Baggage, the psychological debris that we accumulate and carry through our lives, is the great emotional bogeyman. We bemoan it in others and desperately try to ignore it in ourselves, but the more experience we gain — the more we have been loved, left and lost — the heavier its weight becomes. Our baggage defines us. It is the past that shapes our futures.
When you’re in a relationship, experiences become shared history; it’s only when we find ourselves on our own again that that history takes on a negative meaning.
And so the paradox begins: as we grow older and our history increases, our willingness to cope with others’ baggage tends to decrease; the more we carry, the less we want to pick up.
Experience, rather than making us more prepared to deal with others’ emotional shortfalls, makes us defensive, self-protective, less willing to go through it all again.
So it’s not surprising, then, that it’s when we are younger and more emotionally naive that we are best able to accept the complications of a new lover’s past, for example: what we don’t know cannot hurt us.
Later, it is familiarity with the fall-out of relationships gone wrong that makes us wary of entering into something that seems complicated.
Emotional baggage is looked at increasingly suspiciously, and we develop strategies to alert us to potential dangers, measuring would-be partners against both
our own and their track records.
As a result, some of us refuse to consider dating someone with children, say, because there’s too much potential for conflict and divided loyalties; others steer clear of those with messy divorces and their equally messy emotional fallout.
On the surface, it can seem cynical or defensive to delineate your relationship criteria in this way. But it’s never that simple. The relationship choices we make are far more complex than that.
There is a basic premise, says psychologist Paula Hall, that all couples have an ”unconscious fit” upon which the chemistry between them is based.
”There are people to whom you tend to be attracted at some times but won’t be at others. That says as much about you as it does about them. A lot of it is about the missing pieces [in our own lives].”
We learn about ourselves from our interaction with others; our responses and requirements change through the stages of our lives. What draws us to someone, what we relate to or are willing to work through, says volumes about where we are in our individual emotional evolution.
Our response to others’ baggage, therefore, is defined by our own and by what we need or feel we can face at that time.
The good news is that it’s constantly evolving — what you reject today may well be what you embrace tomorrow. The bad news is that, like so many moments in relationships, it would seem to all be about timing: miss the moment, and you may well miss out altogether.
Fortunately, for many of us, practice tends not to see our preconceptions borne out. While it’s very well in theory to believe that we can pre-order and pre-manage our relationships, the reality is often more random.
How many of us, for example, don’t know someone who, despite determined protestations about what they do and do not want, happily ends up with the antithesis of their self-proclaimed ideal?
Maybe it’s all about subtle shifts in our psyches altering our ”fit”, but there are still times, it would seem, when the best-laid plans of self-protection are kicked firmly into touch. — Â