One day I was thinking to myself about all the relationships that
went wrong in my past, and how I've decided to give up trying to do things the
“right way". You see, the "right way" is the reason why I had found myself
struggling my entire relationship life. I found the need to do things the way
everyone else would do them, and not the way that worked for me. And I
thought that maybe I was the only person in the world that felt this way, but I
quickly found out whether it was the case or not...that it was silly. Allow me a brief moment of emotional depth to explain my point. Most of us live our lives in the reflection of everything around us.
We’re products of our environment, and that leaves us in a disposition
when it comes to our personal lives. We fail to realize that our
personal lives do not do anything for those around us, but yet we
consider it to be a decisive factor. That’s why one day I decided that I
had enough, and I was going to do things my way.
I thought me living for everybody else had run its course. I knew
that in the end I would only have myself to blame for why things didn’t
work out, or why they did in fact work out. I mentioned to a friend the other day that I would have no time for a
woman’s insecurity in dating when it came to me. I didn’t want to do
things in my life to live for what her friends may say to her, or to
coddle her own insecurities. She would have to find a way to be in the
relationship between the two of us and not with everyone else who may be
viewing the relationship and chiming in. I’ve felt pretty much from the
time I divorced four years ago that having everyone in your relationship
was the most determining factor for failure in my relationship. And it comes out of me in the things I say about relationships now
too. I tell people, what works for them is probably what’s best for
them. While I may not have a relationship history that looks
unconventional and I may be very traditional in my approach, it’s what
works for me. I live by the thought that in the end if you are happy,
that’s all that matters. Love isn’t a journey that’s examined for how
you got there, all that matters is that in the end you’re happy. No one
revisits elementary school and asks you to show your work when you reach that happy place.
Plenty of my friends and family have reached that happy place and
they haven’t once stopped to wonder if it made sense to everyone else.
They stopped only to think if it made sense to them, because at the end of the day, that’s the only
people who matter. As a people we have all these thoughts on whether
someone should have done it the way they did it. We tell ourselves what
we are willing to put up with and what we would have never gone through
to be happy in the end. However, that only stops with the fact that
it’s what WE would have done, not what THEY should have done. Left with all this going on in my mind, I gave it up, and I also decided that I couldn’t be
with anyone who thought that they couldn’t give it up either. I needed
freedom to be myself and live my life. I needed to be able to look back
on what I did and realize that I did it for myself because most of those other
people wouldn’t be there to congratulate me on a job well done in MY
relationship. Lastly, when I gave it up, I felt a great sense of pressure
had been relieved from my life. I was okay with the approach, and I was okay with any
outcomes that may come out of it. I guess what I’m trying to say is I made a personal decision to make
my own happiness a personal decision. I stopped needing affirmation from
external sources and I stopped asking myself, “How do you think that
makes me look?” If there’s anything I can encourage you all to do, if it works for you, is to
follow the same path. I’m sure you’ll find
yourself in a happy place too. That may be single, in a relationship,
married, divorced, not looking or otherwise. However, it will be a decision that YOU
made. Those decisions are the best decisions to live with...
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