I have lots of opinions. You have lots of opinions. You have your way of doing things, i have mine. When two people meet and if they eventually fall in love and move in together and plan a life together – they look inside themselves and ask a few key questions. Do i love this person enough to want to spend the rest of my life with them? Are they going to make me happy? Am i going to be happy being with them? Am i going to make them happy.
And so begins the honeymoon period of 3 months. You spend your time calculating how long it will take to get to them and how long you can spend together, before one of you has to leave. Best feeling in the world – its sad that it goes, but it doesn’t need to be dormant – I will get back to that.
So at the age of 35 i found myself separated headed for divorce with 3 kids, a house and suddenly the job i had been in for almost 10 years was suddenly gone. I made huge mistakes in my marriage – not understanding the 5 Love Languages (http://www.5lovelanguages.com) i gave words of affirmation to another person, and shrugged my shoulders – not realising that the biggest thing my wife needed, more than a home, more than almost air itself was those words from me.
So i learnt that i am acts of service and gift giving – so over the course of a 4 year period i realised that i was giving, she was taking – i wasn’t giving words, and i wasn’t receiving gifts or services. BIG PROBLEM!
So if you are in a relationship, married, single, separated, divorced, whatever – go to the site, figure yourself out, figure out the other people in your life because a little bit of understanding helps. Once you understand who you are, and who they are, the harder part is still to come. The hardest part is accepting that you or they can’t change. To be fair you can for awhile – but its not part of your coding if your not getting something back – so it slips away.
I think the sad thing i am realising is that as much as those foundation relationships go, we are still trying to find ourselves and the things we sacrifice in the short term for a new relationship are the things that bite us in the long term.
Relationships are messy – they are flawed – they are boring and they are fun. You don’t know love until you’ve felt loneliness, you don’t know happy until you’ve felt sad, you don’t know hot until you’ve felt cold. We all want everything – we want to feel safe and secure and loved, we want a home and nice furniture, we want family and travel and adventure – and sometimes none of it matters if we just don’t compromise a bit.
I feel so good when i do something for someone – i use to bring lunch and breakfast for staff to work every day – it made their life easier when they were running out to drop kids to school on the way to work, it saved them money, and saved them from eating bad food constantly – from a shrewd business side – they worked through lunch which was generally when the phones and emails would spike, and would happily stay later to finish stuff off – everyone wins – somedays were just a burger day – you can’t ever escape it. It became part of the routine it wasn’t as exciting after awhile – they still appreciated it and i still felt i was helping – box ticked. Not every part of a relationship can be like that – i get that – but the important stuff can and the important stuff is the emotions.
That need to feel connected. In life thats all we need. Do we get it from one person, do we get it from multiple. Is home life suffering so we are looking to family or friends. Nothing buys emotional connection.
I think to sum up this post it comes down to this. Relationships evolve over time – both partners grow and change, their needs grow and change – if the internal growth and change doesn’t match their partners – we go back to the beginning of the relationship and the sacrifices that we made gets magnified. We don’t set out to destroy relationships – it happens as we grow and change and realise something is missing we try and protect what we have. I should have asked my wife to cuddle me on the couch every evening after the kids went to bed, instead of her being on her phone on one corner of the couch and me sitting on the other side being pissed off. But alas no, so at some point we both broke – it wasn’t just that – it was a lot of other things, but maybe we could have pushed through the other stuff if we had that time together at the end of each day feeling connected.
So back to the part i needed to come back to – look for a future post titled communication……..
Random Ramblings 