PSA: Relationships Can Be Easy
Hard work? Make it simple instead.
I’m lucky enough to have found a person who is everything I’ve heard a partner can be — loyal, attentive, honorable. Most of all, they are kind. It’s a short list that makes life together so loving, so fantastic to live. I’ve also heard that relationships are all about work, a struggle to keep up, and this is how I used to feel about partnering. Until I met them and eventually worked out, it shouldn’t have to be hard.
How was I supposed to know? I’d come off decades of failed relationships, some of us doing our best together and some not, to discover someone who would teach me just how easy relationships could be. I fought it for a bit, figured there must be some hidden secret, waiting for the bottom to fall out as it always had in the past. But no. The relationship was exactly how it presented itself to be.
I got accustomed to the way things were over time — with the passage of years and a lot of therapy — and I learned to relax into the gentleness and effortlessness. I was shocked that it’s not as difficult as I was led to believe, yet being good with myself first goes a long way to extending that graciousness to someone else.
It comes down to listening. Without agenda.
