So how do you know you've met the right one?
Everyone who is in a relationship wonders if the person they are with is 'The One'. This is the perennial question we use to assess the way our relationships work and our lives evolve. The idea that there is a ‘right person’ for us out there that simply makes us narrow-beam our entire life on one person and re-think our approach to everything in life is sometimes difficult to accept because we are so used to assessing our needs, wants and requirements through a prism that is practical and has a built-in trade-off filter.
We look, for example, for financial security, emotional affirmation and a sense that we are not making our way in this world entirely on our own and, inevitably, we tend to look at the relationships we form as a way of ticking boxes and as a way of achieving something because we are trained to think and assess this way by everything else in our society.
The problem is that when it actually comes to relationships it does not work like this. Certainly there are practical things to work out, after all neither person in a relationship can live in a vacuum but, beyond that, everything else, no matter how difficult or easy it may seem is driven by one simple question: ‘Can I live without this person?’
If the answer is an easy yes, then your relationship, whatever its mutually beneficial points may be, is destined to become one of those comfortable arrangements where both partners begin to look outside the relationship for things which perhaps they should be looking inside for. It might be sex or it might be conversation and the sharing of emotions, the thing is that whatever it is, it is happening so you can be away from your relationship which means you cannot be yourself inside it.
The moment you begin to realise this the choices you have left will be governed by what you want. If you really want to be happy and are willing to look for that happiness and work towards its maintenance then you need to get out and look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you find yourself willing to put up with not being entirely happy then you have to be honest with yourself, understand what you have and what you can offer and what you can get out of it and work within these boundaries.
The problems we have with relationships arise because while we are very good at assessing what we get and what they give us from a material and physical point of view we are not as adept at quantifying the emotional and psychological side of them. As a result too many of us bottle up the psychological and emotional need we feel and concentrate on the more tangible material side of the relationship, the ‘practical’ bits, until, one day, we feel we can take no more and simply crack. That’s when you have traumatic break downs of a relationship with bottled up emotions unleashed and out of control.
This is when one of the couple will suddenly walk out and because there is now an accumulated time of mutually shared ‘comfort’ that’s being wiped out the splitting up will be tremendously painful for both parties.
Can this be avoided? Be honest. Understand what you want and from whom. Talk to your partner. Decided how you want your relationship to be and go from there. Of course, none of this is really important if you really are with ‘the one’ who simply clicks with you at every level, and it will not matter if you are not but you are both able to take your relationship to the next level, but if neither of these options are there, you then need to start deciding, together, what is really the best thing for the happiness of each of you.
