Why are relationships so hard? Many of us confuse the physical attraction we feel for someone with being in love.
We treat love like flowers, buying the beautiful ones without understanding how much work they need. We think that those primal feelings of attraction, those desires and wants, are what constitutes love and we act according to those primal feelings rather than the knowledge that it is not that simple. We have crushes on the pretty girls or the handsome guys and only want to be with the most attractive person.
We confuse this with love, but it is often only an evolutionary instinct.
Even when we grow older, many of us still confuse this physical attraction with an emotional one because very few of us go through the growth of a long-term relationship.
We date based on physical aspects more than emotional ones.
That is why many of us date the attractive stranger rather than a friend we’ve come to know. We base our first instincts of the physical attraction and then get to know the character behind the person, hoping that whoever they are underneath their looks is someone we can be together with.
The problem with this is not the approach, but that most of us subconsciously know this and we fake who we are to impress the person so we can be with them. Our desire to be in a relationship, to be with this person, or just our instincts for sex and romance, beat out the logical way we should approach the relationship.
We lie about what we want, give the person the benefit of the doubt, do not address the issues that come up and avoid any and all confrontations as we continuously try to impress rather than be honest. Even if this does end up working, we get into a relationship that is based on fake personalities.
We love the person who we think they are, just like they love us who we pretended to be, but neither can keep this up forever. However, at that point both parties have already invested enough time, energy and personal feelings into the relationship that they loose too much by leaving.
The problem is that most of us start relationships off on the wrong foot and then have to work very hard to get things just to a normal state. As this initial attraction fades we realize that we have not been honest with them or with ourselves. We made compromises we never wanted to make, we did not stand up for the things that meant a lot to us, and avoided the confrontations we needed to have in order to develop a deeper relationship.
But now it is very late.
We invested a lot of time and energy in this relationship already that we find it hard to cut our losses and get out, or have faked so much that addressing the problems seems like a mountainous task.
This is why most couples end up distancing each other over time.
What we gave freely at first now is given only when the other person changes or when we get something out of it.
The spark of the relationship is lost for the secrecy of pretense, and we try to get by without being found out, scared that we may lose what we invested. We invest less and then are surprised that our partner does the same, and soon wonder where the passion and the love has gone.
Relationships are hard because you have to vulnerable enough to be yourself, even if you might get hurt, have to be brave enough to confront the other person, even if you might lose them, and have to put in consistent effort, even if you may not get anything back.
Relationships require constant conversations, countless discussions and compromises, and a lot of self-reflection, acceptance and curbing of your ego. It requires you to see two points of view, rather than just one, and to combine two lives into one timeframe while meeting the needs of both people.
This makes it exponentially more difficult than just taking care of yourself and is something that most people are honestly not willing to do. Most people subscribe to the idea of “happily-ever-after”, trying to find a person that takes care of them but where they do not have to put in any work themselves.
They want someone who will love them unconditionally and do everything they wanted without needing to be unconditional themselves. And they definitely do not want to confront them, have a hard discussion, or be told that they were at fault and needed to change.
Ironically, the biggest problem is that most are not aware of this and therefore cannot even communicate their wants and desires when they want to, which just increases the problems even further.
You have to understand that a relationship is an ever-growing garden.
There is always more to work on, more to improve on, and more to grow into with your partner. Treat the relationship as a flower that needs constant care and attention and you will find it will bloom beautifully. But if you expect it to bloom without even watering it, you will just end up with a wilted and decaying plant in the center of your life.
