How do we become emotionally mature lovers?
Time and experience can surely help us grow, but it doesn’t guarantee it.
To view fights with our significant other as a positive rather than a negative takes a certain level of emotional maturity. As Dr. Asi had commented on my previous essay, “I think it totally depends upon the maturity level of the couple and ego.”
Fights are ugly. They can bring out the worst in us. We cry, we get angry, we act selfishly, and we lash out.
Not every fight with our significant other can be resolved, much less be resolved happily. But if there is a silver lining to all of those tears and frustrations, it’s growth.
Young, inexperienced, immature love is selfish. You have yet to learn how to be vulnerable, to trust, to compromise, and to accept each other’s flaws.
Learning to put aside your own ego and put someone else’s feelings before your own is not easy.
I was 16-years-old when I got into my first relationship. My boyfriend and I were just two teens who were experiencing love — or, well, our juvenile idea of it — for the first time. We had no idea what it meant to accept another person into our lives.
But with every fight, with every misunderstanding, with every argument, we learned.
We learned how to talk to one another about our problems, because bottling up our emotions only made things worse.
We learned how to listen to one another — to let each other talk without interruption or criticism, because it was important that we both felt heard.
We learned how to accept each other’s feelings without hostility, because we didn’t want to leave the other feeling invalidated or rejected.
We learned how to acknowledge and admit fault when it was due, because we had to own up to our mistakes.
And we learned how to sincerely apologize for our wrongdoings, because at the end of the day, our relationship was more valuable than pride.
Getting through rough patches with your partner takes a lot of patience, perseverance, and, above all, a willingness to grow — as a person and as a couple.
Time and experience can surely help you grow into more emotionally mature lovers, but it doesn’t guarantee it.
Now that I’m well into my 20s, I’ve learned that people can be very set in their ways.
Not every person you fall in love with is willing to change, even if it means changing for the better. You can give a relationship all the patience and perseverance in the world, but it wouldn’t matter if the openness to change and willingness to grow wasn’t there.
At the end of the day, you can only grow so much with someone who refuses to grow with you.
I’ve only just started publishing my work on Medium and was quite (happily) surprised by the attention my last essay received. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my writing. Even though I don’t reply to comments, I read (and appreciate) each and every one of them. —Jess
