Are Relationships Easy?

If relationships are easy, I would like someone to show me what they are doing that I am not. While perhaps somewhat natural, with many people seem able to gravitate to social situations quite effortlessly and naturally, relationships are not easy. To be successful and endure the test of time, they require some tricky, difficult to begin, and perhaps even more difficult to maintain.

Even with us realizing and accepting how difficult a task it is, so many of us head out determined to rise to the challenge and hopefully master it so that we can have that special relationship with those special people in our lives.

And although we are aware of the difficult task we are heading out to take on and the odds against the success of it being something we ought not to anticipate we can master with ‘one hand tied behind our back for certain, it is so very tempting for us to almost instantly believe that there is something very wrong or broken with the other person or us or the relationship itself, when we truly experience how difficult it actually is. Society seems to have provided us with a very simple exit strategy or bail-out hatch. Many of us are willing to cut our losses when the going gets tough because we all know how difficult it is to achieve anyway. We break up, divorce, or end things, and things seem to get better until they no longer feel that way because we get to remind ourselves of how much we wanted to be with that special person involved in a relationship with someone.

And for many of us, this pattern continues. For some of us, additional attempts with the same person, we get back together after breaking up, for a second or third or umpteenth time again.

Such is the life of relationships with other people …. Until….

We begin to learn to develop a real, truly healthy relationship with our own selves first. We have to begin somehow to understand that when we start taking responsibility for our own well-being, with us in the driver’s seat of our own feelings and what happens with us rather than reacting to our significant other as if they are the captain of our fate as if they are the one who is to blame for not ‘making’ us feel the way we want to feel, that is when things start to go a bit smoother. That is when relationships start to move forward and keep that momentum.