If you keep comparing your relationship to everyone else’s, it usually means you are measuring your own kitchen against other people’s photographs: you see the holiday card, the anniversary post, the couple laughing on the porch, and you hold them up next to a Tuesday evening that nobody photographed. Almost everyone does this at some point, and it says far more about what you can see of other people than about what you have.
I want to answer why do I compare my relationship to others properly, because it is a question that tends to arrive late at night with a phone in one hand and a half-finished scroll behind it. The honest answer is that comparison is how the mind tries to find out whether it is safe, and it has been handed a very odd set of evidence to work with, which is the best five seconds of strangers’ lives.
Why you compare your relationship to others
Most of us learned to check our position against the people near us long before anyone handed us a phone, and it is a perfectly sensible habit when the people near you are a handful of neighbors whose whole lives you can see. Now the group has become thousands, and what reaches you is only the polished edge of each one: the dinner that came out well, the trip that went to plan, the sentence that sounded loving in a caption.
There is usually a quieter reason underneath as well. When you ask yourself if your relationship measures up, you are very often asking something older and closer, which is if you are chosen, if it is working, and if you are doing it right. The comparison gives that worry a shape and a scoreboard, and a scoreboard feels more manageable than a feeling, even though it never once tells you anything true about your own evenings.
What the cards say about comparing your relationship
The card I think of first is the Seven of Cups, a figure seen from behind in front of seven cups floating in clouds, each one holding a different vision. It is the card of the shop window, of everything that looks possible from a distance, and I find it a kind way to say that the picture you are admiring is a picture, which is a different thing from a day with a person in it.
The second is the Star, a woman kneeling at a pool at night with one foot in the water and one on the ground, pouring from two jugs under a wide sky. She is not looking across the sky to see how brightly anyone else is doing. She is watering her own ground, and I like that the card shows hope as something quiet and practical that happens at your own edge of the water.
What you actually know about your own relationship
Here is something I have noticed in my own life and in the letters people send me: the things that make a relationship good are almost never the things that can be compared. They are the way someone says your name when you come in, the argument that ended with a cup of tea, the small joke that nobody else would find funny, the fact that you can be flat and quiet in the same room and it is fine. None of that fits in a caption, so none of it ever shows up in the comparison, and you lose every round before it starts.
It can help to sit for a moment and ask what the comparison is pointing at, because it is often pointing at something real. If a couple’s easy affection stings, you may be telling yourself that you would like more affection, and that is information you can use. If someone else’s plans stir you up, perhaps you want to plan something, and that is yours to bring up on a quiet evening. I would treat the sting as a message about what you want, and the other couple as the envelope it arrived in.
When the comparison is about something else
Sometimes the urge to compare gets louder in weeks when something else is thin, a flat stretch at work, a lonely Sunday, a birthday coming up, a conversation with your partner you have been putting off. In those weeks the mind goes looking for a verdict because it cannot find a feeling it can do anything with. If that sounds familiar, I would not argue with the comparing, I would just ask what else is going on in the week, and see whether the answer is smaller and more fixable than the scoreboard made it seem.
It also helps to know that if you are asking this because things really are hard between you and someone, the comparison is not a reliable guide either way. A relationship that looks perfect from outside may be a relationship you would not swap, and the one you are living in may have more in it than you have been counting. If you want to look at your own situation directly, this piece on feeling lonely in a relationship is a good next read, and so is this one on jealousy.
A way to come back to your own side of the table
The practice I come back to is small and slightly unglamorous: I keep a list of things that were true and good about an ordinary day, written for nobody, in the notes app or on the back of an envelope. Two or three lines is plenty, such as he made the tea without being asked, or we laughed at the same terrible film. After a couple of weeks you have your own evidence, written on the day it happened, and it is quite a lot harder for a stranger’s photograph to outvote it.
You can enjoy other people’s happiness without turning it into a ruler, and you can want more from your own relationship without deciding that it is falling short. What you do with that wanting is yours to choose, and the fact that you are looking closely at it, rather than only scrolling past it, tells me you already care about the real thing. If you would like a card to sit beside the question, the free reading is there whenever you are ready.
Clara
