The Good Enough Love

THE IDEAL THAT DESTROYS THE ACTUAL 💭

There is a version of romantic love that has been assembled from romantic comedies and love songs and the curated relationship content of people who post the edited version of their partnership for an audience who compares it to the unedited version of their own, and this assembled version has become the standard against which actual relationships are measured and found wanting in ways that have nothing to do with the actual quality of the relationships being measured and everything to do with the impossibility of the standard doing the measuring. The assembled ideal contains specific features that no sustained long-term relationship can consistently provide: constant passion, effortless understanding, conflict that resolves cleanly, intimacy that deepens without requiring maintenance, and the specific quality of being chosen enthusiastically every day by someone who has access to the full range of human options and selects you above all of them with visible delight that never fades into the comfortable familiarity of actual extended cohabitation 😤

Real love, the kind that persists through years and through the accumulation of ordinary life and through the development of people who are different at forty than they were at twenty-eight, looks almost nothing like this. It contains periods of considerable warmth and periods of moderate distance. It contains arguments that do not resolve cleanly because the disagreements are about real and persistent differences in values or preferences or communication styles that cannot be solved by a single honest conversation and must instead be managed through ongoing negotiation. It contains desire that is not always urgent because desire in sustained relationships operates according to different rhythms than desire in new relationships and neither rhythm is superior but they feel radically different and the difference can look like loss when it is actually just change.

WHAT GOOD ENOUGH ACTUALLY MEANS 🌟

Good enough does not mean settling for mediocrity. It means releasing the impossible standard and recognizing the relationship you actually have with the clarity that impossibility-comparison prevents. It means acknowledging that your partner's patience with your worst moods is extraordinary even on the days when their particular irritating habit is making you want to relocate. It means recognizing that two people who have chosen to navigate the ordinary difficult beautiful catastrophe of shared life together are doing something genuinely remarkable even when, especially when, the remarkable looks completely unremarkable from the outside.

The psychological research on relationship satisfaction consistently finds that comparison is one of its primary enemies, not comparison to previous partners specifically but the abstract comparison to an idealized standard that the current relationship cannot meet by definition because the idealized standard is not a real relationship, it is an imagination. Real relationships have the same quality that real people have, which is that they contain everything, the wonderful and the frustrating and the meaningful and the mundane, and the ability to find the relationship satisfying depends substantially on the degree to which you are in contact with the actual relationship rather than measuring it against a fantasy.

THE PRACTICE OF APPRECIATION 💕

The practice of seeing your relationship clearly rather than through comparison involves a specific form of attention that is different from the monitoring attention many people bring to their partnerships. Monitoring attention watches for what is missing, for what your partner is not doing, for the gap between the relationship you have and the relationship the comparison standard says you should have. It is surveillance of deficit. The attention that produces satisfaction is the attention that sees what is present rather than what is absent, the attention that is genuinely curious about the actual person rather than performing measurement of their distance from an ideal.

This is not positive thinking in the dismissive sense. It is the accurate observation that relationships contain both what is missing and what is present simultaneously, and that the direction of your attention determines which becomes figure and which becomes ground in your experience of the relationship, and that experience is largely what your relationship is. The good enough love, seen clearly, is usually remarkable. The remarkable love, seen through the lens of impossible comparison, looks insufficient. The lens matters more than most people realize 💛❤️✨