Sometimes You Love A Person

Ulla loves Frank, yet she wants to fundamentally change him. Our author explains how to recognize if you truly like your partner – and which questions determine the fate of a relationship.

We discussed what constitutes a happy relationship. However, “happy” is also an unfortunate term, because who is always happy, and happiness can’t be the ultimate goal of a relationship. But then what is the ultimate goal? Does it even exist, and if so, can it be defined in general terms? Isn’t every relationship and every person different?

In the discussion, I suggested starting with couples who genuinely like each other and enjoy and value each other’s company, regardless of the crises and difficulties they face. Crucially, it also depends on how well they can support, endure, or sustain each other in difficult situations, and how they feel in each other’s presence. I consider this shared sense of life more important than attraction, and perhaps even love.

My husband always made me feel like “anything is possible.” No crazy idea, no dream was too big. He believed in me and in us. He took me seriously, with every thought, every idea. If something excited me, then for him that was a sign that it was important and interesting.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for myself. I was the doubter in our relationship. I thought it was my job to keep us grounded. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t? But I do believe that a relationship needs balancing forces. Ideally, the bolder partner is inspired by the other’s level-headedness—and vice versa. It becomes difficult when both start defending their positions and one becomes increasingly reckless because the other is holding back more and more.

There are many couples who function well together but don’t really like each other or can’t stand certain aspects or traits of the other. Ulla can’t accept that Frank is so “unambitious” and has such boring friends. Frank has a good job and is content with it. He doesn’t do more than necessary. His free time is more important to him than his work, and he enjoys drinking beer with his friends, who feel the same way. Ulla says she loves Frank, but she despises his outlook on life.

But then love wouldn’t be so crucial in a relationship. Or, a state is called love even though it isn’t. You can believe you love someone and at the same time find their friends embarrassing, ridicule their interests, not take their work seriously, consider their decisions cowardly, and sometimes find their way of speaking unbearable. You can miss them, have sex with them, own a house together, and still wish they were different.

With someone comes a whole world. You yourself become a different person when you’re with them. A person can be wonderful and yet still bring out a version of you that you don’t particularly like. Perhaps you become more anxious, more compliant, more insecure, or more artificial. With someone else, you suddenly dare to do things you never would have done before, or you become funnier, more generous, and wiser. Just because you love someone doesn’t say anything about whether you can live well with them.

Karla, for example, is very happy with her new husband, but doesn’t want to show him to her friends. She’s ashamed of him. No one knows why, because we’ve never actually seen him. Is he hideous, fat as a whale, or short and dumb as a beetle? No one knows. Is it still a good relationship? No one but Karla can decide that. But maybe even Karla can’t.

Sometimes you’re convinced for years that you’re in a good relationship, and only later realize who you’ve become in it. Conversely, outsiders might consider a relationship completely wrong, while the two people involved get along perfectly. Karla and her boyfriend apparently have a world in which they’re happy. As soon as her other world comes into play—her friends, her ideas about what kind of man is right for her, her own social self-image—a problem arises. It’s different with Ulla and Frank. She isn’t ashamed of Frank, but she’s bothered by who he is and how he lives his life. For her, there’s no shared sense of life because she rejects his outlook.

But agreeing and seeing the world alike doesn’t necessarily make a relationship a good one. There are couples who agree that everyone else is an idiot. Friends are gradually weeded out, family is annoying, neighbors can’t be trusted, and their shared world consists mainly of “us against the world.” That, too, creates a bond.

Furthermore, people and life situations change, and with them, the life you lead together. Traits you once appreciated suddenly get on your nerves. The relaxed man who never defined himself by his job has, over time, become unambitious. The person may have remained the same, but you yourself now want something different.

It’s not enough for two people to simply share a world and agree on it. A better question would be whether you like what your own life has become in this relationship. Do I like the person I’m with as they truly are? Or have I been hoping for years that they’ll eventually change? Do I like myself in their presence? Are there things that have become possible with them that I would never have thought of on my own?

For Ulla, at least one answer is quite clear. Frank apparently doesn’t want to become a different Frank. He likes his job, his free time, and his beer-drinking friends. Ulla loves a man about whom she simultaneously wants to fundamentally change something. She should stop thinking about how to make Frank more ambitious and instead ask herself whether she wants to live with precisely this man. Because a relationship is with the person who is actually standing before you, not with who he once was or who he is supposed to become.