h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Should be of interest for most of us:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A543016

How to avoid getting the wrong partner

A very interesting idea for an entry - but I think some of it could do with clarification and a little more depth, such as when you say "Let's have a closer look at those games..." but don't go into much detail. Are there any examples of these "games" you could give us?

Well, you are right. In the first place I intended to include some own examples, but the fear of getting it too personal kept me off. Maybe it would be good if many researches contributed.

Wonko,

I think your suggestion that this be a group effort is a good one. It's too big a subject to tackle all on one's own, and would benefit tremendously from the vast anecdotes that I'm sure the greater H2G2 community is willing to provide. Perhaps with enough participation, the entry could be divided into a few sections:

1. Bad Dates and How to Avoid Them
2. So Now You're in a Relationship; How to Keep the Thing from Souring
3. Warning Signs that Your Good Relationship is Going Bad
4. How to End a Relationship Gone Wrong

Or something like that. I imagine that lots of people have a lot to say on this sort of topic. And then you'd be able to write an informative entry without having to reveal every detail of your sordid past.

I just wanted to say thanks for using inclusive language, so gay and bisexual people don't feel left out.

Also, I wanted to mention other reasons for constantly ending up with the wrong partner. Some people are seeking an ideal that doesn't exist in real life, so they may discard partners at the first sign of imperfection. It's better to start off with a realistic sense of what you can and can't expect from a partner.

Worst of all, there are people who seem stuck repeating dysfunctional patterns formed during their youth. For instance, a woman with an alcoholic parent may be attracted to people with addictive personalities without even realizing it. When her partners invariably fall into destructive addiction patterns, she doesn't see the connection between her earlier attraction and their later behavior. Sometimes it takes some reflection to determine why we are attracted to the people we are, and whether we are exhibiting good judgment or simply repeating refrains picked up early in life.

Hi the both of you!

As I'm into polyamory and a little little bit bisexual myself, I always try to have a broader view on partnerships.

I fully agree with you. This alcoholic parents thing is exactly what I meant, and even driven farther. If you're having such a partner you end up playing the game of accusation of driving your partner into alcoholism (where in reality she/he only mimics his/her parents), of pointless discussions on how to cure the addiction and so on.

And you don't even have a chance. Even if your partner manages to solve the problem, you'll standing in the rain as the process of solving her/his problem probably destroyed your partnership and she/he seeks a new partner.

Does somebody know how to suggest a group effort?

You could either just post a question on the 'ask the h2g2 community page'

or you could suggest a 'talking point' to Peta.

This in fact has recently been championed by Mark on the ACE forum - although all posts there are strictly speaking confidential I'm sure Mark won't mind if I post this here...

Hi.
>
> Thought I'd tell you about two new pages:
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A587108
> A complete list of previous Topics of the Week (aka Calls for
> Entries).
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A568721
> A complete list of previous Talking Points.
>
> They're interesting reading - check out those ancient
> collaborative efforts.
> They're still good, even after two years.
>
> Ah, the nostalgia!
>
> Mark

Hi

If you have any great ideas for new topics for either Talking Points or Call
for entries, please suggest them at the bottom of these pages.

Thanks

Peta


So there you are - a good answer methinks

Orcus

You could also turn this into a series of entries for the University of Life. Different helpers could take different topics with you coordinating, and they could offer suggestions and help to one another along the way.

The University of Life is at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/C573

I'm working on a project on Sexual Orientation right now, as a matter of fact, and a helper has already contributed an entry on polyamory. If you would like to, feel free to follow to link from my page to the project and make your comments on what we have so far.

Thanks to all of you. It will suggest it to Peta, as I think this entry and the contributions of other researchers to be an important advise for all of us.

Here's the link of my suggestion: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F647?thread=126901&post=1124829#p1124829

Wonko, I feel this article could use quite a bit more. Have you had any success with the University project, or do you wish to expand this article?

I tried to make it a topic on ask h2g2, but nobody replied. Maybe it's a too personal a matter.

I didn't try the University. (Never did...)

I made the entry short and abstract because I want to avoid getting it too personal. The reader has or will make her/his own experience and all I want to do with the entry is to make her/him aware of the mechanics of a relationship.

I would expand the entry and welcome you to make suggestions!

Wonko

Dang it... had this carefully crafted reply, but the servers seem to be running exceptionally slowly today.

I would recommend that this article become a Uni project. I understand that you wanted to keep the article from being too personal, but this is too complicated a subject to cover in a short and abstract article. I can't begin to tell you how much stuff you've left out... For one thing, you don't go into the psychological basis behind mind games, and why we play them. Your suggestion as to how a bad partner might be avoided is misleading, and actually bad advice, in my opinion - parents are not always a barometer of their children.

I don't want to discourage you, Wonko, but this article is way too oversimplified to cover the subject adequately. It needs quite a bit more. Best of luck!

Well, I intentionally didn't get into the psychological stuff as it only muddies the waters. Didn't you read the Hitchhicker's Guide? Psychologists had the Earth destroyed. To try to understand your would be partner only draggs you in, and soon you end up playing her/his game. DON'T try to understand the basis, just avoid it.

Freud was so wrong, and behaviourism is the right thing!

It is as easy as that. My advise does almost always work. And forget the few cases where it does not work, it may take you some precious years of wasted time to find out whether you were right of not.

Personal examples would be good, but I think the message is quite simple even without examples. But they would be good to show the severity of the problem, which is one thing people are not aware of: It is YOUR life to be wrecked if you don't take this advise serious.

Sounds like I speak of my own life. I DO.

Let me break this down for you in detail - I don't want to be a hardass, but I really think there are things this article misses entirely. Your comments bother me a lot, actually - you're saying that you SHOULDN'T try to understand your partner, because it will make you the submissive in the relationship. I can't condone this point of view! Mind games don't happen unless one or both partners feel that they can't get what they want out of the relationship with open, honest interaction. Then the passive-aggressive bullsh** starts happening, but only after the dialogue fails. I'm not saying that we have to be psychologists to get along with each other. I'm just saying that your point of view - ignoring the problem - will not make it go away!

The Desaster ...

• Should be spelled 'Disaster...'

Many people realize they have the wrong partner after quite some time, having wasted precious time of their life only to find themselfes at a point of no return: they can't go back in time and they have not been able to turn their partnership to happiness. Let's try to analyse the stages of a partnership and how to avoid them.

• The syntax of the first sentence is peculiar - I would recommend something more like: "Many people realize that they have the wrong partner after quite some time, having wasted the precious moments of their life only to find themselves..." Your last two sentences don’t track at all. First of all, ‘turn your partnership to happiness’ sounds as if you were never happy. This seems unlikely to me - everybody I know that’s unhappy with their current partner was once happy - otherwise they would never have begun the relationship in the first place. The last sentence makes it seem as if you’re saying ‘avoid the stages of a partnership.’ In my mind, there will always be the stages of a relationship, and to attempt to avoid them means that the relationship will have no real depth, and therefore a very limited lifespan. To really cover the subject, you should probably go into the differences (and the similarities) between a physical attraction and a mental attraction. The relationship based upon physical attraction has a shelf life of less than seven years. As the mystique wears off and you get used to your partner, you begin to look for new ways to stimulate the attraction. This can include anything from marital aids to cheating. For a good reference, try watching 'Bitter Moon,' a Roman Polanski film. It's hilarious - and very disturbing. A mental attraction, on the other hand, has an almost indefinite shelf life - as long as the partners change with each other. Continuous interaction with each other means that they don't grow apart. This is the main reason why people who get married at a young age end up divorcing around age 30-35. Because each partner has a different role in the relationship, they develop different interests, and become different people than they were when they were married. Then they look at each other at age thirty, and realize that they have nothing in common. This can be avoided by taking an interest in the other partner's life, and sharing yours with them. Besides, it's a wonderful stress reliever to complain to somebody about your day - your compensation for having to hear them complain about theirs!

... unrolls

• This should actually be unfolds... I've never heard of anybody using ‘unrolls’ in that phrase before.

First stage: Everything is wonderful, your partner is the most beautiful, friendly, loving and caring person of the world. This might even be true if you take your love caused blindness into account. There's a reason for that: you and your partner try very hard, giving you wonderful 3 months, maybe one year of happiness.

• If your focus is how to pick a partner, you should probably start with meeting the partner. Where? In a bar? In a library? What’s your preference? And what do you look for in a person? Once you find a person you’re interested in, what’s your next step? How do you show you’re interested without scaring them off? Then you need to cover how far you want the relationship to go. Is this a serious relationship, or will you be ‘bed buddies?’ The second sentence’s syntax is weird here; should probably be: “This might even be true even if you think love is blind.” You came close to what I’m talking about with this paragraph - ‘You and your partner try very hard.’ Both are interacting in a relationship and trying their hardest to maintain it. Something else that needs to be included in this paragraph is the dynamic that both people are trying to hide parts of themselves. They don’t leave dirty laundry lying about, they pick up after themselves, bodily functions are less obvious, etc. After about a year, things start to hang out a bit. They’re more likely to burp and scratch themselves in each other’s presence.

Second stage: Things begin to settle, little problems begin to emerge, but nothing you cannot cope with. And, here comes the crutial part, some habbits creep in: small, little, silly, superflous games, assigning a role to you to play. You do not want to play that role, but you cannot escape it and, without noticing it, you begin to change.

• The second sentence in this paragraph is odd as well. Should be something like: “And here comes the crucial part. Habits start to creep in, and you begin playing small, silly little games, that force you to play a role you don’t want. You can’t escape it, and begin to change.” This is a poor explanation of the phenomenon. To really understand what’s going on, it’s necessary to realize that both partners are relaxing into the relationship, and thinking less about what the other will think of a particular activity or quirk of personality. The partner that feels slighted doesn’t know how to express their displeasure, and the ‘mind games’ ensue. These mind games can be passive-aggressive displays, or they can be dominance displays. In either case, the partner playing the games feels that they can’t get what they want with conversation. I believe that a healthy relationship is made when each person feels comfortable saying what they think, and telling the other what they need. This is the only way to avoid mind games - talking! Now, I’m not the ‘let’s talk about our feelings’ sort of girl - but I have no qualms about speaking up if I have a problem with something - just ask my hubby!

Third stage: You and your partner play these games every day. You keep saying the same sentences, although you never said them in your life before, you keep doing the same things, making the same mistakes, although you had been convinced before that you'd never gone make them.

• Third and second stage could easily be squeezed together. They’re part of the same phenomenon. Your third stage is the eventual end of not feeling comfortable talking to each other. Because of your reluctance to speak up, and your partner’s, you end up communicating with each other in the worst possible way - by engaging in petty, destructive behaviors to enact some sort of revenge.

Final stage: You hate your yourself and your partner.

• The final stage is way oversimplified. And the sentence doesn’t track. It should be something like: “You hate yourself and/or your partner.” The final stage is the result of the mind game escalation. Eventually one of you does something that’s so awful that you can’t justify it, and you end up breaking up. That final act quite often has a subconscious motivation. One person wants to end the relationship, but can’t do it by telling the other, so they go out and sleep with somebody else, or just start seeing somebody else, and then make sure that the other finds out about it.

Reasons
What is it that turns loving people into self repeating robots? There are four reasons for that:
1. you don't try as hard as in the beginning
2. your partner doesn't try as hard as in the beginning
3. you are playing games
4. your partner is playing games
Reasons 1 and 2 are quite normal as we all are human beings with limited energy, especially when having children.
Reasons 3 and 4 are very hard to tackle. Let's have a closer look at those games, they are the key to understanding people and partnerships. They are learned from the parents at childhood and everybody tries to play games with her/his partner, playing the role of one of her/his parents and forcing the role of the other of her/his parents upon the partner.

• This section is way too simplistic to cover the subject adequately. With such a simplistic treatment of the stages, you would expect to see a more indepth coverage with the ‘Reasons’ section, but it doesn’t explain anything at all - just summarizes what you’ve mentioned before. You should at least tackle WHY you don’t try as hard as you do in the beginning. Why do the games start happening, why you stop caring.

Solution
So here is how to avoid getting the wrong partner: Get to know hers/his parents, its like a trip into the future as your partner probably will be like them, playing all the games they do. And, while we're at it, try very hard to avoid being like our parents. Good luck!

• Frankly, this conclusion is just terrible, a logical fallacy, misleading, and may cause many good relationships to falter. Getting to know the parents isn’t bad advice. But don’t assume that your partner will turn out like them. Your ‘solution’ is very shallow, and doesn’t begin to solve the problems that you’ve mentioned - why you stop caring as much about maintaining the relationship, and why you begin to play these games. Using your advice, the perfect relationship would be with an orphan who’s been living in a box all their life. No parents to warp their minds!

I'm not a psychologist. I based the information in this post upon my own life - I'm happily married, and have a good relationship with my hubby. I'm sorry to tell you that your solution is TOO simple - interpersonal relationships are much more complex than you've even begun to cover here. And I haven't even started! This is why I recommended that you make this a University project. This is one of those subjects that needs more than one head - and quite a bit more information.

Many many thanks for your long answer!

I did all the corrections you mentioned. Your comments are very usefull if you are in a partnership you value and want to keep. But my entry does not try to deal with these problems, you are right that this would be a very big project.

I changed a few lines to emphasize my solution and inserted a new first section:

So here is how to avoid getting the wrong partner: Get to know her/his parents, its like a trip into the future as your would be partner probably will be like them, playing all the games they do and, if you don't like their games *get rid of her/him right now*.

So my solution is to get rid of, and not to try to improve it.

Steps 2 and 3 are different in that way that in step 2 things happen for a first time and only your partner does them. In step 3 there's a repetition in which you are an equal player of the game and you don't even realize that it's not *your* game.

I don't distinguish between physical and mental attraction, I think humans are one.

Well, there are other stages, I should've made it clear that I meant the games playing stages.

Of course dialogue can very good to keep a partnership intact. Yet most of the time it is a repetition of those games and if you can avoid that firsthand, why bother?

And in my experience dialogue often means that one partner says what she wants and the other partner gives in, only to find out later that he is not happy.

Is it really necessary to say why these things happen? They happen and you can draw conclusions from that.

I'm glad you have a happy marriage! I'm sometimes happy with my two wifes, and sometimes I'm not.

Sorry that my entry was not clear enough. Could you please read it again, now that I've put in your corrections and added some clarifying statements?

First of all I would like to apologise for not reading all the backlog, it is verry long and I will do it as soon as possible, but I did read the entry and would like to comment, so excuse me if I repeat something that was already said

I think this entry is nice, and have some truth in it. I am pretty young and have little experiance in long term relationships, but I don belive that the method described in the article is not as defenitive as it mkes itself look.

I am sure you are writing this entry with experiance to back it (and some bitterness on the side as well), but it is only one aspect of the thing because of two reasons:

1. If you follow this method you might still end up with a verry wrong partner.
2. If you don't follow it, it doesn't gurantee faliour, just that some "tactics" have to be taken to avoid the described results.

I will write some more as soon as I read the backlog and sort my thoughts


Dancer

Well, thanks! My method is a negative one, it sorts out partner with a very low propability of success. Those who are left are of no guarantee to be good partners. But I'm sure you have some methods of you own for further decision.

My method especially takes into account young people, who are full of positive energy and are glad to have found someone. And there even is the notion that everthing can be fixed if you try hard enough. But don't rely on that! More probably that not you'll find out that it is not fixable and you could have noticed it firsthand with my method of looking at the parents.

As Erich Fromm said: Good partnerships require good partners.
My extension: Good partners require good parents.

I think it is best to not play games AT ALL, but that might just be too naive of me to thing



Dancer

You are right. It might be a good idea to think of ways how to avoid playing games. But this is a big task!