I\u2019m not against getting out of an abusive situation or knowing when to walk away because of fundamental compatibility issues, but there\u2019s a trend that I often see that\u2019s too black and white for me and that I can\u2019t always say I\u2019m OK with. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call it Toxic Relationship Perfectionism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How often do we see snippets and IG\u2019s, Tik Toks and FB posts about If your man ain\u2019t X, Y, Z leave him. And so on. While at first blush I\u2019m ok with this, it turns the issue into a black and white thing of \u2018if your significant other isn\u2019t perfect leave\u2019. Relationships aren\u2019t a binary thing, it isn\u2019t a check box in one corner and a zero in the other. We aren\u2019t static creatures and are constantly changing. Nobody is perfect but we always push the idea that if someone has a failing then it\u2019s time to go. If you look at something from both sides, I\u2019m sure each partner has something that doesn\u2019t always work for the other. We\u2019ve all fallen victim to the powers of our own egos and have toxic periods in life. The real question is how do you go about addressing those issues. We constantly like to throw out inspirational quips but we forget that there\u2019s always real work involved in maintaining, repairing and sustaining a relationship. We choose not to mention the need for constructive communication and facing the difficult parts of life\/relationships together and doing so in a productive way. The perfectionist message that I see is almost as bad as the overused prince charming and fairy tail ideology of the past, just dressed up to look a bit more ‘woke’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll be honest, I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ll ever re-marry, not because I don\u2019t believe in marriage or anything like that. It\u2019s mostly because I realize there\u2019s a lot I feel I still need to work on in order to be a reasonable <\/em>spouse. I will always carry some of the baggage of my past marriage with me, but the question is, is it baggage that informs my life in the future or drags me down and prevents me from going forward. If we take the typical social-media view though I’m an imperfect spouse, and should therefore be avoided at all costs. But then who is a perfect spouse? Does this marital unicorn really exist? <\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be my hope that people don’t let social media and the usual ‘click-bait’ culture we’ve developed overly shape their beliefs. Don’t assume that things are absolute. Go out there, be honest about what works and doesn’t work, be willing to communicate, even when it’s uncomfortable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m not against getting out of an abusive situation or knowing when to walk away because of fundamental compatibility issues, but there\u2019s a trend that I often see that\u2019s too black and white for me and that I can\u2019t always say I\u2019m OK with. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call it … Continue reading “Social Media – Toxic Relationship Perfectionism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-slice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7PG4O-hh","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1085,"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions\/1085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vraxx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}