Let’s face it, sometimes we would love to live on a desert island, without a boss who is constantly prodding us with unattainable goals, or without a partner who wants to go off every week-end, and children who never give us a moment’s rest…
And yet human beings are social beings: having a relationship with others is one of our primary needs from the moment we are born, when we need to build a relationship with our mother in order to survive and grow up.
Looking at others as they are
Yet, if we need others so badly, why do we sometimes have difficult relationships with them? Everybody, even the most peace loving person in the world, sometimes has to deal with difficult interpersonal relationships. Why?
To answer this question, I would like to share with you Spinoza’s thoughts. Spinoza, one of the wisest philosophers of all times, drew a distinction between passive and active happiness:
– passive happiness deals with an inadequate understanding of someone or of a situation, while
– active happiness is linked to human beings or events as they really are.
In other words, we attain true happiness when we accept others, things, events AS THEY ARE and not as we would like them to be. The difference is enormous: let’s look at it more closely.
Both in friendship and in love we may be influenced by our own feelings and form a certain idea about another person; we subconsciously “build” an image of the other person by only taking a part of his/her personality into account, namely the part that attracts us and that satisfies our needs. It is true that when we fall in love we fail to see our beloved’s faults. It is only afterwards that we become aware of them, when we have children, for instance, with all the resulting problems.
Human beings are a combination of good and bad qualities. If we only stick to the image that we build of them, we risk being disappointed. The ensuing negative feelings are proportionate to the depth of our love: the higher you fly, the faster you’ll fall.
This distortion also applies to things and to events: we only see the part that suits us.
What should we do to have better relationships with others?
According to Spinoza, the answer to this question lies in a thorough understanding of both ourselves and others. To attain this, we must work on ourselves to increase our self-awareness and self acceptation as we are; and be very patient with others. We will have better chances to appreciate what our partner can offer us provided we expect him/her to simply be himself/herself. We shouldn’t expect more. Period.
But if we want him/her to resemble the image we have created, we will inevitably expect him/her to act accordingly. If he/she fails to do so, we are going to be disappointed, reproaches will start and with them the relationship’s vicious circle. Similarly, if we have a boss who does not behave according to our “good boss” image, instead of wasting a lot of energy trying to make him “fit” our model, it would perhaps be more sensible to face reality, no matter how unpleasant, and accept it.
Looking at your inner self is a prerequisite to improving relationships with others
At first sight this attitude may seem passive, since having to accept reality as it is means that we must stop hoping that the other person will change or that we will succeed in making him/her change. Actually, this attitude is quite a revolution: if I accept other persons and events AS THEY ARE, I will be able to use my energy, in the first place, to make the most of the present moment instead of living in an idyllic world, and secondly to find the USEFUL strategy to attain my objectives.
Going back to the examples described above:
– If I know that my partner likes to go off to the country every week-end, while I would prefer to go out in the city, instead of complaining, I could determine what I really feel like doing (hence the usefulness of introspective work), calmly tell him/her and find a solution that is suitable for both of us. If he/she absolutely wants me to go with him/her, I will find a way of making him/her accept my choice, provided I am really convinced of this choice. I will not try to make him change his mind but will let him free to decide. As a result he/she will eventually also give me freedom of decision without resentment.
– If I want to be promoted, but my boss doesn’t appreciate me, instead of waiting for an advancement that will probably never come, once I have resolved to face reality, I may choose either to wait for a new boss (we all know that bosses are not eternal!) or to start looking for another job in the same company or elsewhere.
In both case I am active, since I take reality into account and finally accept it, instead of living in a make-believe world and “fighting against it”, which would result in a lot of disappointments and useless complaints.
As described in these situations, it is up to us to take the initiative of working on ourselves to learn how to look at others as they are and not as we would like them to be (let’s wipe our glasses!). At the end of the process we will find out what we really want, understand what other people want and eventually accept their wishes.
The wonderful reward is living well with ourselves and with others.
