A
man with dreams needs a woman with vision.
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Back in college, during a lecture on
how to manage Architectural Firms, one of my old mentors shared with us the
secret to finding good business partners. Instead of gravitating to
like-talented professionals, you should try to find your counterparts. If you’re
good at designing, the others must be good at production. If you’re good at
marketing, the others must be good in accounting. You might have the best
product in the world, but without someone to sell it, it’s useless. You might
have the best hustlers in the world, but without something to sell… you get the
idea. When you understand how each person contributes to the partnership, you understand
where you have duplicated efforts, what bases are left uncovered, and if you
have expendable freeloaders. Only when you can cover all the bases between all the
partners, can a business be stable and successful.
He concluded the lesson by emphasizing
how this mentality goes into any partnerships, especially marriage.
We live in a society that promotes
self-reliance and autonomy. We are grilled by life into avoiding at all cost relying
on others; all thanks to failed group projects, bad roommate arrangements, and
the ever constant posts about life’s “givers and takers” or about “reachers and
settlers.” By the time when we’ve been properly indoctrinated into a self-sufficient
mind set, we end up unable to understand why marriage is so difficult.
During that entire process of
independence, we’re never taught to open up to others or to actually trust and
depend on them. We are told that “love overcomes it all” as if love, a
wonderfully ephemeral sentiment, was enough to overcome some very practical
issues that happen within relationships.
Let me make something clear here. No
matter how “complete” and well rounded you are, you have your strong points and
your weaknesses. We want to believe that we’re so “complete” that sometimes
being with someone with a different skill-set or a different mindset just
exposes our shortcomings to ourselves, a mirror into our “weakness.” The
insecurities then tend to flourish as we become defensive of our weak points or
arrogant with our strengths.
You need to view your relationship like
any partnership. You bring into the union your own personal weaknesses and
strengths and hope they play well with those of the other person. It’s about
moving past our inability to accept our short falls or dismissing our partner’s
strengths. Instead, start looking at how you balance each other out and trust
your partner to have your back, even if that means keeping you in check.
The dreamer needs the realist to
ground him, while the realist needs the dreamer to fly. Maybe that successful
person is constantly in business mode, yet what they need and crave in a life
partner is a free spirit, someone that reminds them that life isn’t all work,
that play is important. Maybe that “smart” person needs someone who reminds
them that life can’t be overanalyzed, that some things simply are. Or that
imaginative and creative person needs a pragmatic and logical partner, who can
give them the necessary focus to fulfill their dreams.
It’s amusing how we are willing to
understand this concept when we speak of businesses, as the social savvy
marketer will partner up with the economy savvy number cruncher. Each realizes
the strengths within their partner and weaknesses within themselves, so the
power and command constantly shifts and flows between them depending of the
situation and the needs. If this is so easy to understand as a concept when
dealing with business partnerships, why is it such a hard concept to embrace
when speaking of romantic partnerships?
We don’t need someone to complete
who we are within a relationship. We need someone to complete the relationship based
on who we are. We need a partner who can pick up the slack left by our own
weaknesses, helping us to excel in our strengths. We need a partner, who can
see what we can’t see, who can give a different perspective than the one we
have. And we need to trust this person to hold their end of the bargain and that
is willing to let us do the same for them.
