“Never frown, because you never know who is falling in love with your smile.” Anon
Let’s face it, relationships can be both our greatest joy and our greatest challenge in life. Human beings are a social species; we’re driven to seek companionship, friendships and love. It’s the way we’re wired.
However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want your relationships to succeed you have to learn how to cultivate and maintain a healthy relationship. Otherwise, your ‘stuff’ is going to trigger their ‘stuff’ and unless you find some way to deal with that, conflict is inevitable.
While I don’t consider myself a relationship expert, I’ve had a few over the years and I’ve learned a heck of a lot from each one. In this article (a rewrite of an article I wrote in 2013), I’m going to share what I believe are the 5 most important things I’ve learned so far.
1. Relationships are not here to make you happy.
The great delusion of our culture is that romantic love is the solution to all our woes. It’s the belief that you can’t be happy until you’ve found Mr or Mrs Right, someone who’ll whisk you off your feet and make all your problems magically disappear.
This misperception is so deeply rooted in our culture it can be found everywhere from fairytales and films to the lyrics of just about any song on the radio.
This is actually something that’s relatively recent in human culture. The idea of romantic love as we know it can be traced back to the troubadours of the 12th century. Prior to that, we had a very different cultural notion of love. It was seen as something altogether more fluid.
Relationships are associated with great happiness and joy, at least at the initial stages. That’s because when you attain the object of our desire, your sense of wanting, of being alone and incomplete, temporarily abates. The mind relaxes. For a while at least, you feel happy and complete, and you’re content to live in the present moment, cherishing every moment you spend with your beloved.
Romantic love is intoxicating. It’s been called ‘candy for the brain’ for good reason. It causes the release of all kinds of happy chemicals and hormones. Sadly, this doesn’t last. You simply can’t count on those happiness-inducing chemicals to keep things tickety-boo in the long run. (Did I really just use the word ‘tickety-boo’ in a sentence?).
As cliched as it sounds, happiness never comes from anything outside of you. It can only come from within.
The happiness you’ve associated with this relationship or this other person arises from within you (which is the only place happiness can ever be experienced) and it results from being temporarily freed from your previous sense of desire, lack and incompleteness.
The problem is, attachment now arises because you believe the love object is the source of your good feelings. Naturally, you want to hold onto it at all costs. This can generate a tremendous sense of anxiety. The moment you get what you wanted, you then have to worry about keeping it.
In addition, the honeymoon phase always wears off.
The ‘love’ hormones the brain was pumping through your system begin to dry up.
Challenges arise as you realise that this person you’re now involved with is actually human after all.
In the initial stages of the relationship, courtesy of cognitive bias, you focused only on what you wanted to see. It’s only a matter of time before reality begins to contradict the fantasy you’ve spun in your mind.
When this happens, there’s a tendency to become angry and resentful.
This person was meant to make you happy! Now they’re annoying you, provoking you and making you wonder what sort of future you have together. They have terrible taste in music, their mother is a pain in the ass and they slurp when they eat soup!
A relationship is kind of a contract, and when one party doesn’t live up to their end of the ‘deal’, animosity builds and relationships begin to break down.
That’s the problem of romantic relationships in a nutshell. The actuality rarely lives up to our mental ideal. This person, who we think should bring us everlasting happiness, is a human being with their own particular issues, wants and needs.
The thing is, you can’t expect another human being to make you happy. That is not their job. It’s nobody’s job but yours.
It’s essential to find happiness and wholeness within ourselves before embarking on a relationship (see number 5). Then we’re free to share the happiness that’s already there instead of holding our ‘beloved’ hostage and expecting them to conform to a certain image we have of them in order to ‘make’ us happy.
That’s what love truly is anyway: sharing our heart without demands or expectation.
“Love gives nothing but itself, and takes nothing but from itself. Love does not possess, nor would it be possessed. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.” Kahil Gibran
2. Without communication you have nothing
Communication is what makes or breaks a relationship. As Virginia Satir said, “Communication is to relationships what breathing is to living.”
Unfortunately, many people are surprisingly bad at this essential skill, at least when it comes to relationships.
You have to understand that in any relationship, there are not just two people involved. There are actually FOUR.
There’s me and you, of course.
Then there’s the image I have in my mind of who I think you are, and the image you have in your mind of who you think I am.
These mental representations are kind of like avatars. It’s basically these two mind-created avatars that are interacting and having the relationship.
It’s possible for two people to be married for decades and not even know each other. Their entire relationship is just a transactional exchange between these avatars. Which is just sad. This is the reason you can be in a relationship but also feel lonely and disconnected at the same time.
True communication can only happen when you let go of who you think the other person is and forget what you assume they’re thinking or feeling (we all tend to be mind-readers when it comes to relationships!). Only then can you really be present with them, listening intently, trying to hear what they’re saying and see where they’re coming from.
That’s true openness. Only true openness can facilitate communication between two people.
The willingness to actually be present with someone is the greatest gifts you can give another human being.
We all yearn to be heard, to be acknowledged and to be loved and appreciated for what we are, rather than what people think we are — or worse, what they think we ‘should’ be.
3. Respect differences
People like people who are like them.
We generally feel more comfortable with those who share our values, outlook, preferences and likes and dislikes. Perhaps this is because it solidifies and validates our own sense of self.
But there’s a tendency in close relationships to expect the other person to conform to the way we want them to be; to want to watch the same movies, eat the same foods and do the same things at the weekend.
It’s nice to be able to share such things and it’s important for the relationship to have a strong element of synchronisation. It’s no use if you can’t agree on anything, ever. Usually, after spending years living together, couples develop a natural synchronisation.
Learning to compromise is part of being a mature human being.
That being said, it’s also important to not compromise ourselves, our values, and what’s important to us.
Why should I start watching soap operas in the evening, even though I hate them, just because my partner likes them? In the long term, this can cause resentment. There should be space for each partner to follow their heart and do what brings them joy.
They say opposites attract. Indeed, we often learn far more — and grow more from being with — people who are different to us.
Therefore, differences, although sometimes challenging, shouldn’t be seen as something bad to be overcome, but as something exciting and positive.
Honesty, openness and the ability to respect boundaries are all vital to relationships.
4. Learn to let go
People come and go.
Life is always chopping and changing; an interplay of billions of different yet interrelated factors.
Accordingly, there’s nothing solid about relationships. They don’t always last forever and they’re not meant to always last forever.
A relationship has a life cycle like anything else. They can last the test of time, but in the ever-fluctuating nature of today’s world, that’s often rare.
Where’s it written that relationships should necessarily last forever? I know, I know — fairytales again and the pervasive ‘happily ever after’ myth.
But what if relationships are like an organic, living thing, with a birth, growth cycle and a natural death in which they transform into something else.
I think a lot of breakups can be down to the fact that people haven’t worked on their issues. They’ve maybe failed to consider the above three principles and the relationship has died a premature and most likely avoidable demise.
However, I also think that relationships should be allowed to breathe and evolve naturally.
How can you say you’ll be with someone forever when everything in life — circumstances and more importantly people — are constantly changing? This puts an enormous and arguably unnatural pressure on relationships.
Things come and go in cycles. We have little control over those cycles and relationships are little different because they involve so many complex factors. Learning to let go and immerse yourself in the present moment (which is the only place life actually is) is the key to satisfying relationships.
Allow yourself to enjoy where you are without letting concerns of an imaginary future impinge on the quality of your relationship. This moment is all we ever have and the next moment might bring something completely different.
Take care of the present moment and you’ll find the future pretty much takes care of itself.
A relationship that doesn’t last long is in no way a failure. It lasted precisely as long as it was meant to given all the complex and ever-shifting variables involved in any relationship.
Another important point ties back to the first principle. Because you don’t need a relationship in order to feel happy and whole, there’s no need to feel bad if you aren’t in one. That’s in no way a failure, either.
Life is a zero-sum game. In the end, the good and the bad cancel each other out. There are pluses to being in a relationship and there are minuses, just as they are pluses and minuses to being single. Because of the zero-sum nature of reality, it makes no sense to expect anything — any situation, object, person or relationship — to bring you lasting happiness.
Discovering your own innate well-being — the magic well that lies within you — is a far better approach than being psychologically dependent on relationships for scraps of happiness.
Once you’ve found happiness in yourself, no one and nothing can ever take it away from you.
5. The Golden Key — Love Yourself First
I once knew a guy who was clinically depressed and at times suicidal. His grief largely centred around the fact he was single.
Although he was an extremely intelligent guy, he totally bought into the assumption that he could never be happy unless he had a relationship; and that he could never find value himself until he did.
Unfortunately, because he was so unhappy and so desperate to have a relationship, he didn’t have much to bring to a relationship. Few people will rush into a relationship with someone who has such huge issues and neediness.
That’s why we first have to find happiness and love in ourselves. When we do that we automatically become attractive to others because this love and happiness are what everyone is looking for.
The most important relationship you’ll ever have is the one relationship that will last your entire life: your relationship with YOU.
If you want to be happy in life, you have to ensure that you have a good relationship with your self.
You have to learn to cut yourself some slack instead of constantly berating yourself, criticising yourself, comparing yourself unfavourably with others and thinking you should somehow be more, better, or different.
It means learning to appreciate who you are, to cherish your strengths, talents and uniqueness and to be graceful and compassionate about your weaknesses.
Above all, it means you stop compromising who you are in order to be who you think others want you to be.
Find ways to support yourself, encourage yourself and yes — love yourself.
Because if we don’t love ourselves, how can we love anyone else?
It’s impossible to give away what we don’t already have.
Here’s a wonderful quote by C. Joybell C. to close:
“You can be the most beautiful person in the world, and everybody sees light and rainbows when they look at you, but if you don’t see it, all of that doesn’t matter.
Every second that you spend doubting your worth, every moment that you use to criticise yourself is a moment of your life thrown away.
It’s not like you have forever, so don’t waste any of your seconds, don’t throw away even one of your moments.”
