Today’s passage, “When Optimism becomes Willfully Blind”. Do you believe in the inherent good in all people? Are you excessively forgiving, empathetic and kind?  These are good traits to have in many respects but, our capacity to believe in the ability of others to change for the better can be downright dangerous in romantic relationships.

Perhaps, you’ve experienced this already. You’ve stayed in a toxic relationship just a beat too long because you kept believing in the wish that the person would one day change – the popular phrasing to capture this motif in our generation is that you were hoping your romantic partner would ‘do the work.’

The use of pessimism as a replacement for excessive optimism in a new budding romantic relationship isn’t just reasonable, it’s healthy. Let’s call it cheerfully pessimistic for excessive optimist like me.

Philosophical writer, Alan de Botton who wrote the New York Times essay, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” which was one of their most-read articles in recent years says, “Sometimes pessimism, a certain degree of pessimism can be a friend of love. Once we accept that actually it’s really very hard for people to be another way, we’re sometimes readier. We don’t need people to be perfect, is the good news. We just need people to be able to explain their imperfections to us in good time, before they’ve hurt us too much with them, and with a certain degree of humility. That’s already an enormous step.”

Reframing the relationships we are in by incorporating a pessimistic or a discerning eye is part of the journey in setting healthy boundaries for what’s ok, and what’s not ok, early on in our romantic relationships. It takes an enormous amount of emotional maturity to walk away from a toxic or unhealthy relationship and I say this because many of us unconsciously walk into relationships that are familiar to our earliest childhood attachments.

In childhood, we stay in whatever situation we are raised in because we have no other choice. In adulthood, we learn that we do have choices and we do have, what Alain de Botton describes as the “Capacity to Give Up On People.”

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