The psychology of certainty for relationships

There’s no guarantee in life for anything except death. But how do we get certainty in relationships with people and things around us?

This article will try to narrow down the premises that give humans a sense of ownership and certainty about having their needs met.

Despite all expectations, this is not about the other person being perfect or being able to perfectly satisfy all our needs. In childhood, we depended on our caretakers for survival. That sort of “certainty” was not an expectation and we didn’t set a standard for how well we were taken care of. If we didn’t learn any better, we thought that’s just perfect, because our expectations were just being built into standards of what we should want later in life from our partners in romantic relationships. I wrote another article on the topic of developing the “I” and the “we” in relationships that might come to fill in the information I won’t go further in detail with here about the topic of trusting people to form healthy relationships with us.

But coming back to relationship expectations, our framework for assessing that comes from these primary instincts of what we think it’s rightfully ours. We often project the burden of what we got for granted early on in our lives onto our partners who may or may not have received the same treatment and may or may not know how to fulfill those needs for us now.

This question will give us an indication of what we had more of from our parents who had to fulfill that task for us when we were so loud voicing it out.

Let’s take an example to understand how it will impact the adult later in life when it comes to expectations from their partners:

Related posts:

Many coatis lived at the animal sanctuary in Ecuador. One of their behaviours is to scent their tails - sometimes choosing to use the same toiletries we humans like to wash with

We witness the everyday miracles and heroic events of the living sense: police officers laying their lives down for justice, emergency medical technicians entering ‘hot zones’ to offer assistance to…

As Scott Solomon and Houston Chronicle write,“Genetic engineering can inevitably make us become the first species in history to direct its own evolution. Ignoring our ongoing evolution while pursuing…