I truly suck at relationships. What’s ironic about that is my parents have been together for 38 years and they still truly enjoy each other. You would think that I’d be a pro at it because of the true love I’ve witnessed but I am not. I wasn’t even born or I was too young to remember the old days when they were figuring out their early relationships and I’m sure they went through fire and came through the other side many times. As an adult, all I see are the fruits of their labor.

I always found solace being unattached, single, or relationship adjacent (I describe this as a pseudo relationship with some of the activities but zero commitment). Relationships always seemed daunting, cumbersome and something my early 80’s born and later associates have notoriously struggled with. With the information age has come technologies that have all but erased intimacy in personal relationships. We can text a few words to set up a date, dodge someone we aren’t interested in by ghosting them and we can fumble at getting to know people via a text exchange all while being lazy and using shorthand.

We have become conditioned to live on a superficial frequency. Everything we want from images to food (Ubereats anyone?) has become instantaneous and real relationships are anything but quick! The building of a relationship is a journey much like our individual life paths. So many of us have become accustomed to seeing the perfectly filtered lives of individuals and couples whose lives we admire forgetting a picture only shows a fraction of the story.

What I’m learning is when you’re in a relationship with someone you are really in a relationship with yourself.

Lots of the relationships I was in ended up crashing and burning because I expected them too. If we spent more time modifying ourselves there would be more successful relationships. It really does take a person connected with themselves to ‘unsuck’ at relationships. And this concept, along with anything you are good at in life or working on in life is and will always be a personal growth process. This process of engaging with oneself and healthily reflecting on how one can grow and modify will ultimately help every type of interpersonal connections we want to have and sustain. I care about improving and strengthening areas I’m not satisfied with. One of those areas is I’m not happy with the majority of my relationships. This has been a trigger area for me since I was little girl. Part of “unsucking” is getting to the root cause of the sore spot and working towards addressing unhealthy patterns to hopefully have more pleasant outcomes. More to come on the ah ha moments I hope to gain during my self exploration.