There is no such thing as a magical place where everyone constantly gets along. Where clarity comes just in time to stop people from saying and doing n**sty things. Where couples are protected from each other and from the whole world. Where no one gets hurt, where no one feels pain.
But all is well, you don’t need a fairytale ending, let alone a fairytale life.
You just need a partner who can understand that the road is going to be tough and who will be ready to take the plunge no matter what. Someone who will step into the darkest darkness of life right next to you and who will admit that he was stupid then.
There will be relationship pain no matter how much you love yourself, no matter how much money you have, or how successful you have been professionally. There will be some hectic times no matter how many times you laugh together or how many sacrifices you make for each other. There will be tough times when you least expect it, and tough situations that you can actually see happening over you from miles away, having a snowballing effect on their all too predictable path to bombardment.
Love is not always fun. It doesn’t matter how compatible you are, how often you make each other smile, or how much the other impresses you.
The world is a place where things can go wrong, even if you are a good person.
These blunt truths will impact your relationship.
There will be days when you wake up feeling miserable for no particular reason, and the kind, compassionate, self-motivated individual who usually looks at you in the mirror will be replaced by a cranky, bitter, intolerant shadow unable to be a loving partner. On other occasions, the world will catapult an unwanted crisis in your direction and the challenge of dealing with it will overwhelm you to the point that you won’t be able to do anything more and your relationship will suffer.
Sometimes you will experience setbacks with your significant other.
You will not understand yourself and you will drive yourself mad and reduce yourself to behavior that will loathe you later. You will treat yourself like less than nothing, and it will take hours or even days or months before you can get deep into yourself and admit that you acted like a jerk and apologize.
It turns out that the pain you cause yourself is rooted in beauty on some level. The more you love someone, the more vulnerable you are to them. The more you love someone, the more you empower them to make you unhappy. The more importance you value in this truly special relationship, the more likely you are to suffer when it seems to fall apart.
This person will break your heart in small but meaningful ways over and over again.
But at the corner of every sorrow is a renewed strength, as long as you commit to learning from every misstep. If you take the time to assess what went wrong, understand why this argument was in fact inevitable, and that you are doing the work to get it right. If you believe that every mishap is an opportunity to move forward with even more knowledge, about yourself, your partner, and life in general, you will become stronger, wiser, and more powerful as a couple.
So expect relationship issues. The more prepared you are for the reality that you are going to run into problems, the more prepared you will be to fight for the survival of your relationship. Make no mistake: you will have to fight.
