I’ve been around the relationship and dating circle for a while now and in a very short time,I’ve learnt so much about how these things work and don’t work, but the funny thing is that even with all the knowledge I still don’t think I know enough, it seems to me that what works for person A doesn’t necessarily work for person B and turns out to be a disaster for person C and so on. Everyone has their own idea about how things like this should go, there are also some universal rules guiding relationships and sometimes I wonder who made up these so-called rules.I believe every relationship have their own ups as well as downs, in fact sometimes it seems like the downs are beginning to overshadow the ups but what keeps people together is their ability to stay strong and handle it all with utmost maturity, well, some people still believe love can keep two people together, trust me I used to be a member of that minority but in the past few years I’ve been exposed to certain eye-openers that have made me see these things in a different light.
When two people decide to go into a relationship, there are certain rules that are constant and one of them is communication. Yes this has become a cliché when hearing about relationships and how it works but that’s because it is one of the most important keys to a happy relationship. Learn to communicate things with your partner. No matter how much and how deeply a person may love you and tend to know you, it’s quite impossible for that person to read your mind or know what exactly is going on with you without you saying anything. Know the person you are with and let that person know you, this is actually what intimacy is about not what happens in the cool of the evenings behind closed doors. True intimacy happens when getting to know each other, it is gradually exposing and peeling off faces of you only you can reveal to another, it is letting this person get past invisible walls tagged ‘restricted area’ to strangers, could be walls built to protect something from your past, something you are so insecure about, a character flaw or something really deep. It’s sad that there are so many strangers in relationships today, everyone is so scared and too insecure to let someone else in totally, I really don’t blame anyone, there are very few, make that very, very, very few(for emphasis sake), real and honest people in the world now, most people are living a fake life and are being fake. They just pretend to want to know you just to succeed with their actual selfish intentions and get what they want off you and move to the next one.
Another rule is to forgo every so-called universal rule guiding relationships and make your own rules, more like your relationship, your rules. Trust your heart totally, though fragile it is the only thing that really understands love. Use your head too, apply logic but trust me logic and love really don’t work together, it limits love and keeps one from giving all in love. Learn to give and have little expectations, expectations begets disappointment and it tends to put your partner on the edge because in trying to meet your expectations, they would probably go overboard and hurt your feelings. Same way having certain expectations would keep you from giving in totally because of the fear of these expectations of yours not being met by the other person. Release your partner from the bonds of numerous expectations and let them love you their own way, learn to see your worth to them through their eyes. Besides they say it is in human’s nature to disappoint, not because they intend to most times but because sometimes certain unforeseen factors may counter genuine efforts put in to meet expectations.
Drop ego, embrace love. You see in love, the other person comes before Self, you have to be totally selfless for it to work, don’t think you putting someone else’s feelings and needs before yours makes you crazy or stupid, it is a sign of true strength and maturity. I strongly believe, love is for the strong. I mean it takes a lot of strength to love yourself and then loving someone else is another level of extra strength. So who says love is for the weak, rather the weak can’t love they’d rather quit than stay to actually make things work with someone else. This part is quite difficult,infact being generally selfless is not easy because it entails you depriving yourself to make someone else happy, to put a smile on the lips of some other person not out of compulsion, pity or show off and without expecting anything in return but because it feels right and you find certain level of serenity within yourself. Now when you deprive yourself just to make your partner happy ridding him or her of expectations, you are in turn making room for a happy and peaceful relationship, after all, when one is happy, the other is at rest.
Finally, love is forgiveness. Forgive! Forgive! And keep forgiving. Doesn’t mean you should stay with an undeserving person, sometimes true forgiveness is in letting go. Learning to forgive yourself is the first step to forgiving another person. You don’t have to hold yourself responsible for someone’s feelings or lack of feelings towards you, you don’t need to hurt yourself trying to figure out why you fell for the wrong person in the first place, you don’t have to feel weak or stupid for putting everything into something you believed in. When you can actually forgive yourself, forgiving someone else that probably isn’t deserving of you won’t be much of a problem and getting past issues and moving on becomes so much easier.
There’s so much more to what brews a happy relationship, very few people have found the secret ingredients that keeps their marriages and relationships together and have passed on this recipe to many others, which some apply wrongly and it turns sour for them and for some others it just doesn’t work at all, no matter how rightly they try to apply it. We also have to know that sometimes relationships fail not because the people involved are not so in love enough or patient enough to make it work but because some people are just not meant to make it to happily ever after. Try to know those that have a permanent seat in your life and those that are just there at a particular time to play a particular role, it would save you a lot of crazy emotions being into nothing.
