The patter that I think would be most difficult to change, the most damaging and the most potentially damaging to self-esteem in a relationship is rigid complementarity. Rigid complementarity happens when the submissive partner begins to resent always giving in or when the dominant partner beings to tire of being in charge. I think that rigid complementarity is the most difficult to change because it is the easiest to give into. When you are with a person who is really confident and always needs to be in control it is easy to forget what you want and always go along with what the other person wants. I have personally experienced rigid complementarity in a previous relationship. I had been dating a guy 2 1/2 years and we decided to end things. I had thought our relationship was good until the very end. After we were no longer together I took some time to look back on the relationship and my opinion about how happy the relationship was changed drastically.
I realized that I was always giving into what my ex boyfriend wanted. I was the submissive person of the relationship. If he wanted to do something that I didn't want to do we would do it anyways. It was almost like my feelings didn't matter. If he didn't like a person that I was hanging out with he would tell me to stop hanging out with them and I would stop hanging out with them. Looking back on the relationship it sounds like it was really bad. I didn't understand how I didn't see what was going on. He had a graceful way of making me see things his way. My self-esteem was really low by the time our relationship ended. After we broke up I swore I would never be in a relationship like that again.
When I started dating my current boyfriend I realized that breaking the habit of rigid complementarity was not going to be easy. I found myself doing the same exact things I was doing with my old boyfriend. I would always let him have his way. Eventually he got really tired of that and he told me that I needed to start sticking up for myself. It took a little bit but I finally got out of that phase and I made the change.
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I didn't think that rigid complementarity was that bad of a thing but your blog has made me look at it differently. I didn't think that could hurt a person's self-esteem, but it's different when you hear from someone who actually experienced that. Now I see how something like that can be damaging to a person.
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