This Valentine’s day is the first Valentine’s day I have spent alone in several years and I want to reflect on the lessons I have learned from spending time with John. In essence, building a happy relationship is much like building a house. The relationship should be built on a foundation of openness, with walls of peace, love, unity & respect, roofed with commitment.
First, you must build a great foundation on openness. This is what will ultimately lead to success or failure in your relationships, romantic or otherwise. Being open with your partner is crucial to getting to know what really makes them tick and if you begin to shut off from them, keep secrets, or clutter your physical space eventually your problems will boil to the surface. Don’t make the same mistakes I made of bringing too many physical things into your place of living, or your partner will feel like they are drowning in clutter. And never hide your emotions from your partner, no matter how much you fear the truth will hurt them. You see, if you don’t address the issues as they occur, your relationship will clutter with issues and you will not be able to move forward, past whatever it is that may be troubling you. Eventually, you will be frozen in place completely surrounded by problems and unhappiness.
Next, come building the walls. Generally, at first, these walls are going to be built of straw, then wood, then eventually if you work at it long enough brick or steel. These walls are the four pillars of what makes a relationship last. Should you ever set fire to one of the walls be sure that you are both working to extinguish the flames. You must act quickly before a fire burns the whole relationship to the ground. No one wall is no more or less important than the other four walls, but rest assured that when one wall becomes weak or is set up in flames all walls will become equally as weak with time.
The wall built of peace must constantly be maintained, rebuilt and reinforced. Destroying peace can come in many forms, it can come as jealousy, anger, or any other emotion that causes a disturbance between the two of you. For us, jealousy was an issue that we should have addressed sooner. I should have been more clear that the outside affection he received in the form of text messages was disturbing to me. I should have been clear that the outside affection I received from one of his best friends made me feel suspicious of him. Lastly, we should have been clear with the people that provided the outside affection to us that it was causing us pain. But alas, I let it go on because I didn’t know how harmful it would ultimately become. If your partner ever receives communication that makes you feel jealous I challenge you to speak openly with your partner about how it makes you feel. You both should address the person causing the jealousy together so that you can feel at peace again and so that they know to respect your boundaries going forward.
Our relationship also had anger, while this was very rarely if ever directed at one another while we were dating I was deeply angered with a lot of things in my own life. Things like being vastly underpaid at work but also with medical issues that I have had going back ten years. I was upset that I needed to give up so many foods that I loved eating to heal my body and by consuming them I caused myself physical pain. This pain radiated, and ultimately John felt it in the form of me having a shitty mood a lot of the time. And a piss poor attitude towards life. Ultimately this anger burned away all the peace we felt and I am truly regretful that I let it spill over, poisoning our relationship and how John thought of me.
The next wall is love, this one is also crucial to maintain daily. This can come in many forms, such as through being nice in actions and words. My friend Carlos recently wrote an article titled “Five Ways to Say ‘I Love You’ Without Using Those Words: Festival Edition”. Carlos’s article highlights many great ways you can show love and I highly suggest reading it. The flip side of love is the lack of it or to show apathy or indifference. Being apathetic in a relationship is deeply harmful, it makes your partner feel like, surprise surprise you don’t care. To me, this is one of the most toxic feelings you can make your partner feel because it’s the hardest for the partner to fix and they will feel helpless and apathetic in return. In our relationship I was again the apathetic one, I had a lot of things going on in my life that I was numb about including my job because I felt I was often taken advantage of, but also with my health. At times I gave up on trying to heal myself and again these emotions transferred over to John. Eventually, at the end of the relationship, it was clear that he felt apathetic towards me. Which in retrospect is understandable, after all, how could you fully love someone that didn’t even love themself fully?
The third wall is unity, the state of being united and making one another whole together. This is one of the hardest walls to work on because it is something that truly requires you both to be present with yourselves and to be working towards your individual best before you may be present with one another and working towards your collective best together. If one partner isn’t giving their all to be at their best you will always fail here. The other partner may try to make self-sacrifices to make the other partner feel whole but eventually, this will deplete them and make them feel less than whole. Again, in mine and John’s relationship, I failed to be my best individual self and as a result, I drained away from John’s energy, leeching away from John’s wholeness. I pushed John so hard to be his best while selling us both short by not holding up to my end of the bargain. I failed us both by not pushing myself to reach my fullest capabilities.
The fourth and final wall is respect or the feeling of being positive towards one another. Like all the other walls, this needs to be worked on constantly. You need to own up to the times that you disrespect your partner, but also to the times you disrespect yourself. In our relationship disrespect was present, I can’t deny that. There were times when I asked twice for intimacy when asking more than once should never, ever be done. It took me a long time to realize how wrong it is to ask twice for intimacy, and unfortunately by the time I learned that lesson the damage was already done. John felt disregarded by my words and at times actions. Unfortunately, by the time I recognized what was going on lasting damage was already done. Even after I learned my lesson in what proper consent looks like we felt the pain from the prior incidences. Which is why I tried to teach his new partner this lesson in consent, so that they may never go through the pain of feeling disrespected by one another.
The roof of commitment can only be built if the floor and walls are built first. To me commitment means being fiercely loyal to one another, never being unfaithful, always acting in good faith, and with devotion towards bettering yourselves. It is the summation of the four walls where peace, love, unity, and respect meet. If any of your four walls are weak you must first focus on building them up, or eventually, the roof will come crashing down every single time. In our relationship eventually, the roof did come crashing down leaving me feeling drowned in pain, frozen in place, deeply unhappy, angry with myself, apathetic towards life, like I sold myself short, and a deep sense that I disrespected myself.
Before you reach this point, the point where the roof crashes down I challenge you to inspect yourself, your partner and the house you are building together for signs of faults. Look for pain, unhappiness, anger, apathy, and disrespect and address them before they grow out of control. Look for the areas in which you are selling yourself and your partner short and push to move past the spots in your life where you occur frozen in place. Today I challenge you to write down on paper all the areas that are causing you trouble so that you may address them. Have your partner do the same and do the same for each other, getting an outside appraiser if at all possible. Your home is worth building together but you will never build a stable home without looking for the faults, fixing them and making the repairs necessary to have a home built on openness, with walls of peace, love, unity, & respect, and roofed with commitment.