to a successful long-term relationship: forgive, forgive, forgive.” It’s kind of the antithesis of the scar tissue theory where you need to make sure every grievance is addressed.