What's the point
What's the point
Everyone knows relationships are hard work. Everyone knows that relationships hit roadblocks and whatever the fuck else. Fucking why. What's the point? Be with a person that you mostly tolerate most of the days that you exist? And even then, they still might betray you in a horrible way. I've dealt with a lot of pain and stress and loss in my life, and when the happy shit gets sour, I just don't fucking get it. Why not just live my life fucking off and dying eventually.
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A great relationship with another person is worth more than the effort involved. They provide more to your life than you need to invest.
The problem is finding that person that does that for you.
You could go through a hundred or a handful of relationships to find that person. Until you have enough relationship experience to understand what you need in a partner, you will never know what it is like to find that special person that makes everything before them worth all that you have experienced.
The numbers aren't great. You are almost guaranteed to have to deal with some shit and have bad relationships in order to find that person. The worst part? Sometimes you aren't enough to deserve that person and it is up to you to become the person that your perfect partner deserves. Understanding that you aren't good enough for your perfect partner is hard, and becoming that person is harder. You do deserve to find that undeniable perfect love, if you can understand and work on your faults to deserve them.
The fault is almost certainly you. Strive to be better than your perfect partner deserves and be that person for them. Know when you find that person and understand what you need to be to surpass their expectations, surpass those expectations because they always deserve better than you are and you can be better than their needs in a partner.
That being said, if you can be happy alone, then be alone and live your best life without someone factored into your happiness equation. There is nothing that says you must have a partner to be happy, except your own needs. If you can be happy sexless and living life, great for you. That is a harder path because having someone to lean on when you need strength is hard, but not inviable.
No matter, be a better person to other than you were yesterday.
Understand yourself and be who you are, meant to be to be happy, even if that means your path in life is traveled alone.
<3
Can you explain what exactly people should improve on? I had a relationship with someone I really liked not work out and as much as I reflect back on it I don't really know what I should have done differently.
There is no one answer.
I could list out all the qualities that are ideal in a partner, but I would just be stating the obvious.
The answer you need will be different than the answer someone else needs. It is up to you to be self-aware enough to be able to see what you need to work on and go from there. If you can't see your own problems, then starting on working on your self-awareness is where you should start.
Part of the self-evaluation process is unfortunately having a break-up conversation so you can understand why the relationship didn't work out. That can be a rough conversation, especially if the two of you didn't have the best communication skills and they can convey to you effectively what the issues were and you can ask the right questions in the right way to get a useful answer. Ideally you would have great communication in the relationship and can have honest conversations about the issues one another is having before the issues become problems that end the relationship.
Adding into the issue of communication is accepting criticism and being able to determine valid criticism from false criticism. An example of this is someone breaking up with you because you don't spend money on them. Is that a valid criticism? Through effective communication you can make that determination. Are you the problem because you don't take them to dinner on Valentine's Day because you just replaced a good TV with a bigger one and don't have money for a V-Date or are they the problem because they expect you to buy them random luxury goods when you live paycheck to paycheck?
Is it valid criticism to break up because you don't do anything around the house? Are you the problem because you don't do anything around the house after work or are they the problem because they don't work and don't do anything around the house except watch anime and play videogames and expect you to pay the bills, do the shopping, cook, and clean?
So valid criticisms are genuine problems that you create in not meeting reasonable expectations your partner has. Understanding if your or their expectations are reasonable is sometimes hard. Having a couple's therapist to talk to can really help in that matter. A less than ideal second place option is AI. If you and your partner can explain the problem to an AI, the AI may be able to provide useful feedback and it is up to the both of you to accept the outcome of either therapy or AI opinion and begin working on the issue.
So your keys to the kingdom are self-awareness, ability to accept criticism, and communication. If you can develop those skills, then every other issue you have can be determined and then it becomes a matter of figuring out improvements to make you a better you with or without the help of a therapist.
This is really solid advice here. Unfortunately most people are not able to follow this thinking. Sometimes you find someone but they change later. This usually happens when you get together at a younger age. The person you were with at 22 is totally different than the person they are at 30. Sometimes you “jump the gun” and get pregnant or get someone pregnant before you really get to know them. This happens when it’s been less than a few years and you haven’t experienced all the different emotions and feelings that happen with life and shit going wrong. How a person is when life is good is not a reflection of how they will behave when life turns sour.
My suggestion for people is to just wait. Wait before getting married. Wait before having kids. And wait before buying a house or other large purchases together. It took me to almost 40 and 5ish serious relationships and many not so serious relationships before finding my wife.