Do you think you understand your partner? Let us find out!

Do you think you understand your partner? Let us find out!

The understanding between partners is the key to the success of a relationship. In debates between arranged and love marriage it is often argued that an arranged marriage doesn’t provide the couple the opportunity to know each other well enough to evaluate their compatibility. However, those who had the opportunity to understand their partner and ascertain compatibility before the big decision often end up in failure. So, evidently the issue is in the depth of understanding. The common belief is that spending more time together helps in understanding people better. What we understand about someone by spending more time is partial and predominantly involves physical attributes such as their choices, likes & dislikes when it comes to food, smell, colour, style, movies, songs, hangout places etc. These are related to one’s sensory pleasures and the mistake people do is appropriating compatibility between a couple to the compatibility in these.

Each individual has a unique level of consciousness, that relates to what he is able to be conscious of and the intensity or depth of his experience in this world is dependent on this. A basic level of consciousness at which every one of us exists is the body consciousness. It is with this that we identify ourself as the body and the person we are. Beyond physical, there are several layers to our existence. Some people are innately wired to understand people deeper, beyond the physical level at which we experience the pleasures using our senses. These deeper levels are critical areas that contribute to one’s happiness. But for the majority of people, due to their limited realisation, they are often blinded by the wold of pleasures and stuck at that level. Therefore, if it is not in the innate of a person to naturally understand another person beyond the physical, they would have to put in the effort to understand deeper aspects of a person’s existence.

What plays an instrumental role in the selection of a partner is one’s desire. This could be desires that are conditioned upon us, or imposed as the social norms. A conformist lives his life adhering to these norms. However, innate desires go beyond this and is attributed to our emotional and spiritual needs. A person’s needs are formed by a combination of these two desires. The consciousness level determines a person’s ability to realise one’s innate desires. When one’s understanding is limited to the norms, he/she fails in his understanding the partner’s needs.

Biologically a woman’s needs from a man are to protect and provide. In modern society, with the advancements in law enforcement and judiciary system, a safe environment for women is being ensured which has diminished a woman’s dependence on a man to protect. Added to that, women today are self reliant, fending for themselves or actively contributing to the household income. This further diminishes a man’s role as a provider. On top of this man is expected to transform into a nurturer by sharing the household responsibilities and raising children. Similarly from the biological need of a man for a woman to be a nurturer, who bears children, raises them and runs a house, his needs have evolved as well. Today he expects the woman to share the burden of of earning for the family. Thus from the onset, the overall expectations from both genders are not in alignment with how nature had planned it.

However, when being attracted to a person of opposite gender, naturally our innate energy of masculine and feminine exuberates from man and woman respectively and each partner finds themselves deeply entangled into this energy trap. With the natural instinct at play, a woman naturally becomes softer, displaying the nurturer side of her and the man becomes a protector. This is the early period of the relationship when they are disconnected from the reality. However, as reality sets in the scene changes. The woman when out in the world trying to survive and deal with the challenges at work place is not that soft nurturer because she is forced to adapt by bring forth her masculinity. In addition to this running the errands, attending to the children and running the house exhausts her and so she continues to display more masculine features. A masculine dominant man finds this unappealing.

Similarly, man brings forth his feminine side to run the house and to raise the kids as the woman is not available at home all the time to nurture. So both partners are not exuberating their natural energy and whatever they found attractive in each other in the early days is not what they are experiencing as they struggle to fit into the roles demanded from them. While subconsciously a woman looks for a man’s long term ability to provide and a man seeks a woman’s ability to nurture, partners struggle to experience the security and comfort sought by their respective innate energy.

Therefore, for a successful marriage, it is important that the partners understand these basic subjects of layers of our existence beyond what we understand with our senses, that goes deep into emotional and spiritual levels, as well as about the different energies with which we are born and how to regulate these to fulfill the other person’s needs.