I need you to make an effort to "get" me

My number one need from a partner

Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash

This week, my therapist* asked me what my ‘non-negotiables’ are in a life partner.

“A mutual effort to understand one another, especially when we don’t agree,” was my immediate number one.

It’s taken a while to get to this sentence, to the deep essence of what’s important to me.

I once wrote under the “What I’m looking for” heading on a dating app: “Someone who gets me. And gets that I need him to get me. And vice versa.” Cue the response from one or two men: “How hard is it to ‘get’ you?” This made me delete what I’d written and question myself, but with time I now hold firm to this sentiment.

There are a few other things on my list of life partner personality needs such as kindness in general and especially to me, but the effort to understand each other thing is my absolute pole position factor.

If you don’t make the effort to understand each other, then you might find your partner divorces you because you leave dirty plates by the sink (this is a real thing that happened to Matthew Fray, who has since made a career out of helping people avoid this situation). That might sound extreme, but it’s a crystallisation of a kind of willful misunderstanding: One person explains to the other that they value a tidy home, and the other person disregards this, because what does one plate/mug/bowl matter? They leave stuff by the sink over and over again, and eventually the first person gets fed up with not being seen, heard or listened to by the second, and thinks “fuck this, I’m out.”

Aside from not making the effort to understand someone, I think we can also fall into the trap of thinking that we understand people based on what we assume we know about them. We all create memories around people, images of who they are, what they said, the kinds of things they like.

How many times have you had a conversation that starts something like: “I told you that last week,” or: “Don’t you remember, I said I couldn’t do so and so?” or: “I thought you prefer …”? or: “I didn’t say that”? Whether you think you heard someone tell you something last week, last year, or in your childhood, as Queen Elizabeth once sagely said: “Recollections may vary.”

And, more than we might like to imagine, I think we get those recollections wrong.

The truth is, we can never completely know another person, understand their motivations, and certainly not their feelings. And I reckon the earlier we let ourselves accept that we are likely to fundamentally misunderstand others, the sooner we can approach them with openness, care and lack of judgement.

We could even set off from a point of acknowledging that we won’t really understand anyone, whether they’re a stranger, acquaintance, friend, colleague, family member or lover, though we may assume that the longer we have “known” someone, the better we understand them. If we think we really know someone, we’ll have certain expectations of them - and maybe that can set us up for disappointment.

Which brings me to a bigger question. Do you really know yourself? I mean have you actually worked out who you are, what motivates you and why? Do you understand why you do whatever it is you do, from eating three mini wrapped chocolates in a row – and then wishing you hadn’t – to something “bigger,” like drinking too much alcohol or hiding yourself away when you’re feel low or staying in a job you don’t like, or with a partner you don’t like?

Have you noticed that you’re a ruminator, with the same thoughts rumbling around your head about yourself so much that you believe them? And have you probed the more positive aspects of you, like what it is you love about dancing or music?

Let’s take the chocolate example. Why is it that, as I was writing this earlier in the week, I ate three Cadbury’s Heroes, getting up from my desk at my co-working place to walk to the table to open the jar to pick out a tiny, shiny purple parcel, sitting down, unwrapping it, eating it, and then getting up to do the same thing again, and again? I had supposedly “given up” chocolate for Lent in the hope of breaking my sugar craving, but instead I broke my promise to myself, which I am not very proud of.

There are multiple reasons behind my chocolate “fail,” ranging from the fact that sweet treats are sold in twinkly packaging and have been ever since my childhood, when “Sunday sweets” was a thing in my family (evoking feelings of nostalgia, belonging), to my state of being (tired, a bit emosh), to feelings of “fuck it” (what difference does three chocolates make anyway?).

Essentially, the chocolate marketing gods know all of these things - in the sense that they are aware that their goodies are tied up with all kinds of emotions for me and for millions of others for whom cocoa plus glucose-fructose syrup plus dried egg whites and whey permeate powder present an irresistible combination wrapped in a jewel-like package. Gah!

I mean, even the name Heroes is clever. You’re a hero - go on, have a mini chocolate. You deserve it. What a day you’ve had! Multiple fires fought, many mouths fed and abundant papers pushed. It’s YOU time. And heroes don’t need to stop at eating one chocolate. No! Have another, and another, and another… you get my drift.

Fuck, how did I get from: “You can never truly know anyone else, or yourself” to: “You’re a hero, have a handful of mini chocolates”?! Hell, maybe the only person who really understands me is the Heroes marketing person at Cadbury?! This is my brain right now, a brain I told co-worker was in “neutral”mode. Clearly not. (I blame all the invert sugar syrup and barley malt extract.)

Right. Back to me. No. I mean back to other people. People who aren’t me. And on me trying to understand them.

Lately, I have been doing a thing called “active listening,” where someone tells me something (or “shares,” in modern parlance - do you also hate this word? Especially when the press says one person “shares” a child with another. Urghhhhh. Please stop with the sharing!), and then I tell them what I heard them say.

Active listening isn’t about memorising what the other person says and parroting it back, it’s about taking it in, asking for clarification on any points I don’t understand, and then saying in my own words what I think they said. And the: “What I think they said” is the key bit. One person can never completely understand another, but making an effort to go as far as I can in understanding someone – and in being understood – is so important.

And it’s why I write this. I write to try to “get” myself. I write to see what I’m thinking. I write so other people can see what I’m thinking. I write to be seen. To see. To explore. To show you that you’re not alone if you have similar random thoughts that I do, or feel a bit like I do, or are scared of what I’m scared of (eating too many Heroes and becoming the opposite), or fear being misunderstood.

I’m now typing this today, Sunday, on the way back from ecstatic dance, where there was a woman in a bright green fitness set gyrating next to a drummer, and a tall man with his hair in a bun, and another with blue tattooed feet, and a woman wearing a large, orange polo shirt as a skirt, where the DJ welcomed everyone to a “safe container” to “share the journey” and we all nodded, and where, on the way back to the train station, I saw a man with a bag that stated: “Vulnerability is the new black.” I wanted to howl with laughter at some of these things. Is this a good example of me trying to understand people? Not really. Oh gawd. Seems I have some more “work” to do with my therapist this week.

* I use Headstrong Counselling, a low-cost service where clients are matched with trainee therapists.

Other things: