Jess: Naturally, some problems truly are insuperable, defeating any amount of effort to remedy them, just as you say. [] One reservation about the "despite best intentions all around" aspect is that it can pretty easily serve as an excuse for avoiding the discomforts that accompany the work. Good intentions have limits too. Sometimes more work offers too little prospect of success to merit the energy investment.
Joe Humble: It seems to me that the kinds of differences that cannot be reconciled are of a structural nature in how one approaches the world. [] However, it is something that never really changes because it is at the core of someone's personality.
People commonly think such differences can be smoothed over in time, but that often proves to be romantic idealism, which ...
Joe: One nice thing about experience is that it becomes easier to spot such differences and to end a relationship sooner rather than later.
... all too often blinds one to some degree, which in turn can skew such assessments. As far as I know, ...
Joe: I find enneagram personality types to be remarkably accurate as a personality classification system. Certain types I can cross off the list very quickly because I know their fundamental nature will drive me up the wall eventually.
... there are no universal solutions, only ad hoc ones.
Jess: I think most of us have one or another kind of personal limit, especially important if people are going to live together in relative harmony. I'm hardly a tidiness freak, but wholesale messiness is beyond my adaptability limit, for instance.
Joe: I would not classify being messy as a fundamental part of someone's nature. I have known messy people who, under the right circumstances, have gone neat.
"Right circumstances" is a difficult condition to meet, in typical cases, seems to me.
Joe: I don't think these kind of differences are what sink a relationship. They are the pretexts for ending a relationship that has a much more fundamental, and therefore more difficult to discuss, flaw. Easier to blame the dog on the bed than to confront your partner with their ingrained narcissism.
IMO, that model pretty much fits the instance from which we started in this thread.
OTOH, the kind of discussion needed tends to be problematic,
not so much because people are self-centered (after all, one
*does* need to be self-aware) but because it involves skills
that are typically gained only by long experience. It's a
truism that the most common error in communication is assuming
it's taking place.
