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  • One of the great pleasures of relationships is the sense that another person knows us deeply.

  • While we are either ignored or misrepresented by most of the world,

  • in our relationships we can thrive from a gratifying sense that out identity has been accurately

  • tracked, drawn, and committed to memory.

  • They know our favourite foods, our childhood traumas,

  • our quirks around travel, our morning habits, and our ambivalent feelings about certain friends.

  • But it is the extent and overall accuracy of this knowledge

  • that can provoke sudden moments of claustrophobic irritation

  • when our partners use their privileged overview of our characters to level a claim about who we are

  • that seems to reduce, caricature, or limit us unduly,

  • and is blind to our evolutions and aspirations for change.

  • "Don't be silly! You're not someone who ever enjoys holidays." they might assert with the

  • confidence and authority of someone who's shared our bed for close to a decade,

  • or they might say "That's far too late for you.

  • You're always asleep by ten."

  • or, "You've never liked dancing.",

  • or, with real surprise when we come back from the library, "But you don't even like books about politics!",

  • or, to the attendant at the deli counter, "No, no, no. They don't like pickles."

  • The comments and the sure manner of their delivery reflect an experience of us built up over time

  • through the patient work of love

  • but they can also prove wholly enraging.

  • It feels as if the authority that the lover possesses has malignly been deployed to fix us into a role

  • that actually no longer feels quite true.

  • They're telling us who we are, the nicest thing in theory,

  • but getting it rather wrong, which is the about worst thing in practice.

  • Though a particular trait might admittedly have existed for many years,

  • we may, beneath the surface, quietly be attempting to change.

  • We are tentatively trying to evolve.

  • We no longer want to remain who we once were in every detail.

  • We have new, original, aspirations.

  • We want to shed our skins.

  • We're trying to open ourselves up to different experiences.

  • We maybe want to give pickles a go.

  • And yet the partner has set themselves up as the jealous guardian of a self we no longer quite identify with.

  • They insist that who we are now claiming to be must be false, pretentious, mean spirited

  • or an attempt to hoodwink others,

  • all because it isn't who we have traditionally been.

  • It's clear that, alongside physical development, we are all engaged in a lifelong process of physiological evolution

  • which is far harder to spot, to discuss, and give room for in others.

  • Because we look more or less the same from the outside

  • those around us naturally assume that we must remain, more or less, the same on the inside too.

  • Yet we are continually on the way to discovering new sides of ourselves.

  • We're shedding allegiances, stretching ourselves in unfamiliar directions,

  • and clearing out irrelevant positions and enthusiasms.

  • Perhaps we're gaining a new zone of confidence at work,

  • or we're getting more cautious and circumspect where we were once rather reckless.

  • We might be discovering the beginnings of a new kind of passion for the arts

  • where we used to be quite judgemental,

  • or perhaps we're firming up certain opinions around money or politics.

  • These changes may not yet be very clear, even to us;

  • there are no birthdays to mark them, or public occasions to lend them weight.

  • We can't easily explain them to our partner and may not be too sure how to make them plausible.

  • And yet the changes matter to us hugely.

  • They are, in a way the most important things going on in our inner lives right now

  • and we are therefore acutely sensitive to anyone who might sweep away, or with a mocking laugh

  • destroy the tentative foundations of our future selves.

  • Children show us most clearly the passions unleashed

  • when another person holds us too tightly to an earlier version of ourselves.

  • At a party a parent might explain of her child "Oh, he's five."

  • Only to find the child approaching them a moment later and protesting in an intense angry whisper,

  • "That's not true at all! I'm five and three quarters next Tuesday."

  • Giving due weight to our evolutions, be they bodily or emotional, can matter an awful lot.

  • That's why we can find ourselves in such intense arguments when a partner makes a remark that

  • would have interested the person we used to be back in the spring,

  • or they make a criticism which could have been very true of our outlook at Christmas,

  • or buys a jacket we would have loved three summers ago.

  • What rankles is the static picture of who we are that's implied in what our partner has done

  • and that defends the part of us that associates intimacy with being given the space to evolve.

  • Despite their love out partner hasn't kept pace with our growth.

  • They failed to be sympathetic to the impulse for change.

  • They are fixing us too tightly to a portrait that, though it was once satisfying, is truly no longer accurate.

  • The partner isn't being mean.

  • Change is frightening because the one evolution we're all terrified of

  • is the kind that will take our beloveds away from us.

  • The reason we get stubborn about a new love of pickles may be that it stands as an awful harbinger of

  • what might be a new love for, say, another person.

  • The ideal solution would be to develop a view of the essential normality

  • and unthreatening nature of growth.

  • We will all, over a long term relationship, be growing in a range of ways

  • which can undermine any settled claim by one person to 'know' the other.

  • What we grasp of our partner can only ever be partial an temporary and we shouldn't grow

  • jealous or angry on that score alone.

  • We're not like books, written once and shelved in a static library.

  • We are like continuously updated, edited, and expanded online texts,

  • where a core set of themes is daily enriched and nuanced live before our eyes.

  • True love requires us to allow our partner to become someone rather different than they were

  • when we met them

  • and to welcome their evolutions, rather than use the portrait we painted of them at the start,

  • as the fixed reference point from which any deviation has to be considered a disloyalty.

  • The creature who emerges from they chrysalis is likely to love us more intelligently and deeply

  • as they are to want to fly away to someone new.

  • We should use the phrase "I don't really understand you anymore." not as a despairing exclamation,

  • but as a hopeful call to renew our sources of intimate insight.

  • It's common to accuse long term relationships of being a bit boring,

  • but our tendency to evolve offers us a way out of the limitations of monogamy.

  • We are, if we are correctly attuned to the phenomenon, only ever with one person for a very short time.

  • In truth we cohabit with a constantly shifting array of people who just happen to have the same name,

  • and inhabit more or less the same body, and lie next to us in similar ways in bed,

  • yet, beyond these common points, such are the differences they may really just as well

  • sometimes be wholly new people.

  • We can, in one relationship, without drama, enjoy an array of new lovers, embracing all the different versions

  • of the one person we are with.

  • Our relationship reboot cards inspire conversations that can help to rekindle love between you and your partner.

  • For more click the link now.

One of the great pleasures of relationships is the sense that another person knows us deeply.

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