What's in a name?

Remember Pygmalion? His story became the basis for many a play and movie, perhaps the most famous one being "My Fair Lady". Pygmalion was a sculptor from Greek mythology, who carved a statue of his ideal woman, embodying every feminine grace and virtue according to his point of view and his personal taste.  Myth tells us that for months and months, he laboured with all his phenomenal talent and skill and also with a strange compulsion, almost obsession, rounding here, smoothing there, until he had fashioned the most exquisite figure ever conceived by man. So exquisite indeed was his creation, that he fell passionately in love with his statue, and could be seen kissing its marble lips, fingering its marble hands, dressing its flawless soulless body, as if caring for a real person. But very soon, and in spite of the statue's incomparable loveliness and beauty, he became desperately unhappy. The lifeless statue could not respond to his feelings. The cold stone could not return the warmth of his love and the fire of his desire. He had set out to shape his perfect dream woman, but had succeeded only in deepening his own frustration and despair.

But as it turns out in the legend, the goddess Venus took pity on poor frustrated Pygmalion and brought his statue to life for him. He and Galatea embraced and married with the goddess's blessing and lived happily ever after.

But in our closest relationships, we all behave like Pygmalion to some extent. Most people don't see the world as it is, but rather as they are or as they want it to be. Many of us are attracted at first to other people, quite different from ourselves. We seem to take immense pleasure in the contrast and differences at the start. But as we become more involved and more familiar and finally get to know the other better, almost like we do ourselves, we start to vie for control (sometimes even without feeling it or without doing it deliberately, just common human nature I guess) and we begin to see some of these differences as flaws or defects. Suddenly we are no longer satisfied with our loved ones as they are, but we set about to change them, to transform them into our conception of what they should be, make them do what we expect of them, push them around or even push them away. Who hasn't heard the phrase: "I need some space, some time to think." Slowly but surely we are no longer able to just appreciate our loved ones' distinctive ways of living or doing things, but we try to shape them according to our own values or even agendas.

Like Pygmalion, we take up the project of sculpting them little by little, rounding here, smoothing there, to suit ourselves. We snipe and criticise, brow-beat and bully, we sculpt with guilt and with praise, with sulking and with passion, with logic and with tears, just whatever methods come most natural to us. Not that we do this ceaselessly, nor always maliciously, but all too often, almost without thinking, we fall into this pattern of coercive behaviour. And like Pygmalion, we end up inevitably frustrated, since our well-intentioned efforts, to make over our partners, bring us little more than disappointment and conflict. Our loved ones do not and cannot just comply meekly with our interference in their lives. Even if they were to surrender to our pressure, they would have to destroy in themselves that which attracted us to them in the first place. Their individuality, their uniqueness, their distinct breath of life.

Our Pygmalion projects must fail. Either our loved ones fight back, and our relationships turn into battlegrounds; or they give in to us, and become as lifeless as Pygmalion's statue. In this paradoxical game, we are bound to lose. For we lose, even if we win.

Yes, in the legend, Pygmalion and his former statue, who became his woman, lived happily ever after. But only because a goddess interfered. The rest of us, mere mortals however, cannot rely on such miraculous intervention. Living in the real world, we are responsible for ourselves and for the success of our relationships. This means that we must find a way to abandon our Pygmalion projects before they even start, by learning, if we can, to honour our fundamental differences in personality, our unique strengths, our individual inputs. For only by respecting the right of our loved ones to be different from ourselves, to be perfect in their own way, can we begin to make the beauty of our own relationships come alive.