A life with your significant other shouldn’t be about “dependence” once you start basing your self worth and happiness on your SO, it gets a lot harder when you are upset with each other (it will happen) or even when you want to do something that they don’t - or vice versa.

Either one of you can also start feeling rejected when the other person just wants some alone time.

You’re quibbling about language I think. It sounds like to you, depenence means an incessant need. Like a chemical dependency.

But that’s not implied by dependence. It just means you depend on that person for that thing sometimes. It means life would be tough if they stopped providing it. It doesn’t mean you would fall apart or become unable to function.

Certainly there are things people want to depend on their partner for and things they don’t. But none of it is universal. It’s totally individual. Someone might want to be financially self sufficient. Another person would feel totally safe bringing $0 to the relationship. Neither is a bad choice, it depends on whether that’s something you’re comfortable depending on your partner for, and whether they’re comfortable dependably providing it.

I’m definitely no relationship expert, but the “experts” often talk about the difference between “dependence”, “interdependence” and “codependence”.

Edit: Just in case it wasn’t obvious, “interdependence” is the only one that is considered healthy.

I think it’s more in relation to loneliness.

My wife and I have our own lives that we happen to share with each other, but at least from my perspective, if she were to somehow vanish one day, my life would be immeasurably worse for it.

I really don’t want to imagine coming home to a big empty house.

I agree completely. But, it is too easy to lose yourself in your relationship and forget who you are. Lately, I’ve had to make a concerted effort to increase my social circle from basically zero since I got married.

It just “happens”. I moved across town (metro area - across town is literally over an hour away with traffic), my friends and I all became busy with our own lives and i woke up one morning and realize that my family had become my whole life (not in a good way). Between that and my career I had no friendship circle and I stopped just doing things by myself to recharge. It didn’t help that most of friends were female. Of course that doesn’t work out too well when you’re married.

I had to actually start purposefully keeping in touch with friends and former coworkers as I changed jobs every couple of years and when I saw an old high school classmate (from over 20 years ago) that I was “friends” with on Facebook, I made an effort to reach out to him and another classmate to meet for drinks.

No, dependency breeds contempt. If he values the relationship he needs to remain independent, i.e. have his own mission in life and not just live for his partner.

Yeah, I think the term is really "integrate". While I'm not dependent on my wife, there are things that I trust her to do and things she trust me to do, and we don't even think about them anymore because my partner is handling them. You give up stuff because your partner has got them. You sort of sag into each-other as people.

"And the two shall become one flesh."

I thought that was a reference to the joining of the DNA in the progeny.

Like many things, it can probably be read multiple ways.

Yours is an interesting reading, and I must confess it had not occurred to me before.

Stephen Covey used[0] the term "interdependent", which I rather like.

[0] 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

That was my mistake in my last relationship. Everything I did alone and loved it absolutely - sometimes even more, I started doing pretty much "only with her" and after we parted ways that has been the most difficult part - I kind of forgot how I was happy, active, engaged with just being myself and not with anyone else necessarily.

Co-dependency is not 'part of the deal'. It's something toxic to a relationship.