What Does Your Partner Say About You?

“There was something intoxicating about the validation of being loved by someone like her,” he explained to me, “She is intelligent, glamorous and kind of famous, and the fact that someone like her would love me felt very good.”

As he reflected on the relationship, a darker look came over his face. Of course, I knew it was about the months of recovering from the heartbreak that followed, the many sleepless nights and the recurring bouts of depression.

“Of course, when she left me, that is exactly what was hard about it,” he continued, “It’s not just about missing someone you love, it’s also about feeling like you weren’t good enough for someone like her, not up to her standard.”

When it comes to dating and relationships, there is a lot of talk about standards. Some of the talk is benign, where standards merely represent good boundaries and baseline requirements for how one expects to be treated by a (potential) partner. Some of the talk, though, is not about treatment but about requirements from the other person that make them *good enough* for you. The beauty standard. The employment standard. The *class* standard (which is often sublimated under standards of grammar, taste and style). I suppose, some of this makes sense, sometimes the standards are enforced to avoid a power-imbalance or ensure compatibility but there is another way that they are employed. Sometimes the standards to which we hold our partners are about what *attaining* them says about us.

The most accessible way to understand this is the (usually sexist but prevalent) concept of Trophy Wives. It’s not about who they, but what they represent, and what attaining that says about you. The most common scenario is being so rich, successful and (sometimes) charismatic that the most beautiful women in the world would be by your side. I don’t mean to condemn desiring beauty, that seems natural enough, it’s deeper than that, it’s the motivation for desiring beauty and how you view it. Viewing it as *trophy* inherently means you’ve won it for something and having it is validation for that *something*. For my friend, a different version of this was (partially) at play. Being loved by a glamorous and well-known person meant something to him, maybe it compensated for an insignificance he felt being viewed as generic or basic when he was younger—one of millions—and so being chosen by someone who was socially-viewed as special validated some part of him. I think it is natural and not all of it is necessarily nefarious or unhealthy.

To a certain extent, we’re all mindful and aware of what our choice of and taste in partners says about us (and it is not always about validation) but there is also a danger to it. The danger of what it means to lose or be rejected by the person who was validating you. For my friend, it didn’t just mean losing someone he loved, it also, to some extent, meant questioning the confidence he had gained by being loved by someone like her and then reeling from being rejected for not being good enough. If a beautiful person cements your idea of your worth by being with you then losing that beautiful person can also make you look inside yourself and wonder what about you is so inadequate that you do not deserve such beauty. In some way, we all measure the worth of people in relationships against one another. I have certainly been in the presence of people who look at a couple and wonder: *What does he see in her? Why is she with them?*

I know that when my spouse and I got together, there were some people in my social circle who remarked at my choice of partner. They thought that choosing someone who presents as my partner does—sociable, a man of simple pleasures, *normal*—meant I was vying for something. A life of the type of normalcy that has eluded me for a long time. When we first moved in together, someone (very snidely) asked me, “So you’re playing all these nesting games now, whatever happened to all your subversiveness?” The statement my relationship was making to these people was based simply on the social *image* of the person I was with and based on that, they made all kinds of deductions about who I was. On the other hand, my partner got his share of evaluations for being with me. In the broader social scene, outside of my liberal, feminist echo-chamber (that I love) people looked at me and wondered what he was doing. Some posited that because he was divorced, he was settling for a *fat girl* because his market value had diminished. Others ventured that because his *conventional life plan* had failed, he wanted to go a wilder route as part of a mid-life crisis. They evaluated us, as individuals, based on social-parameters in order to deduce whether we were a *match* or not and then tried to figure out why we were together or what we gave to each other. They wouldn’t ever see it because they don’t see us as people, they see us as types.

The truth is my partner validates absolutely nothing for me, not in that way, anyway, and I don’t believe I validate him that way either. Over the course of all these years, I have realised I have a very simple system for assessing my relationship and whether it is working or not. It’s not happiness, that’s a bit too simplistic, it’s just whether I feel free to grow within a relationship or not. Often, in these relationships where you are meant to fulfil a validation-based role for each other, there is very little room for growth or change. For instance, if you become less beautiful when your role is that of a trophy, you stop bringing the same thing to the table. The relationship stops working because that role of indicating something about your partner to the world changes but outside the confines of that, when I don’t feel obligated to represent as *his* in any way, I feel a tremendous amount of freedom and that is what really works for me (and I hope, us). The zeitgeist is littered with parameters to consider when checking for the success of your relationship, but for me, there is only one. *Can I become a different version of myself without worrying I have to remain the same to merit your love?*

My mother often tells me that as I get older, I should make an effort to look younger *or he will not love me anymore*. My friends sometimes tout the importance of wildin’ out sexually to keep things spicy *or their partner will cheat* (and well, I guess this one is a bit laughable because the next step from here to wilder is just death, I think). There are times when people tout the importance of remaining the same mysterious, vivacious person from their memories of you but I think all of that matters more when you got together for the wrong reasons. If I dated him to be my normalcy, it would shake me when he became less traditional. If he dated me for my wildness, it would shake him when I presented as more staid. That’s not what happened, though, because maybe it was luck or maybe it was the marvel of great timing, I think we both dated each other to be spectators to who we would become, as individuals, as well as a couple, and that is a marvellous thing because to be loved—truly, madly obsessively loved—for the person you are, and not what you represent, is an unrivalled joy. There are no standards. I can be ugly and the opposite of a trophy. He can be poor and meet none of the social *standards*. The whole world could look at us and wonder what we see in each other. They couldn’t see it because love like this is freedom and it’s hard to see that, you have to feel it.

My partner says nothing about me and I say nothing about him either, because we give each other the freedom to step outside this system of evaluation, and that means anyone else could say anything at all, but it doesn't register. It doesn't mean anything at all. There is nothing to validate here.