Healthiest relationships come from
joint growth, not ‘take me as I am’

By David McElroy · March 24, 2018

They didn’t seem like people I would like. I was walking down a long aisle at Walmart behind a couple and a boy who I assume was their son. They were snapping at each other about some disagreement.

He called her a “bitch” several times. She had a choice word she called him, but I won’t even repeat that one. They didn’t seem to care that anyone else was around. The young boy just walked in silence.

Then I noticed the back of the woman’s t-shirt. I had trouble reading the typeface at a distance at first, but then I realized what it said.

“Take me as I am or watch me as I go.”

My first thought was to laughingly think a man would be lucky to watch her leave, but then I thought more seriously that the slogan sounded like an attitude they might both share. And then it occurred to me that this is a common attitude among modern people who don’t want to see their own flaws and their own responsibility to improve themselves.

I think I know where this attitude came from. It’s a backlash against manipulative and controlling people who try to turn a relationship into a “Pygmalion project,” to use psychologist David Keirsey’s phrase. Some people come into a relationship or marriage with the attitude that the other person should be molded like clay to become whatever the manipulator wants the person to be.

Such relationships are one-sided. One person decides what’s right and what the other person is supposed to be. One person is in control and the other person is the flawed one who has to change. This is very common — and I’ve seen both men and women be the manipulators. (In many cases, manipulating is combined with rescuing.)

This idea of “take me as I am” seems to be a backlash against that sort of manipulation, but it’s a very shallow reaction — and it’s one guaranteed to create something equally bad, similar to what I saw this afternoon.

When people are allowed to feel that it’s reasonable for them to be whatever they already happen to be, this grants a license to each person to continue being the worst of whatever they are. This isn’t really any better than the different sort of dysfunction in which one person is controlling the other.

The “take me as I am” attitude is selfish. It sees a relationship as a place where two people are fighting for control and self-identity. It misses the whole point of a healthy relationship.

In a healthy relationship, there is agreement on goals and shared values. The relationship itself is a union with its own goals and needs — and the individuals agree to certain things for the benefit of both themselves and the union.

One of those agreements people share in a healthy relationship is a dedication to mutual self-improvement.

This requires honesty and vulnerability and trust. It requires two people to be honest with themselves and each other about their own flaws and shortcomings. It requires trusting that the other person isn’t going to use your honesty about your flaws as a weapon. And it requires trusting that the other person will be just as committed to mutual self-improvement as you are.

I know my flaws and I’m willing to be open with my partner about them. I want her help in making myself a better person. In return, I expect the same commitment to self-knowledge and self-improvement. And I will be there with her helping her do the things she needs to do to be a better person.

This kind of a relationship creates stronger marriages and it makes individuals happier. Just as important, though, it teaches children what a family — and what a marriage — should be. Remember that your child is going to grow up and emulate your relationship decisions. He or she is likely to end up with something very similar to what you have. It’s very difficult to break such generational programming.

If you come from a dysfunctional family where the marriage didn’t work in this healthy way, you’re probably going to be drawn to making unhealthy choices and sticking with dysfunctional relationships. But if you want the programming to change — for yourself and for your children — you’re the one who has to make the difficult choices to change things.

Insist on a relationship (and marriage) based on mutual growth. Not a single one of us is perfect. Insisting on our right to remain the people we are merely guarantees that things will get worse over time. A relationship based on love and understanding and trust can lead to growth — for the relationship itself and for each individual.

The way I am right now is all I have to offer to a woman, but I can assure her that I want her help in becoming a better man. I want her to be just as committed to becoming a better woman.

Two people with that commitment can have a healthy marriage that’s very different from that of the selfish man and woman throwing profanity at each other in the store today.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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