Before Tinder started and after actually meeting people ended there was Internet dating. A theoretically inspired site, www.MySingleFriend.com, was completely scuppered by one major flaw in practice. You wanted to find someone special so you got your best mate to write a sales pitch for you. In fact on reflection a rather bizarre business model, after all who gets their drinking buddies to draft their C.V.?
Anyway the problem was that your mate bigs you up because that is what mates are for. You meet someone but pretty soon they’re disappointed, they read the Ad but you’re not all that. False advertising might earn you a quick buck relationship-wise but what most people are ultimately looking for is a lifetime investment. And this is where a simple tweak to the site’s premise could reap dividends.
Instead of bullet pointing your most admirable attributes you get your mate to lay out your flaws, drawbacks and deficiencies in excoriating detail. And of course you don’t stop with your best mate. Other contributors must include your parents, your sister, your boss, your childhood nemesis and, most importantly, your ex.
Now obviously this seems mad and counter-intuitive but this is basic due diligence or KYC as David Brent might say. Because ultimately what sustains a relationship over years and decades is not the cherishing of your partner’s finest qualities or their hilarious best story (still so fresh on its 1,000thtelling) or their rock hard abs slowly dissolving into blubber. No; what really keeps it on the rails is putting up with your partner’s shit and their willingness to put up with yours.
And if you don’t know what I’m talking about here it’s the ‘for worse’ bit in the wedding vows that everyone pretends does not apply to them. Well it does: it applies to you, it applies to me and it applies to everybody.
People say that having a child is a testing experience and that is an accurate description if by that they mean it is like taking a Japanese exam that never ends, when you had been learning French all year. I would like to say that having a child with another human being really brings out the best in both parents. But I won’t because that would be a complete lie.
Instead parenting is like an endless voyage of discovery in which you slowly come to understand how utterly different in every conceivable way your childhood was from your co-parent’s to the point where you see why in some cultures marrying your cousin seems like a good idea.
But the thing is. And this really is the thing. If you spend your entire time fulminating about how unbelievably wrong your partner’s parenting is you will be overlooking a very, very important point – and that is how unbelievably wrong your parenting is. But not just your parenting, in fact every aspect of your ‘contribution’ to the relationship.
There’s a lot of talk at the moment, thanks Marie Kondo, about throwing out anything in your life that does not bring you joy. If new parents did that the queue to the Principal Registry of the Family Division would stretch to Land’s End.
Instead I have a little mantra that should ensure parental tensions dont exceed a fast simmer and certainly never boil over. You may remember a whimsical cartoon that used to appear in certain newspapers (when people still bought them), it featured a cutesy boy and girl and every week there was a new answer but the strap-line always remained the same Love is…
If you really want to know your partner, really put yourself in their shoes then you will understand that the ultimate answer is a question and it’s a question you should ask yourself daily –
How annoying am I?
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