“Every couple needs to argue now and then. Just to prove that the relationship is strong enough to survive. Long-term relationships, the ones that matter, are all about weathering the peaks and the valleys.” ―Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven

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Every one of us have a special relationship with people around us everyday, it may be a romantic relationship with a girlfriend/boyfriend, or simply parents-children relation. In these relationship problem arises and it is impossible to avoid having problem at all, what we can do is to value the relationship we have and think if it worth the challenges. We may not able to choose which family we want to live in, who our parents and siblings are, but we definitely could choose who our girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse are. And I hope we choose it wisely and voluntarily, think about the challenges that may occur later instead of being smitten by the temporary “romance” which someday ends.

Romance and lust ends, while true love lasts. The irony is people often choose who they want to live with based on appearance, social status, and short term romance rather than think for his own future. Again, let us not blame our circumstances to our partner but to ourselves by not forgetting that we agree to be in relationship with him/her in the first place. Secondly, we choose to stay in the relationship after knowing his/her attitude and beliefs. So I may conclude that we have a choice everyday to live the way we want to, with the people we want to be with, doing the things we voluntarily do. We do have a choice and it doesn’t take a genius to see if a relationship will work or not.

In a relationship there are lots of variable involved, I think two most profound variables are “ourselves” and “the person we are with”. One thing for sure, we couldn’t control “the person we are with”, we could give advice or even push him to do something, but we can’t change his beliefs unless he choose to. On the other side, excercising our ability to choose will strenghten our mental attitude and avoid “learned helplessness”. Learned helplessness means someone is trying to change something many times but keep on failing, in turn he felt completely hopeless and think whatever he do will not change his circumstances. This is pessimists point of view in this world, they are preoccupied with negative mental state and in turn they don’t get ahead in life, staying stuck in his position.

Simply said, if you are already stuck in a bad relationship or your partner is rude to you most of the time, the get out! Most of violance in relationship were never reported, they stuck in an unhealthy situation over the years just because they are too afraid and too comfortable with violance. Too afraid to leave, too afraid to stand on their own feet, or because they depended on the other person to live. Even if you don’t have any home and other resources to live on your own, I still think its better than living decently with abusive person.

The next question we should ask, specially for young people is “how to build a healthy relationship”. I’ll post it next week, stay tuned!

dp