Without growth on similar paths, two people drift apart, love dies

By David McElroy · August 16, 2018

Falling in love is one of the real miracles of life.

Many relationships are based on far more shallow things such as physical attraction or mutual need or mutual loneliness. But in certain cases, two people meet at a time when their needs and desires and understanding of the world are similar enough that they open up to one another and real love grows.

We celebrate those moments and we like to pretend they always last. Every romantic movie with a Hollywood ending treats those moments as a culmination of something — as a moment when two people join in love and then live for the rest of their lives as the same people they were in that moment.

But that’s a simplistic lie. It might be a well-meaning lie, but it’s still a lie. When two people come together and fall in love, they might be at similar points on their life paths, but unless they continue in growth together — with both individuals and the relationship itself both growing — those two people quickly drift apart and love inevitably dies.

A person who isn’t growing and changing quickly stagnates and becomes very unhealthy. The same is true for a relationship. If two people are not moving forward together on a growth path, they will soon become strangers who don’t know one another. They will end up in such radically different places — if one of them grows and the other doesn’t or if they simply grow in very different directions — that they have no business together, because the love and connection are gone.

For my entire adult life, I’ve been aware that something different was going on in me than what was going on in most of my peers. I quickly became aware that I was wired very differently. I didn’t understand why. (I still don’t understand why.) But I discovered that most people get to a certain point quickly — by about the age of 30 — when they simply quit growing. They stagnate.

Instead of living the next 20 years, they live the same year 20 times. They’re not growing. They’re not changing. They’re just going through the motions of life without challenging themselves or growing in ways that throw off the limitations of their past. That can actually result in a stable life — because you can live the same life year after year — but it doesn’t lead to growth.

About 10 years ago, I had a turbulent relationship for a few years with a woman who I was very deeply in love with — and she was in love with me. We almost married, but the specific things that happened at the time are ancient history. For a long time afterward, I was filled with regret about the way things ended — and I wished I could change the story so I had ended up with her.

Today, I see things very differently.

It’s not that I’ve changed my mind about the past. She and I were very much in love. We were very compatible. We wanted to grow in similar ways together. But she went her way and I went mine. I have become a very different person now than I was when I was with her. I assume she’s a very different person, too. We share a history of love from that period of what we both were at the time, but we share nothing today. There’s nothing left but history and narrative. There is no remaining love.

I’ve been thinking about this today for an odd reason. I always think about growth for myself and I’m constantly changing and re-evaluating who I am. That’s just a part of my emotional DNA. But I was listening to an interview with a woman who reminded me very much of someone else I fell in love with not so long ago.

I’ve talked with you before about my growing respect for the wisdom of the Enneagram personality typing system. (I’m a Type 1, if you’re curious.) I’ve learned a lot about myself through listening to good teachers expound on this system of understanding — and it’s been helping me grow a lot over the last few years. (I could talk about that all night, but I won’t.)

The two-part interview I heard was with a hyper-successful woman who worked at Twitter in its early days. She’s a Type 3, which the Enneagram calls “the Achiever.” Claire Diaz-Ortiz had recently discovered her type — and she suddenly started understanding things about herself which she didn’t really seem to want to understand, but then she was driven inexorably to understand. She suddenly started experiencing the hidden feelings which she had buried underneath her need to achieve for so long. (And she started understanding why she had always needed to achieve.)

I found the interview dramatic and emotional. It was dramatic because she was pulling back a curtain on her life and admitting the things she was learning about herself. It was emotional because it reminded me of the sort of growth I had wanted with this other woman who I fell in love with not so long ago. I wanted her to be having these experiences that I was hearing about this woman having, because I’ve seen and experienced the same needs and potential in her.

And yet it made me sad, because she and I are slowly going down very different paths — by her choice — and we will eventually end up in places where we don’t recognize each other anymore. And that feels like an excruciatingly painful loss.

(The interview I heard was on a podcast called Typology. Here is the first part and here is the second part. Especially if you happen to be a success-driven Type 3, I recommend you listen to every word of it.)

If you understand what I was 20 years ago, you probably have no idea what I am today. The same is true for what I was 10 years ago. And I’m continuing to change and grow, so I’m less and less like what I was five years ago or two years ago. But I haven’t “arrived” at the final iteration of myself. I’m still struggling to become a more authentic version of myself — and I feel as though I’m getting closer and closer to that.

When we meet people and start relationships, we do so at a place where we’ve come together and we can understand each other. Think of those points as something like subway stations. If we meet at one of those stations, we might find ourselves at exactly the same place in life and we might fall in love.

But if we get on different subways — or if one of us stays at the station in limbo — we’re going to end up in very different places. If we don’t travel together — growing and understanding one another along the way — we might end up in such different places that we have nothing in common emotionally anymore. And that’s when loves dies, when we haven’t emotionally traveled that path of growth together.

Love is precious to me. I’ve found real love very few times in my life and I desperately need it. I don’t give it up lightly. I want to hold onto it. But when two people are on such different paths, love slowly turns to sand and slips through our fingers — no matter how much we try to hold onto it.

That’s why I was sad listening to the interview today. I was listening to the sort of growth and transformation that I wanted to experience with someone I fell in love with. When two people experience that together — and honestly work to understand each other — people of differing personalities can jointly become something far more powerful than what either is alone.

I miss the excitement of knowing I had found that sort of love. I miss the excitement of believing I was on that path of growth and success with someone. And that left me with a dull ache of reminder that I’m traveling on a subway going in a very different direction than she is — and I’m tired of traveling alone.

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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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