from the Comments: Compound Interest

From the comments on Two Cents With Interest, Neuro writes:

I’m not sure I agree with you. If I sub in your definitions for work, one gets:

“You can make any relationship continue and be useful/pleasant/satisfying (u/p/s) to the people in that relationship, regardless of the relative age of the participants (or anything else) as long as your goals are the same. And if your goals are somewhat divergent, then you can still make it u/p/s, as long as you have other things in common, like similar past experiences, or a shared cultural background, or that both parties are open-minded to the past experiences and cultural background that each brings to the relationship.”

Is it just that you are assuming that attraction, chemistry, spark, respect, “getting” each other, personal admiration, trust–  in a word, love–  is there from the beginning to the end, too? Because my point here is that the way all this is written it almost reads like an arranged marriage. I submit that one cannot make any romantic relationship work, despite having common goals, background, and open-mindedness to one’s cultural differences. I’m sure there are many women who I could tick off these items with CHECK, CHECK, CHECK and although I might be great friends with them or collaborate with them harmoniously I would never want to be with them romantically in 1,000 years.

I could have all the common goals and life background and cultural openness in the world and if she laughs the wrong way, well, game over.

My point is, I feel that although what you are both saying is certainly of value and ought to be taken seriously within a relationship, the dominant factor in a relationship is the much harder to quantify “certain something”. It’s so dominant, in fact, that it almost makes a mockery of all our machinations toward making a relationship work.

(And the “dominant certain something” is itself at the whim of biology, timing, imprinting, belief, etc. E.g, one study showed that fertile women prefer more masculine looking men when they are ovulating.)

Yoko responds:

[Attraction, chemistry, etc.] are all different things. The attraction, chemistry, and spark fade in time. What takes its place is the admiration, trust, and “getting each other”– but these qualities don’t happen right away, but develop over time. What helps them to develop is to be aware of where someone is coming from, which helps when there some commonality or “work” towards understanding.

[re “I could have all the common goals and life background and cultural openness in the world and if she laughs the wrong way, well, game over.”]  I think we’re coming from different angles here. I think to *start* a relationship, that “certain something” (spark, chemistry, etc.) definitely is what brings people together. But for me, at least, that “certain something” doesn’t keep the relationship going for more than a few months. What does is the understanding, the common direction, what have you. The more you get to know a person, the more you get to know his/her quirks, and maybe those outweigh that spark. But also, the more you get to know a person, the more you come to realize that there are more aspects to being with him/her that “net positive” and thus makes it worth staying instead of ditching because of something like the wrong laugh.

I like it when intelligent and articulate people discuss the different facets of a topic politely and rationally. It’s a lot easier than having to come up with coherent debate points myself. ;)  I wish the two of them and few other people I know had SL avis, so I could host that virtual dinner salon I keep threatening to.  :D

Sadly, I don’t feel like I have much to add by way of clarification.  I was going to make the observation that in my own experience, I’ve never had a relationship get easier.  All the relationships I’ve ever had have always started out seeming very intuitive and unencumbered, providing whatever benefits they provided without the need for “work” or maintenance or complex thought, and then gotten progressively more and more difficult, requiring more work and more maintenance and more complex thought as they went on.  (And then, err…  failed.  <shifts uncomfortably>)  Whose point that reinforces, or whether that’s just a by-product of my particular maladjustments, I’m not totally sure.