Episode 84: The “Right” Person

Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now, your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the loving truth. Today, I want to talk to you about this idea of I just need to have the right partner. My marriage would be better if I had the right partner.

Am I with the right partner? I just need to find the right person, and then, then love and relationships will be easy. See, this idea, it's a romanticized idea that someone is, quote, right for us when they're easy to love and they're wrong for us when things get difficult and things get hard or they're more difficult to love. So what do I mean by that? What is easy to love?

Well, so someone who never irritates me, someone who is able to anticipate my needs, someone who sees my heart and gives me the benefit of the doubt. Someone who can read my mind, put my needs before their needs, someone who's never going to make me wrong, and someone who shares common interests and common goals and common values with me. And so essentially, folks, what we're looking for is like a carbon copy of ourselves.

Because if we just had someone just like us, then no one would ever disagree, would they? We'd never have arguments, we'd never have disagreements. We'd never see the world in a different way. Except that that's impossible, right? That we're never going to, quote, find someone who is just like us in every single way. Like, it sounds lovely. This romanticized idea that when I find the right one, they're going to be so easy to love and they're going to be so loving towards me, and we're never going to have heartache and we're never going to hurt each other.

Except that that's just not the reality of existing in relationship on this planet at this time. Right? It's just not. This romanticized idea is actually not helping us because it's setting up an expectation that most of us would look at our marriages and compare it to that expectation and think we're screwed, when what's wrong is our expectation or our idea of love or idea of what constitutes a good or right relationship.

These are actually the ideas that are killing our relationships because we don't have a realistic idea of what it will be like or what it should be. And I think that giving our attention to what our partners will do for us, like what they're going to give to us, creates a very transactional relationship versus how is this relationship going to help me grow? Like, literally, how many people asked themselves that question before they got married?

If our intimate relationships are going to be our greatest teachers, how is this relationship going to help me grow? And by the way, we don't grow, typically from a place of comfort and ease, do we? No, we don't grow. We don't look for new ways of seeing things or new ways of doing things until things get really difficult. And so inevitably, there's going to be difficulties inside this relationship.

How is this person going to help me show up as a better version of me? How are they going to challenge me, inspire me, sometimes force me to do something differently so that I can continue to show up in love? Like, we don't ask those questions because we think in our honeymoon period and our wedding planning period that everything's going to be great and that love is going to be easy, right?

And so it's this idea that is getting us into trouble because no one's really preparing us. And by the way, we don't really want to hear it, that that's not what marriage is. A guy was at the beach this weekend, and both nights on Friday night and Saturday night, there were weddings that were taking place on the beach. And weddings are lovely, right? I always, you know, I love seeing the bride and the groom and the guests and the, like, the whole, you know, people coming together.

We love that. But I always. Whenever I see a wedding, I always think, should I tell them that they're at the starting line and not the finish line? Yeah, probably not. No one's asking me. So then I get back over into my lane, right? We just. We're, most of us come into marriage very ill equipped to do this well, because not only do we not know how to do relationships well, not only do we not have the right expectations of what it's going to be like, but we are still learning about ourselves many times.

And so in the midst of not knowing who we are and what and having a solid expectation or a realistic expectation of what this is going to be, we just are very unprepared to be really successful inside of our relationships. So I have recently become a wee bit obsessed with an author named Alain debutant. So many of you will probably know his work. He's got a lot of books and he runs the school of life.

But this most recent one that I read, it's called the course of love. Honestly, it should be required reading for anyone before we get married. But it will for sure. Kill your idea of this romantic notion of how love and marriage should be. So maybe you don't want to read it before you get married because you want to keep that hope and dream of the Disney princess alive.

But it really does shed some light on our blind spot. So I want to read to you a quote from here that I think is so important. He says the romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the right person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person. Over the long term, we are too varied and peculiar.

There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace. Compatibility is an achievement of love. It shouldn't be. It's precondition. See, we find it easy to love people who think like us and behave like us and make choices like us, but there's no growth there.

And so the right person is the one who is going to keep showing up when it gets hard. And they're going to look for opportunities to grow themselves, not just change their partner, not just convince them to be different, but they're going to look within themselves. They're going to take responsibility for their choices, their actions and their behaviors inside of a relationship. That's a kind of partner that you have something to work with and something to build upon.

Are we willing to grow? Are we willing to navigate those differences? Are we willing to move through the difficulties? And can we be compatible just because we're two people that are doing the best we can to love one another and we just keep showing up, up, over and over again. You know, I think if we look at the romanticized idea of what love is supposed to look like and feel like, then all of our marriages are going to feel doomed.

But that doesn't mean it's true. It means that we have to rethink or recategorize how we think about marriage and how we think about our relationships. Because the. The love story that romanticism promises isn't sustainable. Like, we might be able to exist there in moments, right? And that's lovely. It gets beautiful when I feel that. That ease in my marriage. And honestly, it makes me appreciate those moments because there are times of real challenge and difficulty and times when one or both of us needs to grow in order to move through it.

But we don't know the good stuff without knowing the bad stuff. Right? You don't know what it feels like to be warm and cozy if you never knew, cold and freezing and uncomfortable. Right? And so sometimes the discomfort that we feel in our marriages, if we can be conscious enough, then we can, it can help us really appreciate and be grateful for those moments when things are easy and light.

And it sort of jives with that romantic idea. I mean, I love ease. I love ease in many, many parts of my life. But I also know that we never grow from a place of ease. And I know that I am here on this planet in this life and frankly, in my relationships to help me grow, to help me grow as a woman, as a human being, and to know myself more deeply.

Right? So I hope that this gives you something new to consider because there's so many times inside of a relationship that is struggling where the underlying idea is my partner is the problem. I didn't choose the right partner. I just need to go find the right person. And if I get rid of my partner, my problems are solved. And that's never, ever true. It's always about, am I being the right partner?

Am I showing up to this relationship as the right partner who can create and sustain the kind of loving, connected, committed and soulful relationship that I really want? Am I showing up for that? Am I the person that can create that and can keep it going? Right? That's a very different question than I just need to find the right person who's going to make it all easy. Look, no one's easy.

There's no one. Well, I don't know, maybe there's little kids and puppies that are always easy to love, even when they're difficult. But most of us adults, like no one is really easy to live with, even though we all think we are easy to live with. Like, I think I'm super easy to live with if you see the world as I do. But I promise you, my husband would say there are times not so easy to live with.

So if we're all a bit uneasy to love and a bit challenging to live with, if we start from that premise, maybe our relationships might be a little more successful than this idea of I just want it all to be easy. I just want to find someone who's going to make my life and my relationships and my marriage easy. My friends, what you want is a puppy, not actually a relationship.

All right? I hope that that gives you something to consider that helps you expand your idea of how to be in relationship. All right, until next time, take really good care if you're listening to this podcast, because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage, and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team.

On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.