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What Makes A Relationship Work

By Jed Wolpaw
Staff Writer

“My friends always ask me how I knew he was the one. I always say, he wasn’t the one when I met him, I made him the one.” That’s how one medical student described her relationship with her fiancé. Fascinating.

As someone who may have set the record for total number of four-month relationships, I have always been intrigued by how people know, or think they know, that they have found “the one” relationship.

Everybody loves the initial dopamine rush that we get when we fall madly in love. In fact, “madly” isn’t far from the truth. Studies have shown that people in the initial throes of a new love have brainwaves similar to people with psychiatric disorders and tend to make poor decisions, especially when it comes to the person they are dating.

The saying “love is blind” actually means that when you are first in love, you cannot see the faults in your partner. You think they are perfect and your brain acts as if they really are.
So what happens when that initial rush ends and the dopamine is cleared away by the dopamine active transporters (affectionately known as DATS)? What do we do when we awake from our madness to discover a person before us who, to our utter surprise, is not as perfect as we thought and, more shocking still, no longer thinks that we are perfect?

One possibility, of course, is to decide that this is not someone with whom we want to continue in a relationship, and move on. Another is to decide to stay, despite the imperfections. Or, as Robin Williams’ character, the psychiatrist Sean, says in Good Will Hunting, to realize that, “people call those imperfections, but no, that’s the good stuff.”

But what a decision! Even if we accept that this person is flawed and that they know that we are too, if we decide to stay with them we are agreeing, at least in theory, to end our search. We are giving up the possibility of finding someone better, more suited for us, more compatible and deciding to put our all into making it work with this one person.

Some people make the decision to stay in a relationship for less than fantastic reasons. Some have been in a relationship so long that they are afraid to end it because, even if it isn’t great, at least it’s a sure thing and safe and comfortable. Others are terrified of being alone, some even to the extent of not ending a relationship until they have the next one lined up and ready to go. You know these people. They’re the ones who haven’t been single for more than a month since they were about 14 years old. They always say that they aren’t going to date anyone else right away and then they always do.

Why? Maybe it is because they are afraid of being alone, so insecure that they need the validation of a lover at all times, or scared that they won’t be able to find someone new. Regardless, it begs the question, with all of these bad reasons to stay in a relationship, what are the good ones? When people decide to stay in a relationship because they truly believe it is the right one for them and not because they are afraid of being alone, how do they know?
I asked medical students who are married, engaged, or in long term relationships to share with me what made them decide that this person was “the one” or at least that this relationship was worth committing to over the long term. The responses were very interesting and perhaps not surprisingly, varied.

One first-year medical student wrote, “There are good times and bad times, but at the end of the day (even a particularly bad day), you can’t think of any other person you’d rather be with.” He says he and his girlfriend get along incredibly well and then asks, “But does that mean that we are each other’s one? I don’t know.” He then goes on to say, “I think that, in a way, the quest for the ‘one’ is foolhardy; it can blind us from who we have right in front of us.”

A slightly different response came from a second-year medical student. He wrote, “They complement you in a way that you never thought possible. They help you to become a more rounded person and I’ll even venture to say a better person. Also, even after the worst fight, you never want to leave their side or be spiteful. You understand that you are both humans that are not going to always get along, but never allow things to get out of hand.”

I found this response and others that echoed it particularly interesting. This person and many others in successful, healthy relationships, obviously values the way his significant other helps him grow and become a better person. But there are people who do not want their significant other to challenge them to be a better person. They want them to validate them exactly the way they are. It is the comfort of being told that whatever they do is good and right, the insulation from challenge, that they crave. Unfortunately, although they may feel comfortable, they will never truly grow.

Another student said, “I just knew, right away, that this relationship was different from any that had come before. Part of it was that we shared so much in common, but a lot of it, too, was that we were able to work well together when the going got tough. We handled the hard times well and to me, that was the biggest sign.”

This was reflected again and again in the people I spoke with. A mentor and friend of mine once told me that he would recommend to anyone thinking about marriage that they spend a year traveling together first. If they can travel well together, away from their comfort zones, dealing with the stress and frustration that at times accompany prolonged travel, then they are probably compatible in a way that will lead them to success in a long relationship. When the big changes and stressors come, like having children, they will be able to work together, adapt and grow stronger.In the end, there is no definite answer, no set formula to know if we have found “the right relationship” for us beyond all doubt. But a guiding path, at least, is suggested by Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet from the turn of the century. He writes, convincingly, that not only should we not be afraid to be alone, we should embrace it. Only then, eventually, can we ever enter into a healthy relationship.

I will end, for now, with a quote from a compilation of his writing entitled Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke writes, “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time…. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another, it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself… Merging is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still)…”

Jed Wolpaw is a second-year medical student.