Myth #5. A Good Relationship Requires Sacrifice
Simply put, sacrifice breeds resentment.
Although some religions glorify acts of selflessness, there’s actually no such thing. Ultimately, attempts to annihilate any motive to do well by yourself are futile. This means that any time you do something you don’t want to do and don’t see any benefit for yourself in doing, you will resent it, either immediately and consciously, or on subterranean levels that will bubble up later, without fail.
It looks like this:
It can become a self-defeating cycle. I don’t care if you’re a parent sacrificing for a child, a worker sacrificing for a company, or a romantic sacrificing for a lover, sacrifice eventually turns into resentment. There’s always a hidden agenda of what’s in it for me? It’s often suppressed, and this is why sacrifice is ultimately unwise and incomplete.
Does this mean there’s no such thing as altruism, philanthropy, or generosity? No, it just means that any time these exist, so do egocentricity, misanthropy, and greed.
There’s always a balancing, sometimes hidden or unconscious, agenda. Acknowledging this fact helps you see why it’s so important to link what you love with whatever you do, or simply say no.
The corollary to the myth of necessary sacrifice is the idea that you have to consciously and continuously balance give and take. The challenge of living with this approach, though, is that your idea of balance is often defined according to your potentially one-sided perceptions and does not always recognize a true “fair exchange,” since it does not always consider all parties’ needs or values equally.
If you try this approach, you might wind up keeping an unfair score. As you run such a mental tally, you can start to experience varying degrees of selfishness and stinginess when you feel you have given too much, and grades of guilt and unworthiness when you feel you have taken too much. When you live according to this myth, such a road can, again, lead to resentment.
If instead you can learn to see that there’s already a perfectly balanced give and take in any relationship—that it’s just a matter of discerning the forms of give and take unique to you and your loved ones—then you can change your perspective entirely.
You can begin to see that giving and taking with mental tallies aren’t what’s important, but it’s the ability to articulate and translate what you’d love to receive and give in terms of what your partner would love to receive and give: That’s true fair exchange. What if you could receive what you’d love to have by helping someone else receive what they’d love to have? Conversely, what if you could help someone else see how they receive according to their values by giving in alignment with yours?
You could eliminate sacrifice altogether and empower one another to grant each other’s heartfelt requests.
There’s an art and science to making requests that inspire an unreserved yes, as well as an art and science to hearing requests so you see how to say yes without hesitation. It also helps you get clear on when no is the right answer for you, so you can decline without a hidden agenda or brewing resentment. You can then hear no with the same equanimity.
Again, you’ll learn more about how to do this in later weeks.
