Glimpses of Our Ideal Selves
March 3, 2010
If you haven’t seen it already, I’m alerting you to an awesome article by my buddy, Nick Sparks, on how and why long-term relationships can be so hard to sustain and grow.
My favorite parts:
“I firmly believe that we are attracted to what we’re attracted to because that particular thing happens to be what will most directly cause us to go/grow where and how we need to at that particular point in time.”
“Notice that this theory includes all things that many people could consider unhealthy or negative. While this may be the case in the short term, I believe that these actions are nevertheless the best path for a person to take. Even if it feels like you’re swimming upstream, the current is always carrying you in the right direction.
Attraction to other human being provide us the strongest and most direct path to this personal growth, and therein lies the reason why we are so crazily drawn to other people. I firmly believe that without women, men would end up wallowing in some gutter in the most depressing scenario imaginable, and vice-versa - with the mechanism through which this happens being one of the most brilliantly designed systems in the world.”
“Because these two versions of ourself, the ideal and the reality, are now forced to stare each other down face to face, this point can be especially troubling. We being to feel depression-like withdrawals and other aspects of our life begin to suffer, including work and other relationships. Our openness is replaced by jealousy - and those fears and insecurities that this attraction was put in our place to overcome begin to show their ugly head.
As strange as it sounds, this is a point to celebrate. Up until now, these personal demons remained for the most part under the surface, but through this beautiful process, they are now brought to some level of light where they can actually be fought.”
Play on, The Asian Rake
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2 Responses to “Glimpses of Our Ideal Selves”
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2 Responses to “Glimpses of Our Ideal Selves”
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great post man, really deep. I think everything happens for a reason and it all kind of ties together. We all have to face who are at some point and like you said, its better to address the real self as opposed to the ideal self
Hey Matrix,
Glad you liked it!
It’s really about getting your “real self” to become your “ideal self” as consistently and comprehensively as possible. Think Fight Club here. The journey of Edward Norton’s character to finally and fully become Tyler Durden.
It’s all that nasty, tortuous soul-searching that we’re forced to do after being confronted with the shortcomings of our real selves that is the issue.
The problem is often that we aren’t even fully aware of the shortcomings of our “real selves.”
The brilliance of what Nick points out here is that it’s in our deepest romantic relationships that we have an opportunity to see both our ideal selves (in the honeymoon phase, usually lasting at least the first 3 months) and our weak selves (in the fallout phases). And it presents us with an opportunity to identify and then work on our shortcomings to more stably become our ideal selves.