A Relationship Isn’t Going to Get Rid of That Feeling
It doesn’t surprise me as much nowadays, but I remember when I was completely oblivious to the reality that when one is in a relationship, one will continue to experience the same issues they were having before the relationship began.
As a matter of fact, the relationship tends to make the situation worse because your partner will inadvertently trigger you.
I recently had back to back conversations with some friends about this. One friend is on the brink of something they’ve wanted for years but then began lamenting on how self-serving the opposite sex is.
I just told them that the entire point of attraction is to love the other person. You can’t guarantee that they’re going to love you back. And as much as we think we can persuade people, it doesn’t stop them from showing their true (and sometimes unsightly) colors.
Then you realize you’ve spent all this time trying to get with someone that you may not even respect. You were attracted to them, but do you admire or even accept how they live or who they are?
The only thing you can do is love people. That’s the only thing you can control. Don’t be a fool trying to control others because you might not succeed and furthermore, you become a sitting duck for others to control you.
With the other friend, they believe that family is a volatile aspect of life. Because of their own familial issues, they unconsciously walk into relationships with people who also have familial issues due to its subconscious familiarity.
Not only is my friend addressing their own past wounds, those wounds are now compounded with the wounds their partner suffers from.
So overall, the gnawing malaise that both of my friends have been feeling inside has been multiplied despite getting what they wanted.
For me, I realized that as a kid, I wanted to escape the feeling of loneliness. I thought I had addressed it, but I had only addressed it to an extent. There was more work to be done, but I didn’t know that.
Unconsciously, I would try to be something that I wasn’t in order to be in a relationship. But all that ended up happening was that I would be attracted to people who would trigger the loneliness within.
Some action (or lack therof) would send me spinning into the vortex of emotion that I was unknowingly trying to escape from. They’d like me but not choose me. Or they’d choose me but their presence was decreasing more and more. Or they didn’t like me but they treated me differently than everyone else.
All of these things took the loneliness that had yet to be healed and then magnified them. In a way, this was a good thing because it highlighted the issue for me. However, when you deny that you have the issue (like I did), you will never be able to see it.
You cannot solve a problem that you deny is there. As a result, I was forced to question if I truly was over the suffering of loneliness. As it turns out, I wasn’t. It wasn’t as chronic as before, but it was still a problem.
So if you find yourself either unceasingly single despite your attempts to be in a relationship or you get into relationships just to be reintroduced to the same problems, ask yourself, “What feeling will a relationship help me to get rid of?”
When you get that answer, check to see if it shows itself in the people, relationships or situationships that you’ve been investing in. If you see it in these various contexts, you have your answer.
One’s relationships are reflections of what’s going on inside oneself. Whatever internal pains go unaddressed will be externally expressed.
It’s not a bad system when internally everything is good because everything remains good and on autopilot. But it is especially useful when highlighting the wounds within because now one knows what needs to be done in order to live the life one wants.
In the context of wanting a relationship, you may realize that the only reason you really wanted a relationship was because you wanted to get rid of the negative feeling.
But if you acknowledge the feeling and it fades away, you realize that all you really wanted was the pain to be gone. You become more aware that you’ve always had love in your life. You are sorry that you were so frustrated with others and yourself for failing to have the relationship.
You realize that trying to change your external world did not change your internal world.
So again, ask yourself, “What feeling will a relationship help me to get rid of?” When the answer comes, check to see if it shows itself in past romances.
And when you see it, just acknowledge that the wound is there and allow yourself to feel the pain rather than trying to escape it as you did in the past.
