The Neurotic Lock

I'm taking a course called the Human Challenge this semester and it is really really interesting and cool and also exhausting. It is making me examine everything in my life closer and making me realize things about myself that suck... and also things that are good. What is to come is nothing more than parts of my scribbled notes and a couple of my own add-ins. I'm no psych major (or minor), just another person in the world trying to figure it out.

The neurotic lock... already googled it and nothing popped up. Maybe my professor (a former psychologist) made it up? It basically is that I'm attracted to the something incomplete in YOU and I think I can fix it. It's one of the reasons why there are so many crazy, messed up relationships.

Stiller (in the novel Stiller) comes back to try and fix his marriage again... but he isn't able to break free of what EVERYONE ELSE in his OLD life thinks. This often happens in our lives. We are constantly evolving and learning, but sometimes people don't want to see that we've changed. They think they know us better than we know ourselves. We can either continue to be who we really are or we can slip back into the role of the person that they think they know and lose ourselves completely.

In relationships we often try to become what we think the other person wants. We want so hard to fill that void in them... but we CAN'T. We cannot fix a hole in someone else unless we were the ones to make the hole. We also try to make other people fit our perfect wish list of a person. In essence, we are looking for a man or woman who never existed! We take someone and subtley try to mold them into something different and completely miss who they really are!

We don't hear this in the marriage vows often, but a relationship is where you discover your weirdness and your brokenness. Brokenness you didn't even know you or the other person had. Marriage is a vow where you promise to stick with the other person even though you don't know exactly what that brokenness will turn out to be. But you say you will be there for the suffering and the hurting and the healing and fixing. But not many people associate marriage vows with that. They enter in to marriage, find the other person's holes, realize that they can't fix them and be the other person's savior and they say... "I'M OUT. We must not really be soul mates." But that isn't true. You're not supposed to be their savior. You're not supposed to be able to fix everything... you CAN'T. Your role is to support and encourage their growth... and to be patient when they are slow to grow.

We are constantly evolving. What if we never learned and changed from our life experiences? What if we didn't learn and grow from our old relationships? We would just go out and do the same thing with someone else.

We all have our wishlist... our list of what the perrrrfect man/woman for me will be. Take a good look at your wishlist. How long is it? In reality... it's probably too long. What REALLY matters? Surprisingly, there are only a few things that we really really need. You want your S.O. to be interested in most of the things you are? Well, they probably won't be. That's okay. You want your man to be your "spiritual leader"? That sounds fine and dandy... but is it a necessity? We need to loosen up our list. Ultimately... it gets shorter and shorter. And do you know what happens when we really prune our list? (Yes the pruning will be painful, get over it). When we REALLY prune our list we become more gracious and accepting of the other person.

My friend Janae hit the nail on the head in a recent chat when she said, "That's the beauty of life and marriage. I mean you're always going to be dealing with issues inside yourself. You're always going to be growing and changing and becoming a better you and the person you're married to will help you with that however they cannot be upset because you're changing but encourage the growth. Life is all about changing and learning and growing. It doesnt mean you stop when you get married."