Hi everyone, welcome back! A couple of weeks ago, I examined our beliefs around ‘fighting’ and tried to understand if all the fighting that we do makes the world a better place or brings us closer to peace that each one of us is in search of in this life! This week, as I have been thinking a lot about relationships lately, I want to examine what exactly happens to two people in a relationship when we say “their relationship grew apart over time”!
Belief: We truly loved each other in the beginning of our relationship but with time, we just grew apart!
As soon as we are born on this planet, each one of us forms our very first relationship and that is with our parents. And if we have older siblings, we become someone’s brother or sister. As life goes on, we form other personal relationships including our ‘love relationships’. This is a relationship where we put a lot at stake. We open our hearts to a stranger to give them love and desire to receive love in exchange. We choose to accept this person along with their flaws and their strengths; their ups and their downs; their good habits and their bad habits; their passions and their interests; their physical appearance and much more! And we choose to love everything about this person, including their weaknesses because somehow, we truly believe that this person and our relationship with them will give us the happiness that we so very much desire! In fact, we also believe this person will fulfil us and make us complete in ways that we cannot not do ourselves!! And we think all these things because of what we believe about relationships – that they are a source of happiness and love! So finally, one day when we decide to spend the rest of our lives together, everything makes sense. And although we don’t know what the future will bring along our paths, we still make plans for the rest of our lives!
Thus, with a lot of hope and love in our hearts, we start our new lives together. Over the first few days, everything seems to be fine until the honeymoon period is over and reality sets in. At that time, we realize that the love of our life doesn’t quite meet our expectations. And they don’t meet our expectations because they do something that doesn’t quite agree with our ‘idea’ of a life partner and the ‘idea’ of how this partnership which we call relationship is ‘supposed to be’. Hence, we get a little upset but don’t say anything to them because we try to adjust! After all, another belief has taught us to adjust and compromise if we want a long and happy relationship! A few weeks go by and we continue to stumble upon our partner’s habits or personality traits that don’t quite meet our expectations and now because we are irritated and frustrated, we say something. And this saying something leads to our first disagreement and maybe even a fight :-)!
As months go by, we continue to disagree more and fight more but since another belief told us that it’s very important to keep our relationship alive, we continue to stay married. However, because we didn’t quite get the happiness that we desired through our partnership, we now turn to our career and think that we can find happiness through our careers and therefore we pursue our career ambitions and become busy with work. And because we become busy with work, we don’t get a lot of time to disagree with or fight with our partners and so our relationship becomes bearable again! But as time goes on, we become frustrated with work also and then turn to ‘starting a family’ and think that we will find happiness through bringing a human into this world! So, we bring another human into this world and this tiny human already carries a huge responsibility of making her parents happy! And as soon as this baby is born, we become even more frustrated and depressed and hopeless and in physical and emotional pain all at once because of sleep deprivation and insane amount of tiredness :-). The reality of raising a kid sets in and hits us on the head like a brick :-).
And all this while, if God forbid, anything that was part of our plan didn’t quite work out per our plan, maybe we didn’t get the job that we wanted or didn’t conceive a kid when we wanted, then that would have added even more stress to our already stressful life. And it would have added more stress not only because we just couldn’t achieve what we so very much wanted to, but at the same time, we felt like our partner didn’t quite get affected as much as we did by not being able to achieve that thing! Thus again, because our partner was not able to meet our expectations about the way they should feel in any given situation, we become even more frustrated and disconnected from them and therefore with our relationship with them!
Thus, after years of being married and living in the same home and raising kids together, we still feel like strangers. In fact, we feel even more strange to each other than when we first decided to get married several years ago! And this is what is called “growing apart in a relationship”! And this growing apart happened because of two reasons. One, we assumed that a person or a relationship with them will lead us to that elusive happiness especially because we were not able to become happy on our own! Second, we expected that this other person, just because you chose to marry them, should behave and feel a certain way – the way you think is right! And that folks right there are the two most important reasons why people grow apart in relationships – assumptions and expectations! And this relationship or any relationship for that matter doesn’t even stand a chance from the very beginning but because we think that relationships are ‘supposed to make us happy’ is why we still get into them in the first place! And even if you or someone you know is still in a relationship several years after they got married, it doesn’t mean that they are happy in that relationship! A lot of people just don’t have the courage to break apart from their relationship because of fear – fear of being alone and lonely! And this fear is another big reason why a lot of people get into relationships in the first place :-)..
Folks, what I am learning as life goes on is no matter how good you ‘think’ this person is who you are choosing to have a relationship with; they CANNOT give you what they don’t have within them already! A beautiful and loving and happy relationship with themselves! And you too CANNOT give them that love and happiness back because you too are lacking in this loving relationship with yourself! So again, it all comes back to each one of us! And not only can they not give you happiness and love, they can’t behave and feel how you want them to behave and feel! And when we accept this very simple yet powerful truth and enter relationships from this understanding; even though sometimes we may disagree and fight, yet, we will be able to forgive and accept each other’s humanness!! We will be able to love each other for who we are instead of running our own agendas of how we can change each other! And that to me is what a loving relationship is – two people who already love and accept themselves deciding on coming together to create more love and happiness and passing it on to their kids through their loving parenting. What’s your definition of a loving relationship?
And as always, feel free to leave a comment if you feel like leaving one! And until next time, love yourself to a beautiful relationship 🙂
