Just as no one gets a guidebook on the right way to raise a child, no one gets a handbook on relationships specific to your situation. Women’s magazines try to come close in asking a myriad of questions ranging from ‘how to please your man’ to ‘what makes your man happy?, but will these recommendations work for your man? Some men like a home cooked meal and sex on the occasion, some men will do the cooking as long as you ‘give him some’ on the regular, some men don’t care either way. This is what we call variety and no one man or woman come with a set of instructions on what it will be like to be with that particular person.
With all the unknowns, we still choose mates, hoping but never truly knowing that we’ve made the right choice. You ‘hope’ with the time you’ve spent together, getting to know each other, whether of short or long duration, that the choice you made was the right one. You’ve gotten to know their idiosyncrasies, their good and bad habits, the questionable things and you’ve been able to tolerate them. If you haven’t you either get rid of them or you hope to change them so they will become exactly what you want. It’s hard to tell if you’ve made the right decision until well after the fluff marriage and reality sets in. Most do not realize that the marriage is only an indicator to others that you are joined as a unit it doesn’t tell you how you’ll fare as a couple. The fact that 50% of marriages will end in divorce for whatever reason, whether he changed, didn’t change, cheated, whatever, makes that fact very clear.
The problem with getting to know someone is that most of the time they don’t bring their best selves from the outset. They bring their fake and phony niceness and platitudes so you can fall in love with that version of them but not necessarily their true and best selves. Their best self is their true self and their true self is their best self. What do they actually look like after they’ve woken up? How about without makeup? How do they really eat? How do they really want to dress rather than having to be made up all the time for laws of attraction purposes? Do they actually go to the bathroom? You know they do but never when you’re around. Are they perpetually constipated, do they have bowel issues? Do they fart all the time? Are they really sincere in wanting to watch ‘your shows’ with them? Or is that just playing ‘Mr. Nice guy’ until we’re married syndrome? Relationships are hard. The ideology these days seems to be that there are not many good men or women left, and all the ones that are ok are already taken. So when you manage to be in a relationship with one of these few good men or good women you tend to believe that this will last forever or you’ll work hard to make sure it does so that you’re not another statistic.
When you first meet someone it’s always based on looks, do they look good to you? After you’ve assessed their looks then it’s time to evaluate their personality. Some people actually have to grow on their partner through their personality in order to be seen. You know that he’s not your type, but after getting to know him better his personality, his soul, outshines his outward appearance and you fall head over heels. Typically this partner knows that you ‘under chose’, meaning you didn’t chose them for their looks, you actually chose them for their other qualities. Will he be a good family man, a good father and a good husband? Will he think about his family more than he thinks about himself because typically you associate the good looking fellas with being a narcissist and incapable of having genuine loving feelings and compassion for anyone other than themselves. So the expectation is that if you find someone who is not your typical attractive or even mediocre looking man that he has to have other great qualities in order to compensate for his loss in looks. If you manage to find both then you have indeed hit the jackpot and will live happily ever after barring outside issues, such as health problems and death.
The new saying is that you have to kiss a lot of frogs in order to get to the prince. Why do you have to kiss any frogs at all? Why can’t you just kiss a whole bunch of princes and you choose the best prince? If you end up kissing too many frogs you might just end up with the best frog and not a prince at all, hence the divorce rate. It’s hard to tell if you’ve bagged a gift or just a bag of coal and sometimes it takes years to figure out. Sometimes you know that he’s no prize but then you talk yourself into having the relationship because ‘He’s the best one yet’. So he has a few flaws but you’re telling yourself that you can work on the flaws and then he’ll be perfect. After the fabulous wedding, and the feeling like a queen for a day, reality sets in that perhaps this ‘best one yet’ may not actually have been the best one for you, but now you’re already married, have a few kids under your belt, a nice home and a nice car, all the essentials for a great life, right? You thought you could change his few flaws but then more flaws appear that you hadn’t seen before and you spend the rest of your time trying to understand these new flaws and if they too are changeable, yet still unable to change the old flaws. Next thing you know you have a whole new man that you don’t know who tells you that you knew what you were getting into but you chose it anyway. After that you’re in divorce court wondering where the man you thought you could change went, and who the guy on the other side of the courtroom actually is. You know the guy trying to hide his money, pay less in support and calling you a whore on talking parents because you decided to garnish his wages for child support.
Yes happily ever after. The words that exist purely in two-dimensional fictional tales and someone decided to apply it to our three-dimensional real lives, as if the two were even close to compatible. We rarely see the story after the story and if we do it’s right after the marriage, called the honeymoon phase, and not years into the relationship where Cinderella has gained the weight back after dieting to fit into ‘the dress’ on her wedding day and the prince has a basketball for a stomach. We are left to imagine a fairy tale story that has a fairy tale ending of love that endures forever as a constant state of love, no flux, just constant ever faithful, everlasting love, which as we all know is a bunch of malarkey. We all know that when our significant other is going out sometimes and they say I’ll be back in a few, we sometimes hope that that ‘few’ is more like days rather than hours. Not that we love them any less it’s just you know, you sometimes need a break from all of that ‘love’. The mistake we all make is not realizing or understanding ourselves before we commit to what can be like a prison term. We all know it well, everything becoming monotonous and we begin to get bored in the monotony. So instead of changing our habits we change partners because at least we’re not looking at the same person even if the to do list is exactly the same. We wait for someone to complete us, to make us feel, to love us, when we really should be doing all of those things for ourselves and then go into a relationship as a whole being rather than waiting for your other half to make you whole. Which by the way is impossible, why? How can someone who is whole add to your wholeness without depleting his wholeness? So someone completing us or making us feel whole is a myth, it’s a nice story but a story nonetheless.
We lack the knowledge of you are already whole, so complete yourself first and then find another complete whole rather than settle for a half. Herein lies the rub with relationships, we watch so many fairytales and love stories that we begin to believe them to be true for us and our entire lives are spent searching for that wholeness through someone else. This other miracle worker can produce that feeling of wholeness for as long as they feel whole. The minute they don’t is when you begin to suffer through the loss of their feeding you their wholeness and the relationship decreases in intensity and you suffer real loss, a loss that should never have been suffered in the first place. Find yourself first, feel whole first, feel love for yourself first, do everything first and when you’re in a relationship what the other brings to the table will co-mingle with what you already possess neither bringing you up or dragging you down. The lesson here is, if you’re in a relationship and you can’t live without him, you are not whole and you need work. If you are in a relationship and it comes to an end and you will miss certain things about him, not him, but certain things about him then you are whole because those things that you miss can be replaced by you.
We are taught early on what a relationship should look like and hence the reason for most of current day relationship issues. You’re supposed to get married, you’re supposed to marry a guy with prospects, you’re supposed to have children, you’re supposed to have a house, you’re supposed to have a nice car, and you’re supposed to have a nice bank account. No one ever says you’re supposed to be whole, no one says you’re supposed to love yourself first, as a matter of fact as soon as you look in the mirror a minute too long you’re vain, so you’re actually punished for trying to love yourself first. Loving yourself isn’t all about what you see in the mirror but if you don’t like what you see it’s a great place to start.
