We live in a world, now, where it feels like an inconvenience to wait an extra two or three minutes in a drive-thru line. It’s a world where you can order anything from vitamins to granola to shampoo and have it entirely customized, tailored to your needs and preferences, and shipped straight to your doorstep within days. Consumerism is our kingdom, and the individual customer reigns supreme.
The thing is, our Western culture is selfish. And that sounds harsh! But, all I mean by it is that our culture is constantly focused on encouraging us to do whatever is the best or most beneficial option for us as individuals. Say what you feel and don’t worry about what others might react to it, don’t invest in anything that doesn’t help your career goals, and construct your entire life independently and for yourself before you even start to think of allowing other people into it. Most importantly: don’t engage in relationships with people who don’t make you happy.
And, please don’t misunderstand me—I do think it’s really, really important to advocate for yourself, and it’s really, really important to make sure your relationships are healthy and fulfilling. But, I think it’s really difficult as well to create genuine and valuable connections if you’re mostly focused only on how a relationship affects you.
An important part of being loved is also loving in return. And neither of those things are always going to be easy. I think it’s a shortcoming of our society that so many people seem to expect that they will someday meet someone that they’ll just click with, someone with whom they won’t need to put any effort into making things work.
I think a lot of the issue comes from this idea that the only point of being in a relationship is to make us happy. Yes, yes—it’s a super important and wonderful aspect that comes from being in a relationship, but I think only seeing it as something to fill that purpose misses the mark a lot of the time. There’s so much more to relationships than the parts that are adventurous and spontaneous or sweet and romantic. There’s a lot of really consistent effort that goes into keeping a relationship healthy. I’ve been talking to a friend fairly often recently about how love is a consistent, every-day kind of a choice. It’s more of an action than a feeling, and sometimes, the choices can be hard. When it’s something that a person is only willing to commit to when they see it as something that benefits them, the relationship is bound to fall through quickly.
A really crucial aspect of relationships that I think a lot of our generation forgets about is all of the times that you need to make sacrifices for one another. The people you’re with should be consistently making you happy, but that isn’t all they should be doing. It’s also important to make sure you’re with people who will continue to push you all the time to be better both as an individual person but also as a person who’s connected to another person. It isn’t weak to share your life with someone else—you can be a powerful and influential and successful person and still be able to give parts of yourself over to another person and dedicate some of who you are to connecting yourself to them.
I know it’s not uncommon for a Kenyon student to reference this, but a few years back a certain highly-acclaimed writer delivered this speech on our campus titled “This Is Water.” In it, David Foster Wallace discusses the notion that the world would be a much kinder place if people were able to forget themselves more often and try to channel just a little bit more empathy for others, even when it can be really frustrating to do so. I’ve always loved this idea. It’s the idea that maybe we should remember that we’re members of a community of human beings first much before we are our individual selves, and sometimes, the things that we feel are our most pressing personal priorities and feelings are not what drives the rest of the world.
There’s something really beautiful about being able to be a part of something bigger than just yourself—even if that bigger something still only consists of one other person. I think it would do good to anyone in any capacity if they were able to put their ideas of self-service aside just a little bit more often and try to view themselves as pieces of a unit rather than individuals looking to be served or fulfilled.
I’m guilty of this as often as everyone else. If things don’t go my way, it can be easy some days to feel like I’ve been personally wronged by someone, or by some cosmic force. It can be easy to expect the other people in my life to automatically understand what I want just because they know me and to expect them to follow through on those things because they care about me. But, having those expectations for the people in my life can abbreviate them in ways that oftentimes take away the very thing I should love most about them: their very humanity, the flawed things about them that make them uniquely who they are and that create the human ability to relate so well to one another.
Image Credit: Annmarie Morrison