Relationships: Growing Apart or Growing Together?
This will change the way you view relationships forever
I shouldn’t have to say this, but it’s important to support your partner through everything. I’m going to tell you a little story of something that happened to me and explain how it can have a massive impact on your romantic relationships. Then we’ll dig into a story about a cuckold fetish and a ruined relationship, then some science to help you piece it all together, then I’ll wrap it up in a neat little package with a bow on top with some takeaways.
I ask that you bear with me through some uncomfortable stories, so we can find out one of the things it required to make a relationship truly thrive for the long haul.
I have a saying about success in life, one that came to me during the 2016 campaign season, when I made more money in my life in a single month than I’d ever made (and we legalized marijuana in California with Prop 64, too). My sudden rise was a historical accident more than anything else. Out of the blue, I was making obscene amounts of cash thanks to the high-stakes Trump-Hillary election. It was a great time to be working in politics.
I worked extremely hard: twelve and fourteen-hour days every single day, seven days a week. But I wasn’t working any harder than I worked other years—and I wasn’t working any harder than many across America who put in long hours for low wages every single day. Still, I was proud. I was like Mighty Mouse, flexing my muscles.
I took to social media, overjoyed with my success, though I spared my friends the exact details. That same month, I lost most of my friends. Such was the cost of my newfound success.
What I expected was a warm reception—my friends cheering me on, as I always had them when they hit their high points in life. What I received was an avalanche of bitterness, anger, covert digs at my character, and a ton of other negative stuff. A few great friends supported me as I moved upward and onward in the world, far from the humble roots where my life began.
Then it hit me:
Most people don’t actually want you to succeed in life. But they don’t want you to fail, either. If you succeed, you make them feel like a failure; if you fail, you become a liability. Most people want you to be exactly where they believe they are in life—stuck.
If this sounds callous, I’m sorry to inform you that for many people, it’s true. Granted, there are those who stuck by me. I count them among my best friends and if you find yourself in a similar situation, you’ll have those who will stick by you. I stand by that assertion today, and I’ll stand by it for the rest of my life.
The thing that hurt me was the feeling that I finally did everything right, the feeling that I’d done exactly what society was always asking me to do, only to have those warm, fuzzy feelings smashed by the contempt of those closest to me, who abandoned our years-long friendships in droves.
If you haven’t experienced it, let me tell you first hand, nothing hurts quite like this betrayal. In some respects, it’s worse than infidelity because in infidelity there’s only one person severing the bond you had; when you go through a “glow up,” you lose countless people all at once. Fortunately, there’s life beyond the horizon.
I couldn’t understand why this happened to me, but now I do. Most people are acutely aware of perceived social hierarchies. Some people don’t care about hierarchies at all and are more concerned with things like connection and shared values. I quickly found out who was who among my friends.
Growing Apart
This experience of mine touches on a relationship issue couples go through all the time. One partner grows restless and decides it’s time for a change. Over days, weeks, months, or years, they make those incremental changes that eventually add up to one big change. Then, they’re overwhelmed with mixed feelings about their relationship, as they look in the mirror and find themselves a totally different person than when the relationship started.
Take this woman as an example. She and her boyfriend have been together for 2.5 years. They’ve enjoyed a nice, comfortable, secure, long-distance relationship. Her boyfriend has a cuckold fetish and wanted her to have sex with another man, a stranger from Tinder, so long as he could prove he was STI-free.
That’s when things got interesting.