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Partners
It’s not my most salient character trait, but I’m wildly fond of online quizzes. Who doesn’t want to know which Game of Thrones character they resemble or which vegetable choice would make you more likely to be a psychopathic murderer?
But while I’m not silly enough to take any of these seriously (Tyrion Lannister and kale), there are moments when I come across a quiz that sparks a deeper conversation for me.
‘Do you cohabit with a partner you like and love?’ is a question that was posed in my most recent digital procrastination mechanism.
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It was a ‘Happiness Test’ presented by the Blue Zone project, a collection of lifestyle and eating plans based on those of some of the happiest, healthiest and longest living people in the world.
It’s a powerful question, because the implications inherent in the answer you give are so broad and so telling.
Not only does it reveal the state of your relationship with your partner and the context you find yourself in, but the state of your relationship with yourself and your sense of personal power.
It reveals how you define love and what you accept for yourself. What’s the dealio yo if ‘like’ isn’t automatically part of the whole when you ‘love’.
Depressingly, I’m privy to too many conversations that reveal dysfunctional relationships where people put each other through hell – actively disliking everything about each other – in the name of ‘love’.
A while back, I sat opposite someone who described the verbal, emotional and financial abuse that had become the norm for their household. There were screaming matches, threats, threats about threats, manipulations … she despised him and he wanted everything about her to be different.
More recently, I listened to a woman spend hours talking about how awful everything about her life and relationship is, how terrible her husband is, and all the things he is incapable of doing, how drained and used she feels…
You know how each of these conversations ended?
‘But I love them, so I won’t leave.’
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If you’re using the word ‘love’ when you should be using ‘enmeshed’, you’ve got problems.
The reasons people find themselves ‘trapped’ by their circumstances of disliking the person they apparently love are manifold, but the end result is the same: deep, undeniable dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
So: Do you like the partner you claim to love? And do you love yourself enough to leave the partner you don’t?
Yes, my friends. Sometimes procrastinary quizzes do deliver some good. Even when it has more to do with life than imaginary TV characters and leafy psychopathy.
Follow Dorothy Black on her blog and on Twitter.
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