Peeled Not Sliced
If you’re a home cook like myself, you would know that onions are best sliced, not peeled, but where the analogy is applied to the area of relationships, it should be vice versa – peeled not sliced.
Nobody in their right mind would ask all the questions that they would want to ask someone throughout the course of their relationship on the first date. Doing so takes the “magic of mystery” out of the relationship as there would be little to no more questions that one would ask on the second date if there were plans to have a second date that is. That’s how we are wired out, if we knew the ending to the book in the first chapter, we are quite unlikely to continue reading chapter two.
If there are a hundred questions that one would ask in the lifecycle of a relationship before they would ask someone to marry them, then technically, they would have known just about everything that they would want to know about their partner in the first meeting and subsequently decide whether to marry or break it off with them on that first date.
Whilst it is true that people asks questions in a relationship to know someone better and to eventually assess them for compatibility and marriage, it is not a one way street as your partner would also have to have that opportunity to ask you their set of questions as well. That process of answering their hundred questions may prove unnerving as well as it stems from their own internal perspective rather than a shared build up structure of questions that build upon each question asked.
Relationships like peeling an onion, it takes time, and as inefficient as that is, it helps us get to process and tweak our hundred questions to perhaps better questions as the relationship progresses. If we take our time to get to know our partners, we get better answers calibrated through the passage of time, as opposed to the need for quick answers to meet the target of knowing everything that there was to know about someone that you like.