Which Dimensions of Compatibility Are Most Important to You?

Image by Alexa from Pixabay  

I’ve been having some beautiful conversations this week on compatibility in relationships and some major insights into my own drivers and patterns that have – until now – led me towards some very incompatible partners.

As I talked about in How to Make Home a Happy Place Where You Are Loved, Supported and Encouraged, it’s our subconscious mind that is in charge of our instant biochemical attraction to someone. As it is much more primal and in charge of our emotions, this allows us to become attracted to someone who fits its definition of love, which is largely driven by what it felt like to be at home (in childhood) and be around our siblings and parents growing up.

Most of us experienced conditional love that has painful associations which cause the problems in our love relationships.  We might subconsciously form the belief that love hurts, that it’s a roller-coaster, that it’s a chase. Or we might be conditioned to expect let down, or have low standards for how people show up for us in our lives. 

Not appreciating any of this as I ventured into womanhood, my only guidance to the question “How do I know if I'm in love?" was that it is a feeling "you will just know". This was reinforced in movies and TV, and this mythical feeling seemed to have people do all sorts of major life changing things for love. So giving away parts of myself, not having all my needs met, wasn’t even a conscious concern, my biochemical reactions were running the show.

As I gained more experience in the mirror of my relationships, I started to define successful love relationships as having two components: chemistry and friendship. Even then, I ended up committing to relationships that really only ever had one of those at best.

I was pondering the definition of a good friend a little yesterday, and concluded that friendship is as subjective as chemistry, and dependant on our personal experiences and priorities. It can also be very multidimensional – like I may have certain fun friends, others to ponder my ideas and deep thoughts with, others to engage in certain activities with and so forth.

Last year when I was doing a course on Attachment Theory with Briana MacWilliam, she talked about the different dimensions of relationship compatibility. We looked at values and beliefs, as well as things like sexual chemistry, emotional intimacy, humour, interests, future goals and spirituality. Other dimensions were introduced that I hadn’t thought about before:

• Unconditional Regard – appreciation for someone because you believe in who they are, regardless of what they give you. And you believe that by being who they are they contribute to the good of humankind, and you like being around their energy
  
• Domesticity – how well you both contribute to the day to day routines and necessary functions of the home. Affection – the importance of physical affection, outside of sexual intercourse or behaviours
• Intellectualism – how much you like talking about ideas versus issues of the mundane
• Generosity – a willingness to be generous in the relationship and towards each other without feeling depleted, manipulated or taken advantage of
• Cultural influences – the impact of culture and tradition (and potentially intersecting systems of oppression) on you and your partner

And I added in a few of my own around financial beliefs, maturity (the degree to which we each take responsibility for our own reactions and behaviours, lean into any conflict and are willing to grow personally) and the degree to which my body/nervous system feels safe.

This gives me a much clearer picture, and also plays into that pondering about the definition of a good friend and the concept about where people sit at my table. It really all comes down to compatibility. And if I was going to live in the same house and share a life with another person again I'd want that compatibility to be high.

By the same token, there's nothing wrong with incompatibility if it's your soul's calling to growth, but I will attest it is often a painful way to grow. After 50 years of incompatibilities I'm grateful for the resultant lessons, but personally I’m happy to try out something more compatible now.

There are different ideas on dimensions of compatibility used in various approaches and captured in different studies, it’s worth doing a search to have a look through and see which resonate most with you if the ones mentioned here aren’t capturing your needs.

While Briana’s purpose was to make me think about what aspects in a relationship are most important to me, it is not a blueprint for a partner so much as an aide to look at the different dimensions of a current/possible partnership and get very clear on where I may automatically be giving parts of myself away instead of making conscious, thought out choices.

As mentioned, Giving away parts of myself is a concept I am familiar with in love partnerships. I had never thought of any of it in a logical way, it was just a case of following the feeling. The consequences, as Robin Norwood opens with in her 1985 book Women Who Love too Much:

• When being in love means being in pain
  
• When most of our conversations with intimate friends are about him, his problems, his thoughts, his feelings – and nearly all our sentences start with “he…”
  
• When we excuse his moodiness, bad temper, indifference, put-downs or problems due to an unhappy childhood and we try to become his therapist
  
• When we read a self help book and underline all the passages we think would help him
  
• When we don’t like his basic characteristics, values and behaviours but we put up with them thinking that if we are attractive and loving enough he will want to change for us
  
• When our relationship jeopordises our emotional wellbeing and perhaps even our physical health and safety
  

All these are things I have experienced and all are signs of giving too much, because what I am giving away is parts of myself, my own wants, needs and desires. When I looked at Briana's compatibility dimensions, and added a few of my own, and the degree to which each is important, it soon became clear just how much I'd been compromising myself in so many areas.

Especially when I look at things such as how much I enjoy talking about ideas versus issues of the mundane, and appreciating someone because you believe in who they are regardless of what they give you. Being an ideas person myself, while it's not so important to me to match with another ideas person, it is important that they hold my ideas in high regard.

And yet in very few of my relationships have I experienced people who “get me” in that way. Most often I would find I was disregarded for my talents and capacity for ideas and steered more towards what I could bring to the table practically. This is a reflection also of my childhood experiences.

That then got me thinking about what it might be like to be with someone with big ideas of their own, maybe a humanitarian type, or ecologist, someone with ideas and ideals about something bigger than themselves. I'd certainly love to be around more thinkers, movers and shakers who want to change the world.

I can see now that being led by that biochemistry in the past (which arises from our subconscious childhood wiring) thinking that's "love" and therefore make everything else work, really suppressed so many parts of me. Something I’m no longer willing to do.

So what about you, which relationships are regularly causing you to feel constricted and unhappy? What parts of yourself are you unconsciously giving away? And is it time to look more closely at the various different dimensions of compatibility and how important they are to you?  

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Let Go of Your Attachment to Your Feelings, Expectations and Beliefs, What Resentment, Frustration and Pain Have to Do With Your Boundaries, Draw Solitude Around You Like a Warm Blanket - Get To Know Yourself and What Do You Want From Your Relationships - Time to Take an Inventory? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.