How to Save a Relationship: Before one can think about how to save a relationship it is important to spend some energy on thinking about what it is. It soon becomes apparent that this is such a complex issue that one can spend a lifetime on it and still not get very far.
How to Save a Relationship: Facts!
Each person is an individual made up of different physical attributes in turn inherited from two complex individuals. It might even be asserted that there are not two people in a marriage but six, since the respective parents are so deeply implicate in who their children are.
Add to all the inherited cell combinations millions of different experiences that are absorbed through the senses from the first day of life. A person has a unique brain. One trivial comment can be recalled vividly twenty years later although millions of others have been forgotten. The reasons why a particular phrase is remembered and others forgotten exemplifies the complexity of individuals.
- How to Save a Relationship: Consider this!
When it is considered how a relationship consists of two people bringing together their unique and complex individualities it becomes apparent that it may be compared with a language. Because words keep coming and going the number of sentences that can be made is infinite. This infinite variety is what makes both language and living infinitely interesting. It is why we do not want to die.
Two changing individuals entering into an affair of the heart create something that is unique and living, like themselves and like the children that may be the outcome of them engaging sexually. Because it is alive and unique their relationship may grow or die. What happens is determined by the way the two significant people act towards each other both when they are together and when they are apart.
- It can never really be static.
In the same way that a person cannot carry on living once his organs have stopped functioning, so a relationship between two living individuals cannot stop functioning while it exists. It follows that the first step in saving something from death is to keeps its fundamental organs working. Such organs are the considerations and actions that two people have towards each other.
How to Save a Relationship: Never Forget this!
A marriage is a legal contract between two people but it is well known that it does not necessarily keep a a relationship alive. Many people get divorced, and perhaps more live together as tacit enemies. In some cases they can hardly be in the same room without bristling and their hearts may sink when they hear the door open to admit a partner to whom they feel that they have been shackled.
The bond between them is so rotten that it should either be done away with or rejuvenated in some way, and thus saved; this has a non-trivial effect when it comes to how to save a relationship.
Having understood the complexity of the issue the next step is to admit that each individual is an ‘other’ person. This issue is deceptively simple. It seems obvious that each person is an ‘other’ but it is not always to easy to behave accordingly. To really acknowledge the ‘otherness’ of another person is to overcome the pride and the prejudices that are a very large part of who we are.
- How to Save a Relationship: An Example!
For example, some parents deny the individuality of their offspring by trying to impose their own preferences, likes, dislikes, prejudices and aspirations on their children. There is a such fine line between education and indoctrination that most people have to settle for getting it right some of the time rather than all the time.
Few can avoid passing on a least some of their own prejudices especially in those toddler years when parents are like gods to young children. Small acts and odd phrases are the dust that settles on relationships.
Failing to respect individuality can destroy the lives of children by forcing them into careers against their inclinations. In a similar way a marriage can be threatened when one partner becomes too controlling. In such cases a remedy may be to stop stifling the other person by trying to control him or her too closely.
How to Save a Relationship: Attention!
- Narcissism is a destructive personality trait.
It is very difficult to overcome because it is a personality trait in many people that can be changed about as easily as changing one’s basic appearance. A narcissist will leave a psychologist’s or marriage counselor’s rooms convinced that these professionals have got things quite wrong if they have suggested something that is not in accord with what the narcissist thinks.
Until people are willing to change themselves in relation to others there is little hope. By the same token things can be changed and saved if people are willing to try and change. In most cases this must be true of both parties. If both are prepared to try and change there is hope for success.
Of course the changes that a person might have to make are not the easy ones that he or she would like to make anyway. The principle of ‘otherness’ implies respecting the other person’s viewpoint. This might entail giving up just where one thought one was in the right.
- How to Save a Relationship: Most of us forget this!
A man who has prided himself on being kind and thoughtful by bringing his wife breakfast in bed every Sunday may have to concede that this drives her mad. A woman who keeps her house spotless might have to give up her pride and joy in the interests of being more sloppy and therefore more relaxed and happy. Such concessions can be very difficult to make but they may save a break down.
Although concessions and back downs are essential they can also be counter productive. There is always a danger that concessions may be seen as weakness and an opportunity for one party to dominate. When two people can respect each other sufficiently to back down concomitantly, taking turns to concede, there are grounds for hope.
In her novel, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen portrays the roles played by these two enemy emotions of good relations between people. The hero and the heroin mutually overcome both pride and prejudice in different ways.
In different ways they both become more humble and this humility enables then to overcome the prejudices that previously defined and limited their lives.
Most people can learn a great deal about the intricacies of human affairs by studying this book written by a spinster two centuries ago. It could even be thought of as compulsory reading on how to save a relationship.