Relationships, wow, what's more special and yet more difficult then a relationship? Of course the first relationship we form is with our parents, what an astounding affect that has on ones life, that alone can in some cases dictate the types and health of relationships a person will have through-out their lives.
Quite honestly my relationship with my parents has never been GREAT but I do love them with my whole heart. I've been through some fairly negative experiences with them, however one of the tidbits of good advice my mother gave me (dispite the divorce proceedings she and my father are going through as we speak) was that you have to BE the right person FOR the right person. The significance of that has only fully hit me recently however I also realized that in some ways (thanks to my beliefs) I'd been living that way all along.
Now it's story time!
I grew up very insecure, never did well with friends or in any type of relationship, put a lot of stock in how others viewed me and was let down a lot and hard. It wasn't until after high school and I made the best decision of my life (move as far away from my family as possible) that I started to really realize who I was, what my self-worth was and that it really didn't matter to me what anyone thought of me. Also I stopped having these high and unrealistic expectations of myself and others, began learning to love others just the way they are and for who they are, people with problems, hurts and fears just like everyone else.
In terms of relationships, that meant that I stopped looking for someone to come into my life and make it better and I realized that I'm the only one in control of my destiny. I resigned myself to being single for the rest of my life if that's what it meant, only because I stopped putting a high value on getting into a relationship and how it would make me feel. I started looking inward to who I was as a person, my bad habits, things I wanted to change about me and things I saw in others that I wanted to avoid, so really unconciously over the period of the past 4 years I've been on a mission of self-improvement. Part of that was to part company with people or in some cases, situations, and to start rebuilding some good relationships and friendships I'd neglected in the past. One such friendship I had prior to this four years was with a girl I'd known for a summer and had enjoyed our conversations and fun I had with her and her friends (my brother was also dating her best friend at the time). For many different reasons, including my younger brother going to jail, our groups stopped hanging out together.
Now I have a very high standards when it comes to relationships, which had left me dateless for about 4 years and resigned to the idea that finding an ideal mate might be a long way off. By happen-stance I met up with this old friend and we immediately fell back into our old fun friendship but I was disappointed to learn she was dating someone. So we began corresponding through e-mails and discussing things and the changes in her life which were quite amazing in their own right. Then a year after that, almost to the day since I'd seen her we began talking seriously about our relationship (I'd already made it quite clear a couple months before that I was having feelings for her). She came up to visit me earlier this year and although we'd been "kinda dating" through e-mail for a month prior, we made it official when she was here.
What struck us both when we talked about it later was how much we both have changed (for the better) and yet retained the qualities that we loved in each other from previously. It's just interesting that I'm in a relationship now with someone who's actions compliment my own, who's views and attitudes are like a breath of fresh air, who's personality is so compatible, whereas even a year ago we wouldn't have worked, we needed to seperately go through the experiences we did in order to develop the charactaristics we have that are so compatible.
My point... oh wait, do I have one?
Oh ya, my point is I think it's so important that people don't focus on relationships or others to complete them or as a way of bringing longterm happiness into their lives, honestly you have to find that happiness in yourself first and be at peace with who you are in order to make a relationship work. It's human nature to (un-intentionally) disappoint and people will let you down and you could find yourself bouncing around from relationship to relationship looking for something no one can give you but yourself. I wouldn't rather be anyone but me and I truely mean that, I have a great self-esteem, been blessed with opportunities and abilities and now because of that, I'm madly in love with a intelligent, confident, self-assure young woman who shares my beliefs and goals. Life doesn't get much better then this!
Ok now buy my book. (sarcasm) :P I hope people don't take this as me being preachy because honestly this is who I am and if it helps and encourages someone who reads it then that's all I want. It's not like I live in some fantasy world where nothing bad ever happens, I wake up somedays and wish I had just pulled the sheets over my head... and held the pillow over my face lol... but life it what you make it and EVERYTHING we do is a choice! It's like we're playing a game called LIFE where we have total freedom to do anything we want and have total control of all our choices and have to live with the consequences of such. Isn't it?!