What Can We Learn From Other Relationships We’ve Observed?

There isn’t enough time in life to make all the mistakes on your own. Rather than try to figure everything out from personal experience, learn from other relationships to make your own better.

Live vicariously and put yourself in their shoes to see what could have gone better. There is always a lesson there to be gleaned.

In this article, we’ll explore what there is to be found by keeping an eye on what others have done.

Cassie’s View on How to Learn From Other Relationships

My uncle has been married three times.  I don’t remember a thing about his first wife, the mother of his two daughters, my cousins, as they divorced when I was barely walking. I have heard stories that she was fairly nutty, and to this day remains an odd bird. Of course, her side of the family could tell similar stories of my uncle.  One can’t be sure.

His second wife, from what I recall, was a nice woman.  She died of breast cancer after a lengthy battle.

Apparently, my uncle lives by the old adage of the third time being a charm because he walked the aisle once more and to this day is married to bride number three, who is yet another odd bird.

My uncle has a type.  But as I said, my uncle has his quirks, so to each his own.  Growing up I always wondered if these relationships, which I knew even as a child were dysfunctional, were the reason my cousins never seemed to find love.

The Love Struggles of my Cousins

Now in their (almost) fifties, my two cousins have never settled into their happily-ever-afters. Separated by less than two years, they were often dressed alike and mistaken for twins.  Popular and beautiful girls with no shortage of suitors, yet neither of them ever found themselves in stable relationships.

Marie, the eldest, never left her twenties behind her.  Although she has had good jobs, she tends to always look for the next opportunity, even if it’s not necessarily better.  She simply can’t sit still.  Unfortunately, this means that when there are layoffs, she tends to sit low on the totem pole.  To her, that means she can just keep moving.  She still spends most nights out with friends at bars, and always chooses men that do not seem to be compatible with what she says are her goals.

Cindy is a struggling artist.  She works part-time retail jobs to make ends meet, but often sleeps on Marie’s couch as she can’t afford rent.  For several years she was in what seemed like a stable relationship, as there was an engagement, but it was called off by her fiancé.  She was broken for a long period after that.  She again has a boyfriend, but she seems traumatized at any mention of a wedding.  Both girls talk about how they had wanted children, and the white picket fence, yet neither made it happen.  Simple bad luck, or something else entirely?

Observing My Parents’ Marriage

I always thought that my parents had a good marriage.  After all, they were still married.  That’s all it takes, right?  Maybe when I was growing up divorce wasn’t so prevalent, but even as I started to get older other marriages were beginning to fall apart. All the while, my parents kept celebrating anniversaries.

My sister and I threw them their 25^th, and then their 40^th surprise parties.   This year they will celebrate 46 years of wedded bliss.  If you stay together that long you must be doing something right.  You must be happy.

I must say that I modeled my relationships after my parents’ without ever realizing that I was doing it. The only difference was that my relationships kept failing and I had no idea why.  No idea, that is, until about four years ago.

Seeing Relationships Through New Eyes

I started a new relationship that could have very likely gone the route of all of the others.  I attempted to attack it the same way.  The only difference is that he opened my eyes to that exact statement.  A relationship is not something that you attack.  It’s not a problem you try to solve as individuals or conquer on your own.  It’s a partnership.

I think I had been viewing relationships the way I had seen everything else in my life, a challenge in which to excel. A battle I needed to win over an opponent. Where did that idea come from?

As I started to spend more time in this relationship, it was like a fog had lifted.  The more time I spent in the presence of my parents, it was so clear that these ideas had been ingrained in me from a young age.

My parents don’t communicate.  They quietly fight.  They bicker and argue about everything from what to have for dinner to what route to take to the store.  I’m not even sure either of them cares about the point they are fighting so long as they win the argument.  Are they happy?  It’s a happiness that they are comfortable with.  This is not my happiness.  This is not the way that I want to live my life.  I choose better.

Giving Happiness a Chance

I think about my cousins and wonder if they even had a chance to find happiness, or if that was taken from them by the roller coaster relationships that were demonstrated to them in their childhood, and if so if they have even figured that out.  They never managed to learn from other relationships that love could be stable and healthy.  It could be forever.

How do we, as we go through life, take the good from relationships and figure out how and what is bad behaviour so that we don’t carry it forward and continue it in our own relationships?  Not only our romantic ones, but the behaviour that we model for our children. We are setting them up for a lifetime of interactions and they deserve the best that we can give them.  That might not be the easiest thing to do.  It takes a lot of self-reflection and opening our eyes to those around us.

Ask yourself if the relationship that you are in would be good enough for your son or daughter.  Recognize not just the good in all of the past relationships you have been in or observed, but almost more importantly, the negative that you do not want to mirror.

I am grateful that I was able to recognize in my parents the relationship that I do not want to have.  Even more grateful to have an amazing partner to help me move past that.   Wouldn’t it be wonderful to all be so fortunate?

Nick’s View

I have always believed that I am fundamentally in control of my own life. Even from a young age, I had the sense that my future would be the result of my actions and choices rather than being predetermined based on current circumstances or external forces.

One of the greatest determining factors in happiness is how satisfied one is with one’s relationships, both romantic and otherwise. In my case, I was rather hot headed in my late teen years and into my early twenties. It was around that time that I became acutely aware that I was modeling patterns of behaviour from my parents. Their dysfunctional way of handling discord of any kind—from getting lost in the car to a mix-up in their order at a restaurant—found its way to me.

Learn From Other Relationships to Design Life Intentionally

It was also in those late teen years that I began to crystallize my vision of what I actually wanted my life to look like, including the following:

• How I wanted to behave.
• The way I wanted others to perceive me.
• The path I needed to take to actually build the life I was after.

I began to understand that I needed to rewire myself. Whether my initial conditioning was the result of DNA (nature) or through direct observation (nurture) doesn’t really matter. It is possible, in life, to learn from relationships both from the additive perspective for traits we desire and from a reductive perspective for those we would rather not. I’ve gained the most with the latter approach.

Be Prepared to Change Yourself

Much of becoming the person I wanted to be meant reviewing my behaviours and actively challenging myself to, in many cases, do the opposite of what had become instinctual to me through the osmosis of growing up in a turbulent household which lacked in the harmony I desired. I had to unlearn the bad thought patterns.

Through the following years which takes me to the present day, I also found myself analyzing the relationships of close friends and not finding models there that I desired emulating, either. While it seems sad to say, the majority of my friends have been in abusive, vapid, and otherwise poor relationships.

Learning by proxy from the mistakes of others in this fashion is vital. If we took the time to make all of the mistakes ourselves, there would never be time for living the right kind of life.

My three-step process for building a positive life is by inverting the problem:

1. Identify what I don’t want.
2. Figure out what would cause the bad outcome.
3. Do the opposite.

Using this method, we can learn from other relationships by figuring out what we don’t want, to tell us what we do. Identifying what we don’t want or like about a relationship and working backwards to find the behaviours we’d like to emulate allows us to grow without the pain.

Modeling those behaviours, of course, takes work and is another story altogether, but the learning doesn’t need to be by direct experience.

Concluding Thoughts on Ways to Learn From Other Relationships

Relationships can be tough. Sometimes it can feel like you’re in it on your own, figuring out the problems.

It doesn’t need to be this way, though. You can get great feedback just from watching what others are doing.

All you need to in order to craft your own great relationship is the following:

• See the good ways other couples treat one another and follow suit.
• Watch the bad things others are doing in their relationships and decide not to do them.

Simple, right? It truly is.