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.

Entangled Ropes

When you're in a relationship with someone they become a part of you. Your parts and theirs are entangled together like two ropes knotted randomly over and over. When you break up you get detached from that person and when they leave they take away that part of you. There's no way to disentangle your bits from theirs and so what happens is the equivalence of passing scissors through both strings to let them loose. That's why the person breaking up gets away intact, he's managed to get all his rope and bits and pieces of the other's, it really depends on who cuts where. Sometimes you want no bits or strings of that person at all and even though you're breaking up with them you sacrifice yours. At first you miss that person. The end of the relationship means that you will not have that person in your life anymore. It feels bitter but after a while you can let go and you can accept that this person is not in your life anymore, and there's a void you feel; this void can easily be filled by other things.

But there's a different kind of void that is much harder to fill, it's that part of you they took with them that you can't find. What you were missing all along is yourself and you didn't even realize. That's why not just the relationship falls apart, but other aspects of your life too, because the part that's missing, that has been taken away from you is part of how you dealt with the rest of the world and not just this person. That's why the blow makes your whole world collapse. I think that you'd need to regenerate that part of you that you lost before you can become normal again, but it is not necessarily a bad thing because that new part of you has the chance to grow into a much better part than that which existed before.

The Void

Must be odd to have something that you need to tell a certain somebody, but they’re out of your life. You look at a piece of news and you feel the need to share it with that somebody who will react the same way you do, but they’re not around. You see a funny video at which you laugh hysterically but others laugh casually and you know that the only person will see what’s hysterical is not around and is not in your life anymore. You notice something that is so insignificant to others but to you and your friend it holds a great value and you can talk about it for hours, but you reach for your phone to tell them all about it and realize you can’t call that person anymore.

The things you appreciated together you now have to appreciate alone, the things you thought you’d do together you now have to do alone. It feels very strange to keep those things you wanted to share just for yourself. It feels like there’s something missing, a void that was once filled by a presence. I think it can also feel like a wound. When freshly cut there's nothing there, it's almost hallow, and by time where perfect flesh once was, a cut that’s irregularly filled. After a while flesh fills that void, but it’s never the same kind of flesh that was there before. It’s always a different flesh and it stands out, but it does the job. Whether time will completely erase that wound or not depends on how big the void was and how well your body adapts.

So when you see the things of a sharable nature, the first time you forget and you think how great it would be if you share it. The next time it takes you less time to realize that you can’t share it, the next time you get sadder and sadder until you have to make a choice. Do I let all of this go or do I keep it just for me?

The Bill

He was sitting in a bar sipping wine together with his ex girlfriend and her girlfriend along with some others. The three of them were drinking wine and enjoying the cheesy music that the bar was playing. It was obvious that the ex girlfriend and her friend were getting along fine despite how different they were. He was trying to find peace with the whole situation.

At one point in the evening he leaned over to the friend and stated, "You do know that we broke up because of you, don't you?"

"Yes, I know," she said with smug smile and a sense of self satisfaction.

The feeling he felt was indescribable, but he decided that he wouldn't waste another minute of his life feeling that way. With this decision he had some clarity, he left his share of the bill and more on the table, and left.