What does love have to do with it? I’ve sat and pondered on this question for much of my youth, especially as I, like a million other little girls, was shown the glittering pages of fairy tales that were warped by the rose-colored lens we were viewing it through. Stories that were all based on a very simple premise that would involve you one day being down on your luck with nowhere else to turn as all your problems began to close in. Then a knight in shining armor and a heart of gold would swoop in and alleviate it all, rescuing you and fixing all your issues instantaneously. This tale is now known to be false. The truth is: relationships are complicated, messy and hard. Sometimes within relationships, there can be silent expectations and roles that one can have for their partners, such as wanting someone who will be your therapist as well as your cook, your cleaner and eventually a good mom or dad. But is it good to make someone your all?
To answer this question, I want to start by assessing the reasons people get into relationships, which is either for your own sake (selfishness) or because you genuinely wish to be in one, to share your life with someone and to be within the shared space of another. Whatever the reasons may be, that will be the footwork for what comes from the experience with your partner. When you begin a relationship based on the premise of “loneliness” or because you want a long list of things from someone, you run the risk of hurting them as well as putting yourself in a position of loss, seeing as there was probably little thought that went into what would happen if the person you’ve chosen to put on a pedestal was no longer in the picture.
Loneliness is a fault that many people seem to fall victim to, which leads them to seek out partners to fill voids that they themselves may have no intention of filling. However, that has and should never be the basis of a relationship, because eventually resentment will fester within the partner who has been put into the position to be the one who ultimately must “save” you from yourself.
Before people get into relationships, they must learn to understand themselves first. How to calm themselves down, know how they love, how they fight and or how they react when issues arise, or else there is room to bring someone else into their calamity. But there is also a need now for people to detach from the “traditional” reasons some of us get into relationships, because people are a choice. They aren’t a tool of convenience, and we need to know and truly understand that before pursuing anything, so as to not view our partners as merely vessels that will ‘heal us,’ but as people. We don’t always have realistic expectations for our partners and it is up to us and only us to remedy our wounds.
