Are You People Shopping?

By Rhiannon Hill-Lewes

The Human Race has become pretty clever at organising and controlling various aspects of our environment.

In the last forty years social patterns in the First World have changed dramatically too.

In the liberating of individuals to be far more self determined than even our grandparents could have imagined, and the feeling of power over our physical world due to technology and scientific understanding, a truly flexible and fast evolving culture has arrived.

But are we throwing some babies out with some bathwater?

Clients looking to process relationship issues often show up with the same attitudes and beliefs about how to go about finding life partners, especially since serial marriage has become the norm.

It is because these attitudes and beliefs have proved unworkable that they seek professional help.

I am often shocked and saddened by the assumptions that clients report about how to attract and develop a relationship.

Some of the common categories into which these approaches fall are:

Box Tickers
Proactive Solos in denial
Status/Financial based searches
Non negotiators
Untenable developmental match

and people who cannot connect or commit who do not realise that this is a negative personal issue rather than a lifestyle choice.

I see many individuals in their thirties and forties who frankly have simply failed to attract a viable long term relationship and cannot understand why this has happened.
These people arrive with a long list of boxes that a potential partner must tick.

Now of course, we all have to be a bit compatible. But we live in a narcissistic, perfectionistic culture. Whereas years ago people knew that within reasonable parameters a good marriage comprised tolerance and compromise, nowadays many people have no concept of this.

Box tickers regard the dating game as People Shopping.

They are looking for a combination of attributes that simply does not exist in one other human being.

Sometimes they have created this impossible structure in order to avoid having to commit to anyone but this is unconscious, so they remain perplexed - and lonely.

If you are only looking for someone with a certain hair colour, job, political beliefs hobby and so on you will be disappointed. These are second level criteria and are really all up for negotiation. People use this vast lists of tickboxes to unconsciously rule out relationship altogether.

Relationship therapists agree, based on many years of actually asking people what they really want, that valid tickboxes should include things like: religious belief, whether to have children, extreme sexual preference, ethicality and financial management.

These are the main things which erode relationships most quickly.

Yet even while people have long lists of trivial tickboxes, many people fling themselves into relationships with others without bothering to check the really important things.

One, three or even ten years into the marriage one or both of them discover that there is a huge discrepancy in the partnership which they never even mentioned, let alone negotiated.

Proactive solos in denial are people who have been too damaged by previous experiences to relate at all for any length of time. These include people who have unresolved sexual abuse issues, people with grandiosity fantasies who cannot be with anyone unless they are special, famous or extremely unusual or exciting, people who have obsessional issues about money and status or people who pathologically take refuge in work or other pursuits which simply leave no time for a relationship.

All these behaviours are a defence against surrendering to A N Other. To be able to own that this is the case is too painful so the person translates their loneliness into a desirable lifestyle choice. They often tend to cultivate friends who are dissatisfied in their own relationships in order to validate the alleged wisdom of staying single.

People who are 'shopping' for a partner based on the need for financial support, or conversely offering financial support in order to retain most of the power in the relationship, or who believe they can only marry someone who will enhance their status, are in a lot of trouble.

Partnerships with a very low or non existent genuine love and desire component will probably work if both partners are marrying for practical reasons. If both are not, or there is deceit, the resentment and hatred which can arise is extremely corrosive. If children are involved the destruction of their functionality is often guaranteed.

Non negotiators are people who do not want to be lonely but although they are capable of loving another individual they are unable to survive unless completely in control. This is never going to create any kind of functional relationship. Vulnerable people with low self regard who may have been overcontrolled in their childhood can easily fall into line with Non Negotiators but unless the Non Negotiator can separate them from others, from information, media and other evidence that they need and deserve mutual power sharing, these relationships break down when the other person suddenly recovers and becomes empowered, often with dramatic results. Domestic violence and murder often occur in these relationships.

Untenable developmental match means that many people do not realise consciously that we change and grow throughout life in different measure and at different rates.

A genuine love relationship based on mutuality, communication, negotiation and respect will withstand not just normal developmental change but also copes well with chronic illness, financial collapse, loss of children, and external natural disasters and extreme economic hardship.

If one partner has fixed expectations, fails to mature (very common in the current culture) cannot cope with a decision like career switch, or the acquisition of step children or new responsibilites for example ageing parents or a disability, the relationship will not flourish.

The last category: people who cannot connect or commit who do not realise that this is a negative personal issue rather than a lifestyle choice, includes people with severe psychological distress and addictions who are prepared to mask these for quite a while to achieve a relationship but are unable to sustain their deception. When their relationships break down their distress increases. As they are due to their undiagnosed difficulty, or because they are anaesthetised by addiction, unable to take responsibility for their behaviour, the displace the blame for their failure in relationship on others and claim to themselves and others that they have to be on their own, or indulge in serial relationship, because that is how things are. Again, their position often looks desirable from the outside to others who are dissatisfied and disappointed with relationship.

Many people lost natural wisdom about how to create a supportive and durable relationship during the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies.

We have replaced the natural processes of falling in love and working things through with an intellectually based over structured approach to finding a partner.

What many of us are doing now is merely People Shopping. We are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

People Shopping causes trust levels to be low, encourages negative and inappropriate testing and other pointless relationship 'games' and the emotional insecurity and anxiety that comes from not being able to settle with one, solid, life supporting person.

The historic and contemporary evidence that humans want and need this is overwhelming but we are losing the instinctual, natural art of seeking and bonding in a relaxed and workable way.

When US and Allied psychologists and medics processed survivors from the concentration camps immediately after their liberation in WW2 they noticed after a while that many people in worse physical condition than some others survived. They looked at commonality and realised that people who had managed to retain, create or sustain relationships had managed to overcome physical privation far better than others who had failed to stay connected in what was an extremely life threatening environment.

There is no doubt that the lack of functional relationship severely affects every other area of our lives.

I'm always really delighted when I hear from a former client who has managed to achieve a successful relationship based on the insights they have gained in our work together. I have often noticed that this is quickly followed by an improvement in confidence, motivation and sometimes physical health.

So think before you go People Shopping. And remember, it would be well to look in your own emotional bank account before setting unattainable goals for others.

More on this can be found in my e-book: Ten Stupid Things That Can Mess Up Your Life, currently on offer at £4.99 to Ecademy members, PDF direct from me.