Why Don't You Care as Much as I Do?
Dear Maxwells: I’ve been stressing out about this election for months now and my partner doesn’t seem to care that much about it, or politics at all for that matter. It’s not that we don’t have the same political views as much as that one of us cares and the other can’t seem to be bothered with it. This has started to become extremely frustrating for me and we’ve started to have arguments about it. The more we fight about it though, the less we seem to be able to meet each other halfway. How important is this and should I be worried about the future of our relationship?
Dear Reader, thanks for your question. We expected to get some election related questions this week and chose to focus on this one because you can insert anything in the “I care more about xyz than my partner” problem and our answer will still be the same. Whether it's politics, spending time with in-laws, religion, sex, sports, music, skiing, the list goes on, but there is 100% certainty that in every relationship, there will be something, or more likely, many things that you care way more about than your partner. Rarely have we come across couples where key interests or values are evenly matched. In fact, part of the benefit of intimate relationships is in the different alignments, or sometimes misalignments of certain values and interests and the alchemy that happens when couples navigate those differences successfully.
The truth is that there is no right answer to your question other than, “how important is xyx to you?” In the case of this particular reader's question, where on the scale of importance does this issue of politics fall for you? Is this issue connected to a fundamental belief that you have that feels like a part of or extension of your soul? Or is this something that you care about, yes, but ultimately, wouldn’t think of as a dealbreaker? Only you can know the answer to this question. If this is a core part of your being, a fundamental part of your belief system and going against it would feel like a betrayal of everything that you hold near and dear, then yes, that would be cause to worry about the future of your relationship. If it’s not, and it’s more of a mismatch of values in this particular area, then the best way to look at it is as an opportunity for growth.
If most of us get honest with ourselves, there are usually only a few crosses that we would be willing to die on when it comes to relating to something as a “dealbreaker” for our partner. Those few crosses usually make up our core value system, or the things that we hold dearest to our heart and are connected to what we want out of life. Whether to have children or not, religious beliefs for the very religious, for some, yes, political beliefs and for others, shared interests that are fundamental aspects of a person's personality. For each person, this list of dealbreakers is going to be different, but for most of us, the list is not as long as we might think it is before we are confronted with the reality of having to die on that cross. For everything else that doesn’t fall on that list, it's likely that you and your partner will not be perfectly aligned on every one of these items. What we mean when we say that this is an opportunity for growth is that the gap between how you and your partner relate to whatever it is you aren’t in perfect alignment about, represents the amount of personal growth you each need to do in that particular area.
Let's take our readers' conundrum as a perfect example. There is a gap between our reader and their partner, specifically in terms of how much our reader cares about politics and how much her partner seems to not care. To close that gap would require both members of the relationship to evolve themselves. For our reader's partner, the growth would be in learning to step out of their own world and take more of an interest in the world of their partner even if they don’t take a personal interest in it. It would require empathy and compassion and simply caring about another person's experience. Similarly, for our reader, the lesson is the same. Just because you care passionately about something doesn’t mean that your partner needs to care as much about it as you do. Get out of your own world, and step into theirs. If you and your partner are willing to do that, then you begin to close the gap on this misalignment. Your growth is a result of getting into another person's world, in caring as much about their reality as your own. This skill is ultimately required of every single person who strives to be in an intimate relationship, and is ironically (or not so ironically) one of the greatest gifts that intimacy gives us…the ability to step into somebody else's world and care as much about it as our own.
