I’m harsh on the concept of Destiny, but someone who surprisingly came into my life got me to think about Destiny in a more truthful way. I also learned through that experience with them that communication isn’t the key to a relationship, but exploration and being willing to be changed by them is.
Maybe it was my Destiny to learn that from them.
Those who say that you need to communicate better are following the mantra of the lazy narcissist. “You don’t know how to communicate,” is too often used as an excuse by the person who bulldozes conversation to make themselves look good and the other person bad.
Communication is not the gold standard for a relationship.
In every relationship, the point of talking is to explore each other’s thoughts, to listen, and to help each other make the points we’re trying to make, even if their point is critical of you.
Great communicators can finagle words in charming ways to seduce you to believe what they say. The greatest con artists are the greatest communicators. The greatest of explorers are the greatest lovers who find the truth which allows them to intertwine their two lives together in a pleasurable way.
But, let’s look at you for a moment.
You’re a pretty good person, you’ve messed up and grown from those falls, but you’re not perfect. So, it’s possible, even as flawed as your partner is, they might have something to say to you. And it’s not that they have any old thing to say. They have something important enough to say that if you took it in and made what they said part of your life it would bring you to a higher stage of perfection. You would become more exceptional and master something you had not mastered yet. The trouble is that you would have to listen.
Even worse! You’d have to help them tell you what they’re trying to say! Even if you don’t want to hear it.
That is the power of the ever-curious explorer. They go to uncharted places, even if it will hurt them temporarily. But what they find is worth the risk.
You have to help them criticize you and you have to take it. They may say, “Oh, that’s not what I was talking about! I was talking about me and you made it about you, you narcissist!”
Then you have to say, “Oh, you’re totally right! Why was I being such a narcissist!?”
Great communicators can twist words around in conversation to make themselves look good and make you look bad. Don’t waste your time dating those with a silver tongue because they’ll only bring you to ruin.
But how can we make exploration and not communication the basis of our relationships?
The stance and state to be in when you’re in a good enough relationship is, “I need to learn from you and I’ll listen to you very carefully and ask a lot of questions to do that. And you need to learn from me and you’ll give me that same respect and listen to me and ask me a lot of questions because I may not have the right words for what I’m trying to say and it’s very vulnerable for me to struggle in front of you.” And then you help that person make their point and they help you make your point.
So, let me bring it back to my gripes about Destiny. I do not like the concept of Destiny because it takes away my free will. I worked really hard to get where I’m at and I’m not going to give credit to some invisible, predetermining force. I give credit to my parents, my teachers, and all of those who had touched my life in a constructive or destructive way.
As someone who practices psychoanalysis, which is a technique used to make things that are unconscious and bring them to consciousness, I see the unconscious as destiny and our consciousness as free will. So, in my mind, it was always healthier to have free will over falling to your destiny, your unconscious patterns.
But, when speaking with this person I realized that winning an argument and solving problems are not the same thing. Winning is a resistance towards progress that is manifested through truth.
Thinking is offensive, aggressive, and a form of battle. But, when you’re able to set up a dialogue, because it’s not always obvious who is right, you can get closer to truth and understanding that enriches your life and theirs. And that’s the whole point of healthy relationships!
Healthy relationships emerge because things could be better than they are for you and me. And just maybe we will go out on a limb and jump into the pits together so we can figure out how to do that through cooperative exploration.
I didn’t want to listen and I was called a narcissist, which was true at that moment, and that hurts, but that’s better than repeating your destructive repetitions. Especially if your destructive repetitions just gets you into the same, broken, perverse, and meaningless relationships you’ve always been in. This interaction changed my Destiny, and now…I’m a little bit friendlier to that term.
The pathway to having a constructive and ever-lasting relationship is exploration, not communication.
And you better get right-enough with yourself and find someone who is right-enough with themselves or you’re just going to find ever-lasting suffering through the changes you and they make in your life.