There is a Right Way to Invest in a Relationship
By: Jason Henry
Tags: Life, Love, Dating, Life Lessons, Relationships

We have a tendency to make our significant others our entire world. Our everything.

We saw our elders do it, we saw our peers do it, we saw it in movies, we heard it in music and so we naturally continued the maladaptive act.

We never stopped to consider that we were making our partners too important. Yes, they’re called the “significant other” but we take it to an extreme.

Hell, maybe we should do away with that title because your romantic partner isn’t supposed to be more significant than anyone else in your life.

I know that sentiment just raised some eyebrows, and that is exactly my point. Why should your romantic partner be more important than your other relationships?

Why should they supersede friendships that have been fostered since high school? Why should they surpass family? Why should they exceed your relationship with yourself?

Why is that the default? Of course you could have had a troubled upbringing and so family is a touchy subject and your friends might have turned out to be hypocrites, but that doesn’t mean that your romantic partner gets the Most Valuable Person trophy since everyone else was crap.

In a few months to a few years, you might find that they are just as unscrupulous as your previous platonic relationships. And if you’ve lived long enough, you already know this to be true because you either saw it or experienced it.

But making our partners our everything gets even more insidious because of an additional fallacy.

We think that if we pour a ton of investment into someone and our relationship with them, then we will get an awesome return.

It isn’t true for stocks and it isn’t true for relationships. Some stocks and some people are far more reliable than others but just because you give love, you want things to work and you make this person super-important, doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be heartbroken.

To be honest, you would be less heartbroken if you were more sober in your approach to romance.

I have been more upset for a near-relationship than for an actual relationship. Why? Because in the near-relationship I elevated this person above all others while in the actual relationship, I suspected I would be cheated on and so I never got too emotionally entangled.

And when it was confirmed that there was someone else, I just kept it moving. I had no ill will and I didn’t feel bad.

I didn’t over-invest in the same way I did in other relationships, but I did invest my heart, time and attention. I was as good a boyfriend to her as I was in any other relationship, but if there was a difference it was the heightened level of calm I felt inside.

Going forward, I can only advocate for us to at least consider that a romantic partner is no more important than any other relationship in our lives.

In the same way we can invest in others with no fuss and within the limits of reason and emotional safety, we can do this for our romantic partners.

We do this by:

- making and keeping dates to see each other; really sharing in the moment when we link up,

- sharing in common interests, activities and topics of discussion,

- going through tough times but honoring the relationship enough to work out differences, and

- being honest about who we are, what we believe, what we feel and what our boundaries are.

That’s it. If you’re doing anything else you’re doing too much. Daydreaming about some fantastic future isn’t here. Projecting some ideal onto your beloved isn’t here. Giving love in order to get love isn’t here.

If you were doing this in any other kind of relationship, that would be weird and you would only frustrate yourself. So why do it for your romantic relationships?