Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Relationships Not a Destination

Why start a relationship if it’s going to end we often ask. If people aren’t right for each other, why even bother. To tell you the truth we have a point. What use is going down a dead end path, where the end is near and you can see it from a distance. Why take an unknown road that leads to the same point. Why be with someone you can’t be with forever.

The reason is because there is no forever. Nothing lasts anyway and every relationship is temporary. What makes 10 years more permanent than 2 years is because we choose to label it so. For some, 10 years is temporary and 25 is permanent. But the point is that it all ends sooner or later. It’s understandable that people want things to end later rather than sooner but the point that people miss out is that it’s not about the end.

Relationship ends make no sense, it’s all the in between that makes all the difference, yet the way people analyze it is as if the journey doesn’t affect you, as if the quality of the relationship has nothing to add to you and nothing to give you. They skip forward in time and see its demise and judge a relationship based on that, but by the end of a doomed relationship you can actually come out a better person, bettered by the person you were with or by the experience. The real question isn’t how long this relationship will last, but how much it would give me while it does.

To shift the paradigm, is it better to be in a bad relationship that would last or in a good one that won’t? Ideally one would hope for a good one that lasts. For sure a bad relationship is not worth anything no matter how permanent it is. The good relationship needs to be assessed. Will it give me more than it’ll take? Would the journey through it give me something, give me joy.. as permanent as the volatile things in life?

Being with someone is very dynamic, it changes everything about yourself and about the other someone, you get entangled and you take a piece of that someone with you as you go along and they take a piece of you. The worst relationship is when you lose parts of yourself without gaining anything of worth. Good people are hard to find, those who share a good part of themselves with you, but should you try and grab a part of them even if it can’t last? If people give you a lot you can always win, and the reasons things don’t work out could very well be external reasons beyond your control. Why give up on something good if you can’t have it for longer? The entirety of life isn’t long anyway.

A relationship doesn’t exist for the sake of the relationship but for yours. What I mean is that the purpose of the relationship isn’t where it’s going to take the relationship itself, but where it takes you. You may see the end from a distance, but you can’t know the route you’ll take to reach it and much more, you can’t foretell the person you’ll be when you reach it.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great Post!

insomniac said...

we agree again!!

Anonymous said...

Wow!
How great of you to sum up life in few lines.This lies among relationships of all kinds.This is exactly why I smile every time a relationship comes to an end.Its the happiness we felt,the connections we had, the qualities we gained that cause that smile.It doesn't matter how it ended, how horrible it was, and who's fault was it.The fact is, Its over.Better catch those mistakes,get them right, gather your experiences and get going.
This is a 10 for me!:)

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http://chocolatemeltscoffeburns.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

I liked this post :)

You wrote something that got me thinking: a good relationship that won't last.

It's quite shocking to see that many of the failed relationships were at some point in time thought of as, not even good, but perfect.

Logically, there's no bad relationships .. it gets bad, and that's because of one of two reasons I guess:

- People don't know how to live with partners. Being a bachelor and being married are very different, one has to change to share a life, they have to share emotions, thoughts, compromises and things .. etc. When they don't communicate well, they end up being resented, because life simply becomes paralyzed (how many cases of wife who doesn't speak to husband and husband who doesn't speak to wife?)

- People do know how to live, but they, in the name of love, forgot who they themselves were. The other extreme; you give too much you end up resenting the love of your life.

If it's a relationship, then it was a good one in the past, definitely. The question is how to foster it to last.

Somehow, people mark marriage (or any other form of be-together) as a milestone, so big that it blinds them from the project-to-be: to make it last. Instead, it becomes sort of a checked action item on their list, and they move on as if they're living alone in the world and totally forget about their life partners.

I said it on many blogs before, we need help in that area. Yes, we, Egyptians specifically, we have a malfunctioned way of 'living with each other' - we change too fast, we don't have a unified mentality, and above all, we have 'many' profiles - this makes communication, let alone sharing a life, incredibly difficult.

Even if you're honest, there are other levels of challenges you have to venture through (religion, traditions, social discrimination, financial responsibilities, job codes and even the way you dress!), . Needless to say, in the face of a very dark society who stands on the largest marble base ever with 'Double Standards' carved right in, your chances of finding a partner with matching profiles, decrease.

They decrease .. dramatically.

Ironically enough, some couples still think they can resolve their differences when they're on that scale - talk about ineptitude!

Talk about knowing one's own profiles for a starter.

sorry for my long blather,

Evaluna said...

I'm stalking ur blog :D
I love this post.. wrote a couple of posts that relate some time earlier..
hmmm...
okay..