Friday, July 12, 2024

Hoping A Romantic Partnership Will Resolve Personal Problems

Some people might seek out romantic relationships and cling to them in the hopes that all of their personal problems, many of which could have nothing to do with romantic loneliness or burning sexual attraction, will disappear.  Dating and marriage are not statuses that resolve irrelevant woes or fix a person, especially if the problem is a moral fault.  Someone who is a slave to assumptions and contradictions is not going to have their worldview corrected by marriage; while it does not hurt to have the support of a loving partner, they are not going to shed egoism, hypocrisy, or philosophical apathy just because they are suddenly married.

For a less inherently dramatic example, a person who is insecure (which is on its own not an ideological or moral error) will very likely not be "cured" by a romantic relationship, because the issue was never really them being in a relationship, but what they have assumed and/or felt about themself.  Depending on them as an individual, they might have just used their romantic partner as either a crutch to intentionally neglect addressing their own problems or they would have treated their partner as the cause of the insecurity, when they are the one who brought it into the relationship.

Without actually working on their worldview, priorities, psychological problems, or actions as needed, they will end up doing one of two things.  They will at best severely hinder the quality of the relationship even if neither member notices or does anything about it.  At worst, the relationship will be almost hopelessly crippled and both people will suffer heavily for it.  Their blame might be misdirected towards one false cause or another, but the partner who refuses to actually forsake assumptions, give up emotionalism, and make any changes necessary is really devastating the connection they supposedly love.

If someone is not stable apart from you, they are not truly stable.  They are instead able to situationally suppress aspects of themselves in order to try to convince themself or others that they are not afflicted by whatever their delusion or trial is.  No, having trauma, complex emotions, or unmet expectations is not a delusion, even though these things are almost never handled well by non-rationalists and even then are only navigated well by them on accident.  When pain can be deeply challenging for perfect rationalists, though they never use it as an alleged justification to err, some suffering is almost unbearable as a non-rationalist.

It is the personal pain or inconvenience of confronting these things and addressing them introspectively (and if done correctly, rationalistically) or by interpersonal communication that makes them such stubborn difficulties, and non-rationalists do not even know assumptions from truth and knowledge, so of course they would be prone to blind errors.  There is relief from at least some problems that can be found, however, in simply embracing the truth and in knowing oneself in light of reason and living accordingly.  A romantic relationship where both partners submit to reason in all things is certainly going to be far easier, though the trials of life can still rage, than it could ever otherwise be.

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