Dear friend,
What goes wrong in most relationships is that people enter them not for the joy of the relationship itself, but to get something out of it, the way you squeeze juice from a lemon. You might say, what else is a lemon for? Fair enough. But that is exactly how we treat each other. We moderns chase enjoyment as a noun, and forget joy as a verb, as something we do together.
We take some pleasure, some benefit, some thing we wanted from the other person, and all the while there is no commitment to the relationship for its own sake. We love destinations and grow bored of the journey. That is what goes wrong.
Commitment to the relationship itself asks you to expand, to hold in your own ambitions not only your goals but the goals and ambitions of the others in it. When you begin to carry the other person’s aims alongside your own, and to ground your actions in care for the relationship, you gain the chance to avoid a tragedy that visits every relationship that matters.
What tragedy? Sooner or later, in every relationship, someone moves unilaterally out of their own self-serving read of the situation, blind to what matters to the other. And if both people came only to take, one of them is bound to end up resentful, because now someone is not getting what they came for.
The less you get of what you wanted, the more your mood sours. You decide the relationship is not working, and it stops working, because you stop trying. You stop making offers, stop generating the mood a relationship needs to live. You sink into the entitled moods of entrapment: feeling wronged, ignored, rejected, unappreciated.
If your idea of the relationship was how special it would make you feel, then at the first sign of trouble you are lost, because now you do not feel special. But if your idea of the relationship is to explore the world of the other person, to celebrate the difference in your values and opinions, to allow grace and real listening, then you will touch something powerful and mysterious. That is love.
With care,Saqib