No significant writing updates for February, just a blog post on a topic I wanted to talk about (I expect this trend to continue for a few more months honestly, until the two beagles grow up a little bit more)!
Besides the obvious fact that in February we celebrate Valentine’s day – whether you genuinely enjoy it or see it as a cynical attempt by the companies to cash in – the same month also marked 5 years of me and my wonderful wife Claire, being happily married. So I could say this was a blog post years in the making.
I have always wanted to find someone to share my life with. To me, love was (and is) one of the most important things in my life. As a result, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it through the years.
That led me to develop my own ideas on a healthy and successful relationship and I tried to share them with others because sharing is caring. Right?
Well, I talked about this very topic to any friend that would listen and I often times received rebuttals and skepticism. In fact, I was even told I should do the opposite. But me, being the stubborn person that I am, I was convinced of my ideas and kept pursuing relationships in the way I wanted, trying to meet people in real life and online (specifically, reddit.com/r/r4r ).
Mid June of 2016, there was a Reddit post from this girl from the U.S., looking for an adventure. We began talking on Reddit, moved to google hangouts and went from there. Text only at first, then pictures, voice call and finally video – you could say we were even more extreme than the recent Netflix show Love is Blind!
In a span of the first 3-4 days (depending on how you look at it, there was a 7 hour time zone difference between us) we knew we wanted to get married. All that remained was to meet in person and … well; we would’ve been married within the time she was visiting me in August. Except my country wouldn’t allow that because she stayed for less than two weeks.
Anyway, it turns out it was a good thing we didn’t do it as that would’ve complicated my immigration to the U.S. to be with her. We had to convince the U.S. government that we’re not a sham and have gotten the seal of approval of a “bona fide” marriage. In fact, even our interrogating officer stated that seeing couples who are truly in love is what makes his job worth it.
So, how did we do it? How was I so confident this was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with?
I’ll try to condense my ideas / theory in three steps, with some caveats that I’ll outline and one personal example.
Step 1 – Know yourself
Before you ever hope to be with anyone else, you need to understand yourself and your story. Be comfortable and happy with who you are. The good, the bad and the ugly, all of it. This is of course easier said than done. Some obvious suggestions are to think about it, keep a journal, talk to other people, explore fictional or real stories of others through reading, watching and playing.
In other words, the journey to find love begins by truly understanding what you care about most. Your values. My suggestion is to begin by writing down a simple list, as extensive at needed. Some examples may include: love and being loved, family, music, video games, philosophy, knowledge, etc…
Once you get a broad idea of your values, imagine each of them as a single point in space. Add onto it, like you would start making a sphere or ball from dirt, dough, sand or snow. Bit by bit. Consider the inns and outs of your wants, needs and desires and be as specific as possible until you feel that you have a good grasp on each value before moving to the next.
Important Note
For most people our brain isn’t fully developed / doesn’t stop growing and changing until we’re about 25 years old. As a result of that, even if we know ourselves fairly well for our own age (all things considered), we will still change significantly and other people might not understand it. Similarly, if in your past you always put other people before you, or, have really neglected yourself in one way or another, it will take a considerable effort to get to know yourself.
You might want to consider counseling if you’re really struggling with this point.
Personal Example
One starting point for me would be video games. I have played them all of my life and will continue to do so (barring something crazy happening). And to make it more specific, I do sometimes enjoy multiplayer games, especially couch coop ones. Otherwise, I love playing single player games with a great story or in some cases a fun gameplay loop, regardless of the genre.
And so on and so on … I could continue this by going into specific favorites, most memorable moments, whatever else. Do the same with any other values that are important to you.
Step 2 – Understand what you’re comfortable with in relationships
So now you have a good idea on who you are, what you value and potentially where you want to go. Awesome, but what next?
Taking your most important values, it is time to figure out your compatibility range. You can think of getting the dough ball from earlier and stretching it out as if you’re making pizza. For easier representation, I suggest thinking of an interval (so 2D instead of 3D). Start from where your value is at and see how far away from it you can go and still be comfortable.
The extremes of the interval that you come up with are your limits. If someone that you’re trying to date (or even just to be friends with for that matter) is outside of the range with their own interval, they will likely be a poor fit for you. This applies to your main values – core values if you will. And even then, life experiences can change us and we can absolutely go beyond what we initially thought. If that’s the case, go back to the first step and readjust.
So basically, the more your two intervals overlap, the better. They’re never going to be the same and that’s the beauty of exploring a relationship and keeping it interesting. And let me be very blunt here for a moment – if we dated a complete copy of ourselves, we’d get bored quickly or double annoyed for any of the things we find annoying with ourselves.
Important Note
What can be a huge roadblock in my opinion is the idea of “courting”. That fantasy of having to wow, charm and seduce your potential partner. Essentially, to present your best self so that you “win” your match. I was even told by some of my friends that I should be less of myself and hide my weird parts.
That sort of advice is great if you’re looking for one night stands, or, you’re just trying to do the biology’s bidding (and produce good offspring). Plenty of animals do it. But if you’re trying to find a lifelong partner? Yeah, good luck in keeping that pretense up. Be your true self as much as you can.
Personal Example
| Lower Extreme (the very least) | Upper Extreme (the most) |
|---|---|
| Someone not playing games at all, but understanding gaming as a passion | Someone playing games all the time, not caring about any other form of entertainment |
In practice, I could never be with someone who thinks games are a waste of time. At the very least, they need to understand that like with any passion, sometimes I can spend considerable amount of time playing – especially when a game is released that I was looking forward to. It would also likely be problematic if I dated someone who said they are “open” to trying games, but never really played them. That sentiment could easily turn into them eventually deciding that games are a waste of time. Probably not worth risking it.
On the other end of the interval, a person who only plays games and never watches any movies or series, or reads or enjoys any kind of other storytelling medium, would alienate me as well. Especially if they tried to convince me to game all the time.
I found my perfect match with Claire in the middle of it all. She plays video games but is not obsessed with them. We have different favorites but there is also quite a bit of overlap, as we both enjoy spending entire days getting lost in Minecraft, surviving Don’t Starve together or others. She also enjoys watching (and shit talking) me play through a story driven game that catches her attention and we both tried each others favorite titles.
Step 3 – The endgame
At the end of the day, no matter how many books you read or videos you watch, you have to experience it yourself. Meeting other people, dating, getting to know yourself better. Rinse and repeat, step 1 and step 2.
Once those steps are really well defined, you’ll want to focus your energy on talking about the bigger of the values first to a potential lifetime partner, only gradually exploring the smaller ones later in a relationship.
A lot of different topics will naturally flow in a good conversation, but in particular, the way that me and Claire knew we wanted to get married so quick is that we had really in-depth conversations about the most important topics to us in the first few days. This doesn’t mean that we know everything about each other all the time, but the small differences make our dynamic interesting and fun instead of deal-breaking.
All of the above could also describe a really good friendship. And a lot of people will tell you that if you marry, you want to marry your best friend.
So what’s missing? Physical attraction and sexual compatibility.
I’m not trying to be superficial, but that really is it. You absolutely can have a great relationship with someone and not care about their looks at all, or their sex drive. But when we’re talking about a lifelong partner, that’s an entirely different story.
If you find somebody absolutely revolting, well then suck as it may, that’s not a person you want to pursue a romantic relationship with. Mind you, I’m not talking about what the society at large finds acceptable. The idolizing of certain beauty standards is bullshit anyway. I mean your own personal sense of who you find attractive. Emotional connection will make people wonderful in your eyes, but it’s not an all-encompassing thing either.
Last but not least, the truth to the matter is that sex is wonderful, but it can also complicated, especially with lack of education in regards. Instilling in girls that it’s wrong for them to feel pleasure should be considered a crime against humanity. Likewise, telling boys that their dick is all that they will ever need (i.e. no need for sex toys) is also completely unrealistic. What are your sex drives? What type of stuff are you into? It may be easy to discount this part and say that with great emotional connection comes great sex, but that’s not always the case.
Whenever you encounter any discrepancies, be it emotional or physical in nature, the question that you want to ask yourself is, “Do I care?” – just like I said at the beginning of step 3, make sure to revisit step 1 and step 2. So often I heard people say things like, “But he/she said that they will change!” or “They’ll grow out of it.” or “They’ll see / change their mind.” or even “They would be perfect, except for xyz.”
If you have to say “except” that means they aren’t perfect for you. What if they don’t change? That is always a possibility for whatever reason – are you prepared to live with that?
I honestly wish everyone to have a good and happy life story. If you see yourself as a forever bachelor / bachelorette, that’s perfectly fine. But so many people want (or think they want) a happy love story, ultimately settling for something less then.
Like the title of one South Park episode: Make Love, not Warcraft. In all seriousness, toxic and unhappy relationships have long reaching consequences. Not just for the couple in question, but also for the future generations that they may be raising, as well as people they come in contact with. The world would be a better place with more love and less war.
Tomo Umer 
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