Falling, Yes But Growing Too
Love is difficult, isn’t it? Finding one that lasts forever; one that doesn’t lose it’s essence rather grows both ways; one that ends with shrinking eye sights and some pain in the joints. Yeah, finding something like that is difficult. But you know what’s more difficult — to hold on to it. To be able to be there, till the end.
The millennial generation is often looked upon as the one, which is further away from emotions and family values. Professional achievements and a ‘first world’ life takes precedence in our lives. Words like compromise, adjustment and consideration are not only fading away from our vocabulary and behaviour but are looked upon as weaknesses. According to a report based on the last census data, there are almost 1.36 million Indians, who are divorced. That was back in 2011. I am sure with our individual experiences we all realise that that number must have shot up drastically by now.
Every relationship or marriage is different. There are no fixed formulae to make it work in every situation but there could be a few things we could practice in our relationships that could bring the sanctity back.
Choose the battles wisely
Not everything needs an A-bomb. A wet towel, some unclean dishes, a missing button on a shirt or some extra salt in the food is nothing in comparison to the hot soup that you get when you are dead sick in bed or a special delivery at work with all your favourite food just so you don’t forget to eat because of a busy schedule. If everything is treated with the same intensity, the real issues, which need attention, get buried under a lot of unnecessary noise. Nobody is perfect. Each time we go through the mental list of the things that bring irritation and bitterness, it inflates beyond the real proportions in our head. What we forget to do is to make another list of reasons why in the first place we are with the person. A little bit of consideration on certain issues can do two things. First, it will decrease the chances of unkind words being hurled at each other. Second, it’ll make the other person see the logic in what we say when we do draw attention to something that needs to be taken care of.
Remember how it felt in the beginning
It’s easy to lose sight of certain moments in life. The first time you tasted chocolate, the first time a bee stung you, the first time you realised that he/she is the one. We all, at some point or the other, have wished to relive the first moments of a relationship. We can’t go back in time but what we could do is sharpen our memories of the things that happened in the beginning. Revisiting places that have memories from the past, watching a movie that somehow contributed in making the relationship stronger or simply reminiscing about the things that were said can make us relive those emotions we initially felt. We could keep caressing those spots in our brain to keep those feelings and memories alive and not lose them in the crowd of not so pleasant ones.
Kindness is not just for charities
At work, with friends and even with strangers we often display an amount of kindness and consideration. However, we forget to extend the same to the one person we love and care for the most. We start imposing our level of perfection on them and put them down if they don’t fit our standards, however, we forget to weigh ourselves on those same parameters. People often lament about their partners by saying “but I was saying it for his/her own good, why can’t he/she understand that?”. They probably don’t understand because of the way the message is being relayed. We start taking our partners for granted and feel that even in a heated discussion or argument they will be able to filter our harsh words out and only look at the love and care behind the words. That is a little too much to expect, don’t you think? How about we don’t try to pinch them with cruel words, instead and control our instincts to take a higher moral ground always. It might be fun for you to mention a short coming of your partner in public in form of a joke and call it casual humour but ‘negative kidding isn’t kidding’. Though teasing is not ill intended it can be misconstrued. Unknowingly and unintentionally it can harm the relationship.
Stagnancy isn’t stability
Our scheduled daily life runs on autoplay. We wake up, perform some household chores, go to work, come back home exhausted and retire to bed in preparation of another similar day. If attention is not paid this routine becomes a habit and it consumes our entire life. It brings with itself a level of stagnancy that is misunderstood as stability in a relationship. In his film ‘Annie Hall’, Woody Allen said that “a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies”. Talking about the future and planning events for the time to come could bring excitement that can help in not only keeping the relationship alive but also to handle life’s different challenges, which otherwise we could be handling alone.
These suggestions are but just the tip of a iceberg. There are so many other ways of preserving a relationship, but the only thing common in them is the effort made. I once believed that love should not need so much work. It should be effortless, only then it is real but it does require effort and care to preserve it. Starting anything new is easy. We are full of enthusiasm and exhilarated about the newness of the relationship but imagine the exhilaration of spending a lifetime with someone and knowing every story, every joy and every sadness of that person. In the end, that excitement can never be replaced by something new.
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