Difficult Relationships: Run Or Stay?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

"Relationships should be simple and enjoyable" - an article with such a headline recently flashed in the news feed of the social network. Her main message was this: if you feel difficulties in communicating with your partner, it's time to get out. There is no need to prove or explain anything. Or everything is light, airy and simple, like two kopecks, or - "come on, goodbye."

Thinking about that article, mine was born. Just an alternative opinion that does not claim to be absolute truth. The personal experiences of marriage and the experiences of my clients give me the right to say this.

Relationships where there are no difficulties can be created by the ideal man and the ideal woman. Tell me, have you seen a lot of such people? I have not met one. Moreover, we are deluded when we want to be perfect. There is nothing more boring than perfection. Perfection can be admired, admired, and even strive to conform. But this beauty is dead. The ideal is the ideal that does not allow flaws: only higher, stronger and better. Striving for perfection, we become very demanding of others, since external relationships are a projection of internal ones.

Relationships are created by two people: just a man and just a woman. Two living people, very different and definitely not ideal. One of the staples that holds two together is the ability to be yourself.

To be yourself means to be different, natural, to rely on inner honesty. When you don’t need to appear as someone you are not, you don’t need to earn love and respect.

When we try to be what we are not, and then hear words of approval, we do not believe it. We do not believe that real ones can be loved. After all, they do not recognize us as real, but that forgery that we ourselves revealed to the world. Recognize the impostor we have voluntarily chosen to become.

A ray of light is best seen in the dark, and a shadow in light. We cannot truly be happy without letting life touch us in its entirety. By refusing to share space and time with our feelings, we extract life from ourselves. Everything that comes from within is ours and is part of our identity. If we strive for naturalness, we need to be open to our sensitivity, to what is spontaneously born in us, to an internal response to an external event.

The world is not monosyllabic, there are semitones in it, the thoughts of others are different from ours. Everything said and heard passes through the inner subjective experience and the system of perception. Truth is always subjective.

If we want to find the truth, we need to listen to the thoughts of another, to withstand our own disagreement. To admit the likelihood that we ourselves may be wrong in something, imperfect, stubborn.

Mutual understanding is not the identity of opinions, but an exchange of views and the expansion of one's own boundaries of understanding in communication with another.

To get closer to this, it is necessary to conduct a dialogue from the heart, to be sensitive to others. Then we can sincerely say: "I am angry, I do not understand, I suffer, but I also feel your anger and despair."

It is very difficult.

Those who want lightness associate a relationship with either relaxation or an opportunity to avoid worries. They equate relationship and love. Not every love story ends with a long-term relationship. Love is the foundation for partnerships, but it does not exhaust them. Marital relationships require patience, mutual agreements, the ability to seek what unites through mutual respect and forgiveness.

Those who have eaten a pood of salt value the taste of honey higher. It is impossible to enter a new stage of a relationship avoiding death in the old format. To soar high, you need to go through a zone of turbulence, to face the truth that the world does not revolve around us and that what is good for us is not so for another. Live disappointment, not be afraid of differences and mutual imperfection.

There is tremendous potential in family difficulties. After dark, light always appears, the morning reminds of this. We fail not when we admit defeat and come to terms with reality, but when we complain and run from difficulties.

There is no perfect relationship, if only because we ourselves are not perfect. We are different, and we learn to understand each other, respect differences, overcome our own selfishness. It is foolish to think that it will be easier and easier with others. No. If you want a serious relationship, get serious and get ready to work. First of all, above yourself.

A difficult path is not equal to a wrong path. Difficult - not necessarily overwhelming. This is what needs to be addressed.

I know this is possible, even after a difficult period. With a mutual sincere desire of two people, the beginning of which is an honest conversation about "how things are now, how would you like, what values unite us?" With a sincere desire to see and realize that in another person deserves love and respect.

Relationships don't have to be easy, but they must be safe.

Domestic violence is unacceptable. Not in any form: neither physical nor psychological.

The basic value of a family is safety. Perhaps you are in a relationship with a person who offends, shows physical aggression, is cruel and projects their problems onto you, considering them to be the cause of their suffering. Run from such a person. Problems of violence can be “solved” only at a distance. We must be the first to defend ourselves, and not wait for protection from the outside.

The language of reproaches, claims, insults, ridicule is a dead end for any communication. It’s not a problem if you hear complaints in your address, a problem if you don’t hear anything other than complaints.

Relationships must be secure. This is the field in which we allow the partner to interact with us and correlate his actions with the inner compass: "can I be with this, and what will I do with it?" The safer the relationship, the more opportunities you have to know yourself, trust yourself and follow it. Only by correlating with our own intimacy, we become an interesting interlocutor for others. We acquire the capacity for dialogue and Meeting. We are simultaneously involved with the outside world and are in contact with ourselves. We are united in our feelings and in our actions.

There is only one way to hear kind and supportive words - to speak them yourself. The ability to hear a partner does not depend on what and how he says, but on our desire to sincerely hear and understand his point of view. From the ability to melt joint mistakes into experience. Growth in relationships is not the absence of conflicts, not "ease", but the ability to accommodate a greater volume of emotions in them, to withstand them, to turn bile and negativity into a healing balm of love.