This is my personal opinion and I’m an engineer, not a psychologist or a ❤️love scientist❤️. However, I’m a practitioner of love, being a husband for almost ten years, with three kids where I’m (hopefully the real 😊) father of. I’m married with a person that is the opposite of me in all aspects, except one.These are my personal thoughts. And if you disagree, do not walk away, but have, what Ray Dalio calls, thoughtful disagreement with me.
One of my fascinations is how relationships start, and why some break 💔 and others survive❤️. And a surviving relationship must not be the goal. You need a surviving happy relationship. I think there are different scenario’s of breakups and survivals:
How we come together
To at least become a couple, you need chemistry. You don’t know why you fall in love, but you just are able to do. When my wife and me had our first date (a very original cinema date), we started talking and felt that chemistry. What I observed, I can be wrong, is that many are looking people with the same interests. Might not be the best strategy, as we’ll see further.
So chemistry is needed to get started. But you’ll need much more to stay together happily.
Coming together is pure chance, staying together is not
How we tune and stay together
We go a bit technical now, but keep reading. It will become clear!! I think three things are important (the figure below illustrates):
- Your personal wavelength (your values) (the distance between your own peaks)
- Your personal phase shift (how you synergize and reach goals together) (the distance between the peaks of the two partners)
- Your personal amplitude (your character) (how high your peaks are)
What I am pretty sure of, and what is also valid for any other relationship:
If you don’t share the same values, you are simply incompatible. Values determine your goal, and a couple is nothing else than a team in love working towards that goal.
Some relationships will never work, some might work. Values are very hard to uncover, but it’s that gut feeling. For example: someone acts in a way that makes you mad or stressful and you don’t know why. Probably there is a value being violated.
Your signals need to enforce each other (in physics called ‘resonance’). They become the ‘super wave’, what I call the ‘love line’ in the below graphs. When you are fully tuned and in synergy with your partner, your love line is at maximum potential (the phase shift is 0, which means your peaks occur at the same time like in the bottom figure).
When I started living with my wife, it felt like the graph in the top left hand corner: we were on the same wavelength immediately. However, our phases were shifted a bit. For example, some habits cause some difficulties, but you can tune. We tuned without changing our character (=the amplitude remained the same), but we started resonating after about 5 years. I think it takes at least that amount of time.
Oh yes, kids are little magnets that can cause some signal disturbance (like your cell phone disturbes the radio). However, if your love line is strong enough, it will not be affected, and these magnets might even enforce it after a while.
Our opinions about other couples
My wife and me are EXTREMELY different persons. She’s an extreme introvert, I’m an extreme extravert. Our interests differ and if we do a Meyers Briggs personality test, we have no single letter in common. So to the outside world we may appear as a weird incompatible couple which some may predict to break up. Also ‘apparent perfect couples’ exist. However, what many don’t see is that me and my wife have an extremely strong red line caused by huge resonance. We hardly have to talk to understand each other. People with kids reading this: we know how difficult it is, right? We have three of these interfering magnets 🙂
Conclusion
My theory is that you should have more or less the same wavelength (values), tune your phase shift a bit (to reach maximum ‘team’ potential) and not change the amplitude (your character). YOU SHOULD NOT AT ALL LOOK FOR THE SAME PERSON AS YOU. IT IS THE DIFFERENCES THAT BRING THE EXCITEMENT.
I don’t want to hurt people with certain experiences. Sorry if I did. I wanted to provide my simple template.
Look, this is a topic that is of concern to all of us. Please react below and share if you think this is important. I wish you a happy resonance 🙂 ❤️❤️❤️
Interesting! Thanks for sharing Wim 🙂
A pleasure Michel!