Lately I have been thinking about the question of how do we help one another become?
Our current culture tends to treat the romantic relationship itself as the point. We measure relationships by attachment, longevity, commitment, and permanence. Our romantic ideals are often built around permanence: You complete me. I am your home. We need each other. We are soulmates.
But what if the relationship is not actually the destination? What if the relationship is the developmental environment within which two people become more fully themselves?
There is something about this that feels connected to the idea of apprenticeship. In apprenticeship, the purpose of the relationship is not to keep the apprentice an apprentice. It is to help them become capable of standing on their own. The teacher recognizes something in the novice and invests in its development. They guide, protect, tolerate their mistakes, and promote increasing autonomy.
Perhaps love can work this way too. Not that a romantic partner should become a teacher, or that one person should be more developed than the other. In a healthy partnership, the apprenticeship perhaps flows in both directions. Each person supports the development of the other.
Maybe, I see something in you that you may not yet be able to see in yourself. I make room for it. I protect it while it is still fragile. I encourage you to take the risks needed to develop it, while realizing and accepting that authorship for your life remains with you. I cannot decide what you should become. I take pleasure in watching you become more fully yourself. And you do the same for me.
There is something particularly beautiful about being chosen in this way. The chooser sees the person before the rest of the world necessarily sees them. They see both who the person is and who they might become.
They are not simply asking, Do you fit into my life? They are asking something closer to: Who are you, deeply? What might become possible if you are loved well? Could I love you well? Not simply being known as you are, but being understood as someone who is becoming.
I don’t have to keep you small in order to remain important to you. I don’t need you to be dependent on me to know that you love me. In fact, I want to see what happens when you are given more space, more confidence, more responsibility, more of your Self. And you do the same for me.
And I know you, so I know how to give you that space in a way that feels safe, that feels supportive. It’s not a wild process. There is intimacy in the space and in the becoming. There is beauty in helping a partner grow and stand tall.
Of course we need one another. We are social creatures, and intimate relationships provide companionship, care, recognition, pleasure, and support that we cannot simply manufacture alone. But perhaps we don’t need one another to remain unchanged. Perhaps I can trust that you know how to find your way home to me. And I trust that I can find you when I am ready.
A person’s becoming also cannot happen entirely within a romantic relationship. A marriage is not an entire world. We need friends, teachers, children, parents, colleagues, communities, traditions, places, art, solitude, and experiences that belong to us independently of our partner. We need a constellation of relationships through which different parts of ourselves can emerge.
In some traditions, the deepest goal is not perfect attachment but realization—becoming sufficiently established in one’s own nature that the deepest parts of the journey cannot be outsourced to another person. At some point, each person walks alone because there is a part of becoming that belongs uniquely to each person.
There is a particular generosity of heart in seeing what a loved one is capable of and supporting their development in that direction. Because we are all learning, growing, and becoming. This does not mean separation. We can keep choosing one another as we change. We can take different paths and return to one another, make room for solitude without rejection, and delight in each other’s becoming.
To belong to someone can mean holding an internal, evolving map of the other within your mind. It can mean having witnessed and supported their becoming closely enough that some part of their story is now also part of yours.
The purpose of relationship may not be the relationship itself. It may be what becomes possible because the relationship existed. A person who is more fully themselves. A family that did not exist before. A child. A friendship. A body of work. A community. A new elder. A new apprentice.
I see something beautiful in you. I want to see what happens when it is loved.