Under the Same Sky Dreaming the Same Dream

Freud claimed that, “When we make small decisions, it is always to our advantage to analyze the pros and cons. However, in life matters, like selecting a partner or a profession, the decision must come from the unconscious mind, from a hidden place within us. When it comes to really important life decisions, we must let the deep needs of our nature guide us.” For this reason, relationships suppose having the same dream while at the same time preserving individuality.

Throughout the day, we intuitively make many decisions, we select the clothing that we are going to put on, we choose one path and not another to go to work, we eat a certain food and not another. If all of those decisions were not made intuitively, our life would be chaotic because we would take a very long time doing anything, or even by not doing it, but rather starting to do it.

But what happens when it comes to choosing a partner? It would be complicated to make long lists with the pros and cons of going out with someone and even more complicated to tell our heart who we like and who we do not. As such, when it comes to choosing that person with whom we wish to go out, our intuition acts, because it is a matter of living a dream.

Choose someone you want to dream with

Although there is a myth that opposites attract, many studies have shown that we tend to marry or go out with people who are similar in terms of education, social class, ethnic origin, and even physical features. This phenomenon is called assortative mating. The effects of this type of mating are not exactly insignificant, as it contributes particularly to the continuation of social or cultural inequality by going against the mixing of classes.

In 2009, a study performed in Latin America was published in Genome Biology, in which it was concluded that people tend to mate according to similarities in their DNA, particularly according to similarities in genetic ancestry. That is to say, we do not choose our partners randomly.

More recently, work done at the University of Colorado in the United States has concluded that people tend to choose partners who possess similar DNA to their own. For the study, scientists examined the genetic sequences of 825 couples from the United States and showed that there was a greater similarity between the DNA of the couples than between the individuals of each couple and the rest of the individuals involved in the study.

The researchers also compared the magnitude of similarity between education levels. In this sense, they observed that the preference for a genetically similar boyfriend or girlfriend was three times less than the preference based on studies.

Shared dream and a dream of one’s own

Being in a relationship with someone does not mean that we do not have our own dreams; that is, there must always be a part of our life in which we develop ourselves as people, in which we learn to be ourselves, while still sharing this with our partner.

In the movie The Joy Luck Club (based on the novel by Amy Tang), the lives of a group of Chinese women who immigrated to the United States is described. The youngest are Americans, but they continue to have the deeply rooted task of giving themselves over to others and their partners.

One of them goes to college and one of the most popular boys falls in love with her when she shows herself to be sincere and authentic. A short time later, they get married, but she gives up all of her hopes and ambitions and dedicates herself to him.

In one scene in the movie, she asks him where he wants to have dinner, at home or out. He answers wherever she wants, but she insists. The husband demands that she decide, that she express her desires. But she is no longer capable of selecting because she has buried her dreams so deeply that she has forgotten how to choose. In the following scene, we see the divorce papers.

This simple scene teaches us that being in a relationship should never mean giving up our own dreams, our own ability to choose and be free in our choices. There will be shared dreams , but there must also be the dreams of each of the individuals and that will be what enriches each one and the relationship.