Detoxing from the Hope Porn: Why Collapse Realism Is the New Activism

When you’re in a relationship that seems to be hitting the skids faster than you can say “divorce”, it is tempting to romanticize about what could have been, should have been, all the things that went wrong which could have been avoided, and how both of you could have handled situations differently. You maintain an idealized picture in your head about who you and your partner should have been to make this relationship work, and you try to carry learnings from the past into the present, and into your next relationship. That’s great…

However, it soon becomes apparent that this task is harder than it looks. If anything, the same relationship ends up repeating itself, only with a different person. You begin to recognize patterns both in yourself and your partner who, at best, is only an incremental improvement on the previous one. You beat yourself up and pray that “you won’t screw it up this time”, and then one, or both of you, do. You see, while hindsight may be a useful analysis, the fantasy that we can do things differently next time around will most times remain a fantasy. As hardwired behaviours take over, it becomes clear that a perished relationship was dead in the water from the start. Most people who separate will take with them their old behaviours into a new relationship, a new job, a new country. They will most likely make the same mistakes, the ones they so resolutely promised themselves they would never repeat. The great majority of us will swear that we have completely changed just because we have a new partner, career, or lifestyle. But we are, more or less, the same person.