We mostly believe that life events influence and change us; we tend to also believe that to varying degrees we are flexible and adaptable; we adjust, try to solve problems in ways that require new skills – we change our views and beliefs of what was important to us in the past and is important to us in the present.
We also only share with others some of our views, doubts, hopes and concerns and as such, we are only partly known to others.
The same applies to all of us.
Although, we assume that we think objectively about ourselves, about who other people are and about the world around us, studies in psychology indicate that we are limited in how we make our way through a complex and multifaceted world. How we perceive our environment is not a reflection of an objective truth, instead, our perception is a composite picture based on what our own interests motivate us to perceive.
We operate under the illusion that we directly experience the world as it is but it seems that our senses organise the environment for us according to our preconceived beliefs and changing needs in order to survive and thrive in it.
To simplify matters, we tend to do two things, we stereotype other people and we try to predict what they will do next – just think how easily we resort to thinking of ourselves and others as personality types, psychological categories and descriptions: a Virgo, a Libra, narcissistic, INTP or ESTP, left-hemisphere, right-hemisphere etc.
Although there is scientific evidence that we show constancy and stability across certain domains (the big five) there is also evidence that our behaviour is situational and context-dependent. Labelling ourselves and others can be a useful shortcut to understanding a situation and our behaviour in it, but it is a shorthand characterisation.
Research also shows that we tend to simplify complex situations by making quick decisions, using rules of thumb and use good/bad dichotomies to name a few. In fact, the more complex a situation is, the more we try to simplify it and a lot of it happens in complex relationships.
We tend to stereotype the people closest to us using language such as always and never; we categorise them as this type or another and we predict their behaviour and thus participate in how things turn out.
Holding ourselves and others in flux is no easy task because it means we need to constantly assess and reassess who we are, who they are and make space for new possibilities.
Your partner is and will be a mystery to you regardless of how long you have known them and if we cannot truly know another person, we can focus on how we experience them.
We can also focus on how our partners handle change. Mysteries are to be discovered: stay curious and never stop asking questions about each other.
Whilst it can be frightening to witness somebody we rely on change, in realty our commitment is not to the constancy of the person but to their unknowabilty.
