“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage”
Lao Tzu
“Ek safina hai teri yaad agar, ek samundar hai meri tanhai”
(If your memory is a boat, then my solitude is an ocean)
People often ask for a perfect relationship. Not because they’re naive or romantic, but because they’re exhausted. Exhausted from adjusting, from explaining themselves repeatedly, from starting over. The question comes from fatigue, not fantasy. It’s a desire for something that doesn’t demand constant negotiation.
The truth is, relationships rarely unfold the way we imagine they should. One person understands silence but struggles with restlessness. Another matches ambition perfectly but never quite syncs emotionally. Some connections burn intensely, then disappear, leaving behind habits carried for years. These aren’t failures. They’re just incomplete in some dimension we decided was essential.
How We Got Here
Understanding why relationships feel so burdened requires looking at how human connection has evolved. In older societies, different relationships served distinct functions. Extended families provided continuity and support. Communities offered identity and belonging. Marriages handled economics and child-rearing. Friendships supplied intellectual companionship. Spiritual communities addressed existential questions.
No single relationship was expected to fulfill every need.
Modern life changed this distribution. Families scattered across cities and countries. Traditional communities fragmented. Religious participation declined. All those needs that once spread across dozens of connections now concentrate into one: the romantic partnership.
Today’s romantic partner is expected to be a best friend, intellectual equal, adventure companion, emotional support system, source of stability, catalyst for growth, financial partner, and permanent life companion. When one relationship inevitably fails to deliver on all fronts, the assumption is that love has failed or the wrong person was chosen. The question of whether the expectation itself is flawed rarely gets asked.
The Built-In Contradictions
Relationships contain inherent contradictions that can’t be resolved, only negotiated. This isn’t a flaw in specific relationships but a feature of human connection itself.
Consider the simultaneous desire for intimacy and independence. Deep connection is wanted, but so is freedom to remain an individual. These needs don’t alternate. They coexist, often uncomfortably.
There’s also the tension between security and novelty. Stability and predictability are comforting. But so are surprise and growth. Too much certainty creates stagnation. Too much uncertainty breeds anxiety. There’s no final resolution, only ongoing balance.
The same applies to openness and privacy. Complete transparency is appealing in theory. But boundaries and private spaces are also necessary. These opposing needs persist throughout a relationship’s life.
Understanding that these tensions are normal doesn’t make relationships easier. But it does make the difficulty make sense. The work never ends because these contradictions are permanent features of connecting with another person.
Different Connections Serve Different Purposes
Looking at how various relationships function reveals an interesting pattern. Some friendships revolve around shared interests like music or sports. The connection is valuable precisely because it’s specific, not despite it. Other relationships offer intellectual stimulation through deep conversations about ideas and philosophy. Still others provide comfort, gossip, adventure, or professional collaboration.
Each serves a distinct purpose. None needs to become something else to be meaningful.
Research on attachment patterns supports this view. People don’t have one uniform attachment style. They can be securely attached to one person, anxiously attached to another, avoidantly attached to a third. Different bonds serve different functions and don’t necessarily diminish each other. Secure attachment in one relationship can actually enhance functioning in others.
This raises a few important question: Why consolidate all these functions into one romantic relationship? Why demand that a partner simultaneously be a best friend, intellectual companion, adventure partner, comfort provider, stability source, and growth catalyst? The expectation itself creates impossibility.
The Existential Dimension
There’s a deeper layer to why relationships feel both essential and disappointing. Human beings are fundamentally alone in their subjective experience. No matter how intimate the connection, ultimate separateness remains. This existential isolation creates a profound desire to bridge the unbridgeable gap between self and other.
Connection is sought not just for practical benefits but as a response to this basic existential condition. Yet the same isolation that drives people toward others ensures that complete merger is impossible. Total escape from separateness cannot be achieved.
This illuminates why relationships feel simultaneously vital and insufficient. Connection is needed to create meaning and define identity. But no connection can fully resolve existential separateness. When one relationship is expected to eliminate loneliness, satisfy the need for meaning, and provide complete understanding, it’s being asked to solve an unsolvable problem.
Authentic connection recognizes and honors continued individuality while building community. It allows difference and sameness to coexist, accepting that profound connection and fundamental separateness exist together.
The Unfair Burden
One relationship carrying the weight of all human needs is unfair in multiple directions. It’s unfair to the relationship itself, which buckles under impossible demands. It’s unfair to the partner, who is expected to be everything. And it’s unfair to oneself, as repeated disappointment becomes inevitable when reality fails to match expectations.
Think of it as structural engineering. A structure designed to carry a certain load will collapse if weight keeps being added beyond its capacity. The conclusion wouldn’t be that the structure was inherently flawed, but that it was overburdened. Yet with relationships, when they collapse under excessive expectations, love gets blamed rather than examining the load placed on it.
This overburdening manifests in many ways. The romantic partner is expected to provide the emotional intimacy once distributed across family, extended kinship networks, and close friendships. They’re expected to offer the intellectual stimulation that communities of practice once supplied. They’re expected to provide meaning and purpose that religious and spiritual communities historically offered.
When relationships succeed at some dimensions but not others, it’s experienced as failure. The pattern repeats: breaking up, searching for someone who can do everything, perpetuating the cycle of exhaustion. The expectation itself rarely gets questioned.
A Different Framework
The alternative isn’t about lowering standards or settling for less. It’s about distribution and acceptance.
Distributing the need for connection across multiple relationships means each is valued for what it genuinely provides rather than what one wishes it would provide. Deep friendships, family bonds, professional relationships, community ties, creative collaborations, and well-chosen solitude all contribute to a well-lived life. None of these diminishes romantic love. They contextualize it, support it, and relieve it of impossible burdens.
This doesn’t mean devaluing romantic partnerships. It means recognizing that romantic relationships exist within a broader ecology of connections. When other relationships provide what they can provide, romantic partnerships don’t have to do everything. The pressure decreases. The disappointment lessens.
Seeing relational diversity not as romantic failure but as wisdom changes the entire perspective. Maintaining deep friendships, investing in community, pursuing meaningful work, engaging in creative practice, and also loving romantically isn’t a sign of not finding “the one.” It’s understanding that being human means being connected in multiple, differentiated ways.
The Gentleness Required
When a relationship doesn’t fulfill every need, that isn’t evidence of inadequacy – personal, partner’s, or relational. It’s evidence of reality. The exhaustion so many experience comes from fighting that reality, from the endless work of trying to make one connection do everything.
The relief isn’t in discovering the perfect relationship. It’s in releasing the expectation of perfection itself.
Connection is possible. Profound love is possible. Intimacy, growth, and joy are possible. But they become more possible when the demand that they all come from the same source is dropped. When love is no longer required to prove itself by being everything. When relationships are allowed to be what they actually are: imperfect, partial, and still somehow enough.
Comfort – the thing most sought in relationships – doesn’t come from finding someone who completes us. It comes from accepting fundamental incompleteness. Human connection, in all its forms, is both the greatest joy and deepest challenge. The wisdom lies not in perfecting it but in embracing its complexity, distributing its weight, and finding meaning not in any single connection but in the rich, contradictory, ever-changing network of relationships that constitutes a human life.
This is the lesson: love widely, expect honestly, and let each connection be what it can be rather than what convention says it should be. The burden lightens not when perfection is found but when the demand for it is released.
“Mujhe tanhai ki aadat hai meri baat chhorren, ye lije aap ka ghar aa gaya hai haath chhorren”
(I am used to solitude, forget about me; here, your home has arrived, let go of my hand)
The irony in these words runs deep. Becoming accustomed to carrying everything alone makes it difficult to distribute the weight. But real connection begins when impossible expectations are released – not people, but the demands that keep everyone perpetually exhausted, perpetually searching for that one perfect relationship that will finally provide rest.
Rest comes not from perfection but from acceptance. And acceptance begins with understanding that love, in all its forms, is enough when the demand that it be everything is finally set down.
