All the time, the questions from our Love in Relationships (part 1) post are hardly thought through. They pop out of heads as easily as compliments given about your partner’s looks and as spontaneous as decisions to brush one’s teeth in the morning! Of course, the answer most times will make or destroy the relationship — and I should add that in my experience the answers are inevitable because these questions have become the proverbial “you’ll be damned if you do and you’ll be damned if you don’t” type requests.
Either way the answer has consequences… whatever you choose to do in responding or not responding has consequences too, but I’d like to explore a couple’s rationale from a different perspective and shed light on a background that will, if possible avoid the questions altogether.
Relationships are built on “Mutual” Affection as most will readily tell you. It sounds like the things we said as kids: “You like me and I like you” and that’s all she wrote! Unfortunately, as kids at heart we seem to expect the same treatment when things go sour, sometimes the expectation is such that in a long standing relationship the contract should simply read: “if I don’t like you like that anymore, should I tell you?!”
Funny how, as simple as it sounds, it’s the hardest thing anyone can actually do….to respond to a relationship contract. That is heartbreaking for the hearer….but sadly that is the origin of the questions I had started this article with! (A pretty good time to read them again if you haven’t!)
As we grow up and as our desire to have relationships increase, the flesh we put on our skeleton idea of sharing our life with someone else, describes to us that “the effort one puts in a relationship is supposed to make you and your partner happy!” In other words “I am showing attention to this guy or girl and I’m happy doing it…not because I’m getting the attention back but because I like giving it to this particular person….”.
This to me signifies a genuine affection for the other person but here lies the problem! In as much as we all seem to believe the slogan that “Change is constant” I know for a certain that its not to hold sway in relationships… a higher slogan does! It’s the one that goes a step further to say “As much as Change is constant… Principles are more constant!”
Read more in part 3…