From a young age, we learn how to talk and interact with people. When you’re young it’s usually something forced,,, when you’re a kid and you meet new children on your first day of school, you come to learn that engaging and interaction simply gives you stimuli,, it just gives you more. It’s free knowledge, it’s free experience,, it’s free happiness and it’s free other things.
As we grow older everything becomes more complex. Every interaction is essentially becomes a kind of give and take,, and that give and take comes in multiple forms. You want to convince someone that your favorite TV show is worth watching,, so you might listen to what they want or are looking for in a show, or you might try to learn if they have never seen a show like yours before,, and you build your “argument” off that. If you aren’t giving them something as explicit as your time and your intent for them to understand you,, then you’re at least giving them the information that you are REALLY insistent on them watching that show..
And every person is different, every person will take an interaction to have slightly different meanings and connotations, just because of their own sequence of interactions and events in their lives. But obviously they aren’t always so drastically different, because then no one would talk to each other. No one would ever work together to build a house if everyone didn’t feel the cold of the winter, or if everyone thought that someone else would do it for them.
This is where individual relationships begin to form,, through similarities. Every relationship whether it be good or bad starts from some similar tie,, some starting point of commonality that two people share that they each recognize, and have some kind of thought about. You each have the same friend, you both were in band together, you had the same class once, you have the same exact schedule, you both love videogames, you both go to the same coffee shop, you both draw the same subjects, you both are architecture majors, you both are treating the same patient, blah blah blah.
Relationships aren’t always the most explicit things in the world but they usually at least start with a recognition of the other person existing,, and that you both have something in common. Your friends and allies are the people you might have the most common things with, and you actively find and create new similarities and shared experiences in order to be around them more. Your enemies or people you hate might be people you have no shared experiences with,, but more often than not it’s actually a case of you disliking the common thing you two share. Jealousy, after all, is wanting to have something another person has all to yourself.
The politics, the difficult part of developing and maintaining a relationship with one other person, then becomes a subtle game of intentions and perceptions. In your attempt to learn things about this other person, you constantly are aware of how they feel, how they might react to something you say or how they might like or dislike something you do.
Once you found someone interesting that you have already spent some time developing a relationship with,, you’ve already developed a significant understanding of who they are as a person and their life story,, the rest of your political relationship becomes focusing on the maintenance of it. You’re constantly making sure that the way you two envision yourselves interacting in the future, is meeting up to your standards and how you believe it should be.
In friendships, it’s easy to do this. It’s easy to keep friends, and even possible to restart and rekindle a friendship after years of not being around each other, all because the relationship between you did not involve any kind of heavy “contract”. The friendship between you two does not involve promises of exclusivity that a real “relationship” between spouses or partners have. Friendships are great because they don’t, and shouldn’t, rely on an agreement that binds them together like a stereotypical relationship does.
Real relationships are unique. They are unlike any other kind of relationship between people because they often speak to humans not living very long. They speak to the recognition of death in literal wedding vows, “‘Till death do us part”. It’s a contract that has a lesser form of commitment,, something usually done to test out the willingness to be in that heavy of a relationship with,, but it is still usually an important determining factor of if you even believe that someone can be perfect for you.
That’s why it can be, if you so choose it to be, a kind of interesting leap of faith.
When this happens, it seems that it is one of two things. One is you find someone, who just isn’t perfect. Things really aren’t that great for you, they might not make you really feel good ever, you’re just bored or your even hate them. It can literally be any bad reason that a single current relationship could have, which can sometime even be enough to make it seem impossible to find someone fitting. And also if it happens often, which it can, then it just creates continuous unhealthy and depressing thought about relationships and people.
So that sucks and can happen often, but there is another side to how your attempts and trials at a relationship can be. They can be great, they can be successful, they can be fitting. They have a chance of creating some exactly satisfying thought and status that is the positive and rare occasion of an amazing relationship.
And if it’s like that it can kind of go one of two ways,,;
if it’s a new and passionate relationship you may try to find yourself trying to be the same cutesy person you were when the relationship started,, but that won’t work. You’ll spend your days trying to figure out how to hold them up, how you can try to be an active person in their lives all the time, how you can find excuses to just talk or be with them as much as you can.
Sometimes it works; sometimes you’re both in positions where you can see each other frequently, maybe you both simply don’t have much to physically or mentally do for your normal lifestyle and it’s easy to just be around each other for more than a couple of hours a day. But it isn’t always like that. Sometimes you both have demanding jobs or school or friendships and social events or you’re far away from each other and it’s not possible to be there for each other in ways that you’d like to be.
Sometimes life is out of your control. Or rather your life is on a course, and you couldn’t anticipate them as a part of your life. Depending on the type of person you are(you might have differing thoughts on this) your life may just accidentally be filled with complications. You may finally meet someone who you truly enjoy, but then you look around you for your free time and/or try some kind of physical representation of how you want to be with them, and give it to them, but then you realize you have barriers. You realize you don’t have the ability to see them because you work from 9 to 5 and they work from 7 to 6. You realize that you have to go over seas for months at a time and it’s impossible or impractical for them to come with you. You realize the distance you have between each other is just great enough to make meeting up difficult. You realize you’re in college and they’re not.
And it’s always enough to make you question yourself. It’s always enough to give you doubts about what you’re doing, if it’s good enough for them and for yourself. If how much you like or love them is healthy and something that can be sustained at the time you find yourself in. You want something to happen and for it to be as exciting or romantic or just for it to be as intense as you truly do feel toward them. And sometimes it happens, but sometimes it doesn’t.
Finding yourself in that kind of position is the worst, and it happens to everyone. Everyone in a relationship has “ups and downs” but this is honestly what they sometimes mean. They might sometimes use that as the most laymens term for the difficulty and strain on a relationship,,, because it wasn’t always just because they couldn’t be together.
But relationships will always be hard even when you’re perfectly together. The most important part in being in a relationship that usually seems to show its symptoms in arguments about closeness,,, arguments about how they “always do things” in some way you don’t like, that they just don’t get you, or what you’re coming from or whatever,, is the ability to show that you’re still different and slightly independent people, who share and help each other develop into what they want to become.
When that becomes the most important part of your relationship, when that becomes a possibility or an ideal that you want to share with a person, and they’re being brave enough to say yes, then it’s something worth chasing and attempting. That’s an ideal that may not always be considered possible, but when both parties think it’s possible, they should try. It’ll show and challenge they’re intelligence, and devotion to each other, your partners health, needs and wants. You’ll truly be attempting to do something impossible and through honest faith and planning, then you might be able to do it.
Some people aren’t ready to do it,,, it usually is hard to focus on understanding yourself if you are constantly trying to even learn who a new person is. If the whole point of being in a relationship like that is to support each other to develop, then the base root of that to understand who you even are as an individual. Finding someone who is just right is perfect, but it may come at a time that you haven’t been focusing on yourself. You may have been distracted with things not having to do with the improvement of yourself or you may have been depressed or hurt fucking anything else that can happen to a human.
But if you’re able to get over it and you both attempt to find ways to, again, improve and develop each other as your relationship, then that can be what your “love contract” is. Your contract, that is unlike any other relationship, that is the most complex and beautiful way to be around another person,, will be the only one like it to ever exist.
All because you both decided to do it. I hope you do it.
In the Mind of a Dood 