Happily ever after
Have you noticed how demanding it can be nurturing a romantic relationship? Although all of us enter romantic relationships hoping and committed to making it last forever, forever seems to be shrinking as time goes by. Why is it so hard to make a relationship work in the long term? One of the strongest determining factors is that instant gratification has been gaining popularity amongst all age groups. Therefore, “long term” has become a long couple years.
We see this phenomena in pretty much all areas of life. At work, if we worked 2 years for a company upon graduating and not being made supervisor, team leader or manager, makes us feel frustrated, unappreciated and unworthy. If we’re lucky, we are given a 24h deadline to deliver a complex 2-year long project from scratch to completion. If we aren’t lucky, however, the deadline is yesterday.
Food no longer is planted in spring, harvested in autumn, slow cooked and enjoyed at a dining table with family and friends over 2.5 hours. Instead it’s planted with fertilisers all year round, harvested as soon as possible, ordered and picked up within 5 minutes and swallowed without any regard to quality at workstations in the office within 10 minutes whilst working on that project which the deadline was yesterday.
Romantic relationships follow a similar path. In the past, potential lovers would meet at a public place, go through some form of awkward first conversation until either one made a move - invite him/her to the movies. The movie was followed by a special dinner and at the end of the night the first kiss would likely occur. And so a relationship would begin. These days, however, I swipe right, the woman on the other end sends a thumbs up, I invite her to a bar where we get smashed and end up at a cheap motel room having meaningless sex. If sex was anything but meaningless, we see each other again and a relationship begins.
There’s nothing wrong with and I’m not against online dating apps, websites or couples who met through them. My point is that we, as humans, have lost or significantly reduced our ability to bear difficult situations, probe them and learn from them. Instead of doing these things, we seek asylum in booze, drugs, social media, porn or some other form of numbing distraction. Well, marital relationships are a difficult situation in and of itself. There are so many things to distract ourselves when a difficult situation arises that we lost sense of how to be in a relationship. We don’t even know what we need and want, let alone how to communicate it. Because we lack self-knowledge, we hold onto that idea of relationship we saw on the movies. As that ideal has become our model of world, anything less than that frustrates us. We, then, obviously go about blaming the very clueless partner we chose to be there for us when we needed. How can you and I be there for each other if when things go south we blame one another? What if, instead, we asked for help to identify what went wrong so we can fix it together? Wouldn’t it strengthen the bond between us?
In case nothing strikes us and shove some sense of responsibility into us, after a few years we wind up fed up with such tormented relationship and breaking up. And in a few months or years later, everything begins again. However, we haven’t done much to become better partners, hence we have become wounded partners. We can look a wound as being either a reminder we got hurt or a place where healing light shone through. In most cases we see as the former.
The secret to build a long lasting romantic relationship, is to first accept that our partner is extremely unlikely to be that impeccable chivalrous from the movie. But instead, (s)he is just a flawed human being who wants to experience love with us. With that in mind, we’re more prone to have a clear mind to identify exactly what we need and want from this relationship, so we can communicate it. By using kindness to verbalise whatever we need and want, we give our partners the opportunity to make it happen. Thus, they give us the opportunity to provide feedbacks in order to fine tune their actions and behaviours to our needs and desires. Such process of communicating and giving feedback is relentless, therefore requires patience. With patience, kindness, honest communication, acceptance and love, we are bound to be happily ever after.
