By Rev. Dr. N. Rosechild-Sullivan

Since relationships are a good deal of the stuff life is made of, from infancy on, we give an awful lot of our mental and emotional attention to them.

And for each kind of relationship that is available between individual humans, our various cultures have constructed role expectations to delineate what two people – who are positioned in a specific way to each other – should do or contribute to each other.

What do we owe our children? What do we owe our parents? What do we owe our sibling? extended family member? platonic friend? a romantic friend? spouse?

It is all written out in our social codes. It is all inscribed in (gendered) roles.

But people are not roles.

We come to each of these relationships with a list of expectations – scripts we have learned from a (generally) shared social background (schema), and we then assume that the other party to the interactive relationship is reading from that same script.

But subtle, and sometimes even glaring, differences abound in the ways in which we – and others – internalize these scripts – and in individual inclination and ability to enact them.

Life is not actually scripted.

It is not actually a stage, and ALL of the people are not actually players (though some certainly are!).

And people fit (and misfit) into, and understand (and misunderstand) all of these scripted roles in an endless kaleidoscope of ways.

But we must love, or not love, bond with or release, like or reject people on their own merits – not on the roles they are supposed to fill.

Ultimately, our parents are people – just two human beings – who, for their own reasons, because of their own inclinations and baggage, made/make the choices they made/make.

And if who they are, and the actions they take, works for us, we can deepen that relationship.

But if who they are, and the actions they take, are not good for us, we can release part, or all, of the bond between us.

Just because someone is your sibling, your cousin, your relative, your friend, does not mean they will, or even can, always meet your expectations.

Just because you (at least initially) find someone “hot” sexually, it does not mean that they will (or even can) meet all of your role expectations for a romantic and/or sexual “relationship.”

We must learn to love and accept, or choose not to love and accept, others based on the ground of the reality of who they actually are – and of what the dynamic and interaction between them and ourselves actually is.

It doesn’t work to say, “Partners/spouses/boyfriends-girlfriends, are “supposed to” do this or that.

It works to ask ourselves, “What are they actually doing? If something isn’t working for me, is there a way to fix this through communication? Should we seek out a therapist to mediate, and further instruct us, in our communication? Is what my partner is doing an idiosyncrasy, a quirk of personality, that I can live with, or is it a deal breaker and for my own sake, I need to get out?

The fact is that, whether we admit it or not, each of our relationships is (and is only as good as) the interaction between us.

Generally, we get this in the realm of platonic friendship.

We don’t necessarily get it with family, though we may long since have adjusted our expectations away from who a family member “should” be and have gotten moderately realistic about who they actually “are.”

This is problematic though, as we often still long for family members to more closely fulfill the roles our socialization leads us to expect.

And we think others have that – that their mothers/ fathers/ sisters/ brothers/ grandparents/ aunts/ uncles/ cousins epitomize their roles.

This is complicated further in families where one or more of the members actually does harm (to you or to other members), as when there is neglect or abuse (verbal, mental, emotional, physical, or sexual).

However, in platonic friendship, we have a different model. In platonic friendships, we don’t usually try to make someone enact a role that is not true for them.

Instead, in the early stages of platonic friendships, we allow ourselves simply to get to know someone, to assess them, to consider who they actually are; and from there, we then allow ourselves to turn away and stay merely acquaintances, or to get closer, sometimes much closer – maybe even becoming best friends forever.

We could make use of this model in romantic/sexual relationships.

Once romance, or the potential for sex, is involved, we almost never allow ourselves the time to get to know, to see, to ascertain – who someone actually is – and then to allow the connection (or lack thereof) to evolve from there.

Instead, operating from a cultural model of “love at (damned near) first sight,” we allow ourselves to get caught up in the fervor of attraction – and even help to sweep past the process of getting to know them – giving our libido (and our hearts) away to (essential) strangers.

And then, we get surprised when they don’t meet our role expectations.

We come to romantic/sexual relationships with internalized scripts – good portions of which may be unknown to our partner/s – and then, agonize when they don’t do what we want – or when they do something we “would never do.”

But people are not roles.

Each of us – for all our similarities, for all our shared humanity, for all our propensity for greatness or baseness – is actually simply human – and comes to a new romantic/sexual endeavor with differences in our lived experience that write subtle differences into our romantic/sexual scripts – and therein lies the disconnect.

Assuming for the purposes of this discussion that:

1). the person (or persons) you are involved with are not sociopathic (that they have the ability to empathize, can put themselves in your shoes, and care about not causing you pain), and

2). that they do want their relationship with you to work out,

then most of our relationship conflicts arise out of misunderstandings and miscommunications, because we think we are on the same page in regard to role, to scripts, to who should do what.

When our lovers are not on the same page, when they have a slightly different but still significant set of rules for “your role” and their own, conflict ensues.

People are not roles.

If you are in one or more romantic/sexual/ companionate relationship, and you like him/her/them, and you want it to work out (and no one is suffering from antisocial personality disorder or perpetrating abuse), you might want to compare your scripts.

It is just possible that you – and this lovely complex person who has won (or is winning) your heart – need to communicate – and adjust – your expectations to each other’s.

Do you love them?

Can you love them for just who they are, as they are?

Do they love you?

Can they love you for just who you are, as you are?

Can the two of you compromise and make this thing work, or is there a real deal breaker that one or both of you can’t get past?

Would mediation with a trained third party help you communicate and compromise?

If this person isn’t fulfilling your role expectations – once you firmly face who this person actually is – is there a way to adjust the relationship – or even another way for you to get your need/s met – without abandoning this person and your interaction with them?

© 2013-2018 Nadine Rosechild-Sullivan, Ph.D.