Update Your Maps to Avoid Bad Relationships

The funny thing about relationships is that they’re hard to see when you’re in them. You can live in one for decades only to wake up one day to find that all this time the landscape of reality has been nothing like the map you’ve been using to navigate.

The maps we carry in our head are detailed. They tell us where we stand, where the other person stands, and what the terrain between the two looks like. Sometimes, the key is skewed, so we estimate the distance between the two incorrectly. These maps even come with little pictures in the margins showing each of us what the other looks like.

These can be way off. Inaccurate, sure, but convincing. So convincing, in fact, that we often cling to our mental images of our partners even as the evidence piles up that our cherished pictures are dangerously wrong.

The guy in the story above is a pitiful example of this. He rolled along oblivious to his wife’s real nature until disaster set in. Then, in a moment of crisis, something catastrophic happened, and his map proved useless to help him navigate. His wife revealed her true character in a way he could not deny, declaring that so long as he was unemployed, she’d be out on the streets with other men.

This was not a snap decision. No devoted, faithful spouse suddenly decides to “open” her marriage immediately after hearing of her husband’s job loss. She’d been planning to drop that bomb for a while. If the speed of her decision isn’t enough to convince us of her premeditation, the fact that she already had dudes lined up ready to roll the moment her husband broke the news certainly does.

The reality everyone but the author of the story above can see is that his wife hates him, wishes him ill, and is a person whose lack of character makes her unworthy of his devotion.

We look at this poor guy in astonishment. We cannot believe anyone could be so naive, so blind to the situation around him. And yet, he was, and so have many of us been.

Our situations might not have involved such glaring betrayal, but most of us have had the experience of waking up during—or, more likely, after—a relationship to see the landscape was rockier and more arid than we had perceived. We find ourselves disoriented, looking for direction.

The worst part is when we realize that what we had thought was a pretty decent relationship was, in fact, characterized by subtle negativity, destructiveness, or even abuse. We lose faith in our maps. We don’t know who we or our partner really is. What once felt like union is revealed as illusion.

The answer to the question of how this happened is complicated.

Our inner maps come from what our parents modeled, our early experiences of attachment, the longings and fantasies we project. It’s a long, subtle story of how we grew estranged from reality.

However we formed our maps, we become profoundly dependent on them. Even when something happens to throw us off course, we might try to find our way back to the path by relying on the only thing we have: our old maps. You can see this implied in the brief story above. The last lines contain a plaintive note of the author’s longing for repair, for a means to make this alright. He’s trying to figure out how to use the old map to find his way through this new, hellish situation.

This is common behavior. So many of us cling to relationships even when it’s undeniable that repair is impossible, as it is in the relationship above. Our maps contain roads with no off ramps. We just keep going toward the inevitable crash.

So, what do we do?

We have to continually update our maps. We have to be aware that we’re even looking at a map, and not directly at reality. And then, be willing to examine the observed data about our partners from multiple angles to make sure we’re seeing it correctly. We need to ask for input from others whose maps are different and, potentially, more accurate. We have to have the courage to revise our own maps even when that process proves difficult.

The hope is that, over time, if we keep updating our maps, they will at last guide us to someone whose map is equally well tuned and then, in turn, lead the two of us home.