Do you share everything with your girlfriend? Are there things you would talk about with other girls in more depth than you would with your girlfriend?

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What a great question! This gets at the heart of what a relationship is and what you should be going for in one of these.

In these, I can give advice on what the “best” path forward should be, or I can drop all that and speak from the heart. My ideal strategy is to do the latter and segue into the former. Sometimes I’m better at this than other times.

I had a girl I was extremely hung up over. We talked a lot about a ton of different things. I said things that might be construed as oversharing. If I had been more careful, I could have preserved the spark. But as it was, the communication only highlighted our incompatibility. I, of course, ignored all that in my pursuit of a life partner.

Anybody truly honest about wanting a real relationship winds up looking to their parents for a model for how to pursue that goal. But what you find there isn’t always very helpful. What I learned from them is that incompatibilities should be worked through in order to get to a “real” relationship. But when I tried that, all I found that bringing was more pain. It was then I realized that the relationships of our parents can only be honestly considered by us to be torture glorified.

Your job as your parents child is to do better than they did.

So how do you do that? Our only real map for relationships is our ideals. One of these ideals is perfect honesty. It’s a wonderful ideal to shoot for. But it’s something you have to shoot for, not actually accomplish.

Because honesty is a funny thing. You want to just say everything to your partner, but realize that your partner is not you. And romantic energy must be preserved. So you leave out little things in the beginning, with the understanding that you’ll open up later.

But when you do open up later, you find out that they had already built a image of you and you just dashed that image. Incompatibility strikes once again and your relationship is thrown to the wolves. You need to get better about being honest. You can’t say nothing about those things that are important to you. You can’t leave the polyamory discussion until after you’ve been seeing each other for months. But if you come out with it in the beginning, well, that’s a very delicate conversation and there’s a reason polyamory hasn’t hit mainstream yet.

You want your partner to be the one you can talk to about anything and everything. You want your partner to trust you to hear anything and everything coming from you. But emotions, man, those are some extremely fickle things. Even knowing that they have good reasons for thinking and reacting the way they do, often doesn’t really matter, your own emotions can’t be denied and you need the catharsis of a breakup in order to process all of that.

If you want to reach for the relationship brass ring, that magical ideal where you can open up about anything and everything, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that being that honest is going to reveal incompatibilities sooner rather than later. And you want to get better at explaining yourself, because how you open up matters. Yes, you will make mistakes. And those mistakes can cost you something that you thought was forever.

But you can’t sacrifice yourself for a relationship. You can’t just decide that you aren’t what you are, so therefore there’s no reason to be honest about that which you’re not. Even when you’re perfectly willing to. Because our parents did that, and the only reason we are willing to is because we learned it from them. Not because it’s actually necessary.

If our parents had had Tinder and Match.com and all of that, maybe they wouldn’t have been so quick to settle on the first person that fixed the immediate need they were looking for someone else to fix. If you stop looking at those relationships with rose-colored lenses, that’s how you have to see it. The only thing you can take heart in is that their parents’ relationships was worse.

Some of our parents got lucky and managed to cobble a wonderful relationship despite the humble beginnings, most didn’t. But make no mistake, nobody from our parents generation had the kinds of tools we enjoy now. If they did, probably that would have changed the way they chose their spouses. And like it or not, our ideals for our relationships come straight from them.

Do yourself a favor and try to chart your own course.