I will admit it- we have a problem. All of us. Us girls.
We tend to hang on to that dying (already dead?) relationship with the last shred of strength in our bodies, even if ‘tis slowly killing us. From s*cky relationships to marriages in shambles, ask the woman why they’d rather stick around and struggle and they’d pretend they don’t even see that their equation is more out-of-whack than Miley Cyrus’ wardrobe!
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I’d make my peace with the high road in ‘choosing love, no matter what’ if only there was a sliver of hope for things to work out. But the problem is that hope has withered and died with the rest of the relationship, a long time ago. And yet, we cling to it with all the force of our souls, getting behind the wheel and driving on, with no destination in sight!
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Is this what relationships should look like?
A ruin of everything that can never be restored?
Isn’t settling in relationships the absolute way to ensure you kill what you might ‘potentially’ have?
Image source: dollarphotoclub
Okay- I will go first. I have been there, done that. I have stuck by relationships far longer than was healthy and justified my choice on the grounds of a comforting familiarity. Some part of me knew I was in a dead-end relationship, one that’d go nowhere, and yet, I found myself settling in relationships because I wanted to prove that LOVE works out. Maybe not right away. But eventually. I was too blind to see that the love that I was pinning my hopes on had fled a long time ago.
Sometimes, I even revisited my childhood to see if I was making a habit of settling in relationships because I never had seen a real one around. My dad wasn’t the kind of husband who’d bring my mom flowers thirty years into the marriage or my mom the woman who’d lick the mayonnaise off his lips! There was no fairytale to believe in, no magical stroke of the universe to bring lovers together and certainly, no ground to assume that anything LOVE wasn’t going to be hard work!
So, when I found myself in relationships that fizzled and faded in time, I simply convinced myself about this being the juncture where the ‘work’ begins. I never probed deeper to find out if there was more to ‘falling out’ of love than the plain absence of effort.
And there was.
Something more than our feelings changing.
Settling.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
I was settling for people who made me tick, not people who fed my soul. People who made butterflies rove in the hollow of my tummy after the first date, but not those that could make’em stay. People who kissed me like I was air for the first few times, not those who couldn’t do without for all their lives.
I didn’t realize that settling in relationships almost became a pattern for me, because as a love-crazed being I was ready to do anything to make that feeling stay. The sad part, though, was it never did. The feeling died its natural death and I kept convincing myself otherwise.
And that’s where it went wrong.
We were taught lessons on self-worth, since childhood but clearly, the lesson didn’t stick for me. Not until I told myself that I deserved to be with someone who made me a better person than I could ever be by myself but also someone who loved my imperfections like I was the most perfectly crafted being ever. Someone who knew that love took more than just love. Someone who believed in sustaining the ‘magic’ of beginnings through middles until the very end.
Someone who knew that love alone wasn’t enough.
Someone who knew that ‘good’ isn’t great. Someone who’d never make me wonder if I am asking for ‘too much…’
Because here’s the plain truth- I deserve no less. I deserved nothing less of what I believe I do.
None of us deserve any less than that.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
So, to all the girls who are settling in relationships that aren’t quite what they want, hold out for the ‘perfect’ relationship. No matter what they say about these unicorn-like bonds, they exist.
There, I said it.
I know they do, because I held out for it after a long string of settling in relationships. And I couldn’t have been happier that I did.
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Remember that we settle for a lot of things in life. The jobs that don’t really satisfy us, the price of a new gadget because we are too lazy to look up a better deal, or even a mediocre-college score because we are too damn lazy to take the test again. Love, out of all things, is far too precious to be mediocre.
Don’t settle in love.
You will sift through your mistakes, learn from them, look deeper for answers and you will keep moving on ahead until you bump into someone who is exactly the person I described above.
Until then, be patient. And do NOT settle.
Featured image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
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