Relationships

Lets start from the beginning. Who makes the rules for a relationship? What makes the right relationship for you? Are there set rules?

Well, knowing someone usually means that you have something in common or someone in common. This doesn’t always mean that you get along or understand each other because you can’t always relate to everyone around you. People’s beliefs often put them together or keep them together. Many successful marriages are made from both partners having the same beliefs in life, such as live and let live, or don’t poke into anyone else’s business, or in other ways such as both believing in doing charity work or both always wanted to travel, both wanting lots of children, or both wanting to earn lots of money in their early years to secure themselves in later life.

Faults are the other thing that separates who can be with someone and who couldn’t be with them. For instance I have a friend who has a husband that really annoys me but the things he does are things that don’t annoy her so that’s fine. I would think that the things she does would annoy some men too but they don’t seem to annoy him so they are very happy.

People can’t change other people; people can only change themselves.  Relationships are made up of people who can relate to one another in the things they say and do, and can therefore understand them and react in a way that the other person can understand too.

Family relationships

These are some of the strangest relationships that people have.  They can be close or distant, but what they are is always there whether the person wants it or not.  You can fallout with a boyfriend or even a husband and cut all ties with them but with family, even though you may fall out from time to time, they are still there, whether you see them or not.

Friend relationships

These are all about support and honesty.  There are very obvious rules to friendships and you certainly know when you have broken a rule!   Friendships are very important relationships in most parts of your life. They are a back up system when you feel you need justification or confidence but they are also a way or hearing the truth from someone you trust will tell you it straight… whether you will like it or not.

All in all…

I think that its fair to say that you need to find out what you want in a relationship of any kind and be truthful to yourself in what is working for you and what isn’t. Sometimes the beginning of any relationship is all about watching and listening and finding out how the other person reacts to situations that arise, then finding out whether it is the situation that made them deal with the thing the way they did or if they keep doing that same thing in different situations; for instance, a person may be quite timid and shy away from giving their opinion in a conversation and you feel as though they have no character or interest about them and that they are quite boring…however, with a little thought about what could be going on; are they doing that because of the person they are talking to (may be your mother!) and they want to be polite, or are you finding that they are like that with any person that gets into a deep conversation?  Which ever way it turned out to be, what would you feel about it? Some people would say that the person is a whimp and that they couldn’t stay with them; other people may say that its nice to just stay in a quite nice conversation and that they also would stay quiet. There is no right or wrong, only what suits you and what doesn’t suit you in a person. These things about people are not like writing shopping lists in what you do want and what you don’t want, they are about things that you find out about them that you like or dislike or have previous experience about and know you don’t like it and have learned from it. There are things like lying that no one likes and they are the obvious ones, but we constantly learn about what annoys us and what makes us relax and enjoy the other persons company; the more annoyances and mismatching of characters the shorter the relationship, the more matches and relaxing behaviour between the two people, the longer the relationship can last. The beliefs and lifestyle things as mentioned previously obviously play a huge part too, and a good combination of all of the things can bring a happy relationship. Everyday things may occur that brings friction between a relationship, and there is nothing wrong with an argument or discussion for a specific issue so long as everyone is prepared to sort it out with regard to everyone’s feelings.  Issues need to be sorted out on a daily basis and agreement of what should happen doesn’t happen by magic. The important thing is that it gets sorted out in an equal and mature way so that the object of the ‘discussion’ actually gets sorted out.