NAVIGATING RELATIONSHIPS IN THE MODERN WORLD
Quality Relationships
Quality relationships are key to living your best life. Whether they are romantic relationships or plutonic friendships, it’s important to focus not on the quantity, but the quality of our relationships. Realistically, we cannot live our lives in isolation and it’s important to navigate this world of relationships with clear and concise candor about what we desire and how to achieve it. After all, humans are social creatures, so cultivating good relationships are key to living your best life. It’s not going to be all sunshine and roses, but the key is to cultivate good relationships, and either try to fix, or distance yourself from the bad ones. While this is true for all our relationships both romantically and platonically, in this article we are going to focus on romantic relationships.
“What better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92)
We all desire love in our relationships
Ah yes…. LOVE! Something we all desire in life. What better feeling in the world is there than newfound love? Waking up to see that good morning text knowing that other person was thinking about you just as much as you were thinking about them. Talking until the wee hours of the morning as the the conversation just flows effortlessly. Unfortunately though, these good times in relationships rarely last very long. There are several reasons why this happens and there’s an infinite amount of “relationship experts” that will tell you that they have all the answers if you just sign up for a “consultation” (for a fee of course).
The reality is, the reason we repeatedly have failed relationships is because we don’t fix ourselves first. It’s easy to blame others but very difficult to be introspective about our own faults. It takes a special kind of person with strong character to recognize their own faults and an even stronger person to take the steps needed to fix them even though it may hurt. In this article we are going to break down what constitutes good relationships as well as visit some common struggles we have in poor relationships and how to fix them.
Mutual respect
Self-love and mutual respect can be a difficult but necessary first step in the beginning of any relationship. Essentially, we really need to ask ourselves what we’re looking to get out of a relationship. Are you looking to settle down with someone in hopes of something long-term or eventual marriage? Or are you just looking for companionship? This is not only the right thing to do for the other person, but even more importantly for yourself.
A common way we use other people in relationships is that we can use them for validation. Often times, we can use others as a crutch if we are feeling sad or depressed. Subsequently, this happens in both romantic and plutonic relationships. All too often people use others for validation because its an easy and quick fix to emotional damage that should be healed in more productive and positive ways such as meditation, therapy, exercise, getting out in nature or several other ways and techniques to build your your life up and not tear another’s down.
Self Love
You may be asking yourself, “Why does a fitness and nutrition blog have this article on romantic relationships?” Well let me tell you. This site was created to help all people live their best lives by cultivating positive growth in mind, body, and spirit. Some of the most damaging aspects of our lives in all three of those areas have been rooted in failed romantic relationships. If you’ve ever broken up with someone you genuinely loved (or at least thought you did) and it feels like someone ripped out your heart, lit it on fire, and stomped on it while laughing, then you know what I’m talking about.
Often times, a bad breakup can send us spiraling in despair that does incredible damage to our emotional and mental state. Eventually this damage literally affects us physically as the destruction continues to obliterate our sanity as well as our personal and public relationships. It may seem dramatic, and some people can handle it better than others, but the reality of the matter is, failed relationships are probably one of the biggest reasons people fail in life. That’s why it’s so important to recognize these issues in ourselves and develop the proper mindset and techniques to battle these circumstances as they will inevitably happen to you many times throughout your life. Even if we’re married or in a long term relationships, it’s important to develop the skills needed to make sure we can handle arguments and fights in positive ways before they escalate and make things a whole lot worse.
Exercise to clear your mind
One of the best ways I’ve found to help clear my mind is to go workout. The rush of endorphins and dopamine is an excellent natural way to calm your mind while taking out your aggression on the weights, going for an intense cycling ride, or banging out a long run. The natural chemicals and hormones released in your brain will have a calming effect on your whole body. This may not help the root cause of your problems but it’s an excellent way to remove yourself from a situation without escalating things further.
Not only is exercising a great way to remove yourself in a crisis situation, beginning and maintaining an exercise routine will greatly increase your overall mental health. According to the NIH, “Exercise improves mental health by reducing anxiety, depression, and negative mood and by improving self-esteem and cognitive function. Exercise has also been found to alleviate symptoms such as low self-esteem and social withdrawal.”
Most often, you and your partner are not thinking clearly and are saying and doing horrible things to each other that you truly don’t mean and would never say to someone you love. You are both trying to hurt each other because you are in fight-or-flight mode. This triggers an actual physical response in your body by activating your sympathetic nervous system and triggering adrenaline to either “fight” or “flee”. This is a stress response that causes massive inflammation in your body and causes a great deal of stress on your heart as well as your other organs. Continued triggering of this reflex can cause permanent damage, heart attack, or stroke so its best to get a handle on this and either fix your relationship or break it off completely. That being said, exercise can help you deal with these situations and help you keep a cool head.
Meditation
It may seem obvious, but meditation is an excellent way to clear your mind in heated arguments. Not only that, its a positive tool to help you have a solid mental health foundation. The whole point of meditation is to clear your mind. It’s not meant to obsess over all the stressful things going on in our lives. Breathing techniques can also be used to stimulate actual chemical responses in our brains to help naturally calm ourselves down.
As a matter of fact, meditation can not only help you in your romantic relationships, but can also help you in your public relationships. More and more high-powered successful companies in the world are using meditation techniques to help combat high-stress environments in the corporate world. They recognized that the stress was burning out some of their top talent and in order to hold onto these valuable employees they’ve implemented mandatory self-love meditation times. Agree with it or not, these companies saw value in keeping their top employees minds calm, cool, and collected. You’d do well to use these techniques in your personal life as well as your relationships.
Therapy to heal broken relationships
Sometimes, to help heal a broken relationship, you need to get some professional help. While I will not advocate for all relationship therapists because they are human as well, but sometimes you just have to have a third party advise you in helping fix a broken relationship. Therapists can be biased as well and can sometimes actually harm a relationship, so if you go the therapy route and start involving another person, make sure you do your homework on who this person actually is. Maybe check out their social media or ask for references. Use your discretion and trust your gut.
6 ways to create good and lasting relationships
Now that we’ve looked at some of the pitfalls of relationships and how to fix them, let’s look at how to cultivate good and lasting relationships.
1. Focus on your purpose
This ties into a bit of what I was talking about in the beginning about validation. You cannot allow yourself to be validated by another person. Having purpose in your own life is paramount with or without the approval of your significant other. You should be autonomous and have differing but complementing interests than your partner. For example, if you’re not really into working out, but your crush is, don’t fake it till you make it by lying about your interest in fitness. Don’t pretend to like something because your partner really likes it but secretly you hate it cause you’re gonna have a bad time.
Whether it’s building a business, maintaining a household, raising children, charity work, community involvement, etc., you should never dictate what someone can and cannot do. You should also never allow someone to do the same to you. For the most part, a person should be happy in their own life before they couple with someone else or the odds of having a successful relationship drop dramatically. I’m not saying that you have to have all your sh*t together and be successful in your career and relationships, but you should be confident in who you are and where you’re headed in life.
2. Be confident in who you are and what you want
You should have a healthy self-knowledge of who you are and what you want in life. So often, damaged people meet damaged people and then glob onto each other creating damaged children and a severely toxic and damaged relationships with everyone they come in contact with. This is very prevalent in our modern world and I’m sure you’ve seen it yourself many times over. Toxic people are going to be toxic so its best to be confident in who you are to root out these people from your life and steer clear from an epic train-wreck.
3. When choosing a partner, focus on character
Looks fade and money is fleeting, but having good character is like building your life on solid foundation. So often people get into relationships for their good looks, lots of money, nice career, “security”, etc. Many times they get smacked in the face with more red flags than a Chinese parade, but since they have money or good looks, they overlook the features that would be a huge detriment to their relationship in the future.
I’m not gonna lie, there are a lot of relationship predators out there that will use you and abuse you only to dump you or divorce you and take half your stuff. The honeymoon phase will seem like the best time on earth, but little do you know you have hell to pay in the near future. Make sure you know who the person really is before you get emotionally, physically, and spiritually entangled in a hot mess.
4. Watch out for “love-bombing”
“Love bombing” is when another person showers you with attention and affection typically in the beginning of relationships. Sometimes this is intentional and other times it’s not intentional, but the end result is still the same. Love bombing obfuscates someone’s true character and how they actually treat other people. It’s not reality and creates false pretenses on how the relationship will actually work out in the long term. Typically people do this deceptively to get close to a partner with money or for other reasons, but sometimes people just get caught up in the honeymoon phase of the relationship and they “love bomb” inadvertently. After all, love is addicting, but its important to set up boundaries.
5. Create boundaries
Learning how to create boundaries is important in our personal as well as our professional lives. You cannot allow others to take advantage of your kindness and willingness to be agreeable. Many times people just want everyone to be copacetic and have low-stress in their lives so they bend to other people’s demands. This can happen in relationships, the workplace, friends, even random people you interact with on the street for that matter. Everyone thinks that they’re the star of their own show and many times they’re not wrong! We all suffer with this from time to time and consequently, we forget to be considerate of other people.
When their conscience kicks in, most people can see the error of this way of behaving and correct it in the future. Sometimes though people are sociopaths and think that the world was created to serve them with no negative thought or feeling about it. I try to stay away from these type of people regardless of social status or power because I try to build my life up to help and give to others. This type of person will take and take and take without an ounce of remorse until you have nothing left to give. So it’s best to stay away from them unless you have to. That’s why it’s important to create boundaries.
6. Give without asking anything in return
While I know it seems contrary to what I just wrote about keeping boundaries, in any relationship it’s important to give without asking anything in return. Now doesn’t just mean with things we buy but with our time, resources, kindness, positivity, knowledge, happiness, etc. However, it’s important to note that even if you give all these things out of the kindness of your heart, you really cannot expect anything in return or you will get resentful.
For instance, say you’ve been giving all sorts of gifts to someone or giving someone all your time and they do not reciprocate, you have to adjust what you’re doing or reevaluate your relationship. Some people just aren’t like that and you would be better to find a partner who reciprocated accordingly. You can’t bribe someone to love you just because you give them gifts. Love should be symbiotic where both individuals feel loved and respected according to their own wants and needs. That’s why is critical to really know yourself and what you want before getting into a relationship.
In Conclusion
Now that we’ve explored some things that constitute good and bad relationships as well as tips and techniques to help yourself navigate this modern dating world. The advent of social media has exacerbated many of these issues so it’s more important now than ever to really get on top of your game. My advice is to stay away from social media as much as possible especially interacting with your significant other. I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve heard that massive fights, families ripped apart, and even divorces were caused by people’s foolish actions on social media. Sometimes it’s not even the actions themselves, but the perception of the actions. Regardless, my advice is to stay away from social media as much as you can if you want happy and healthy relationships in your life.
So I hope this guide helps you create the tools you need to live your best possible life. Remember that we are the creators of our own life and no one else can give us happiness. After all, whether it be stress and drama, or happiness and positivity, we were created to create. What we surround ourselves with will be our reality. Stay tuned for more articles like this and feel free to comment below or reach out directly to share your story. Peace.
