These blogs are part of the Relationship Thread. Every so often, I'll post a new blog topic for the thread regulars to respond to, and of course submit something myself. This first topic is a confessional. Sometimes we don't follow our own advice and it's important to identify things that we need to work on in a relationship. Enjoy!
As I've grown up, my personality has changed and consequently so has my approach to relationships. Typically, your first serious relationship will see many if not all of the big 'don'ts' - jealousy, insecurity, co-dependency, poor communication, immaturity, lack of self-control - and these all are caused by two factors: inexperience, and low self-confidence. The more experienced and confident we are, the more successful our interpersonal relationships will be.
My first real relationship lasted for just under three years, from when I was 18 until I was 21. For the first half of the relationship, I was doing the first three 'don'ts' on my list above. I was jealous of my boyfriend's female friends, thinking that they were all far more beautiful and interesting than I was; insecure about myself and about the future of the relationship, constantly needing reassurance from my boyfriend that he wasn't going anywhere; and co-dependent, not being able to imagine life without him. This obviously drove him up the wall, and probably further away from me.
I can't pinpoint exactly where things changed, but I think it must have been around the half-way point. My (now best) friend and I had gotten much closer, and we were going out partying together maybe three or four times a week. It sounds simplistic and shallow, but we both began to get more attention from guys, and as a result our confidence grew hugely - so much so that there came a point where we just didn't need reassurance that we were awesome. We led increasingly separate social lives from our boyfriends, and came to stop relying on them for any kind of support - we had each other, and we were independent.
So it was around this time that I swung over to the other side of the spectrum, and started experiencing the last three things on my list - I stopped communicating well with my boyfriend, and shut him out of much of my life; I would go out and do childish things and then act like he was a parent telling me off when he commented on them; and yes, I had a massive lack of self-control. Strangely, the more I pulled away from him, the more he chased after me telling me how much he loved me. The tables were turning, and soon I found myself thinking that I'd be happier without him. We were living together when I broke up with him. It was the hardest and most horrible thing I've ever had to do, and I didn't do it very well either.
After that, the common factor that I found was inhibiting my relationships was my crappy attention span - after a few months, I'd get bored and lose interest in the guy. My standards leapt up, and I started seeking out men who were more on my level in terms of intelligence, hoping that they'd know not to break the rules in relationships. It frustrated me when a guy would tell me his feelings for me, and as soon as he did my attraction toward him would fade.
This brings me up to the present day. I'm in a great relationship now, and have been since around February this year. He does know the rules, for the most part, and things would probably be pretty perfect if he hadn't been going through a massive emotional trauma for the last six months. Being orphaned at 24 will do that to you. So, yeah, we're coping with that, and we do try to be optimistic about our future together because we're ideally matched all things considered. Perhaps you'll get a whole blog about that out of me yet.
Anyway I'm finding it hard to lay a finger on where I sometimes go wrong, because it's much easier to do that when you're looking back at the past; but I do think that my aforementioned overconfidence has led to complacency and selfishness, which is difficult to rein in sometimes. I definitely don't get jealous anymore, or any of that, but I do sometimes find myself thinking of things in a parent-and-child way where he's stopping me from doing whatever I like. Overall though, my bad habits are not at all what they were a few years ago. My experience of relationships has helped me a great deal in identifying the signs and symptoms of a bad approach to things, but it's also made me examine myself more closely, and I don't always like what I find.
I think that ultimately it comes down to the fact that I don't have confidence in my ability to maintain a successful relationship. Since my previous ones have failed, and failed quite epicly, I've kind of created this cynical core in myself that says 'You'll never get anything right" and "Who cares anyway? You're fine on your own!" It's always been me doing the breaking up in the past, and I don't think I'd ever let it get to the stage where I literally could not live without the other person - however I still hold this distorted view that if you don't have that can't-live-without-you feeling, the relationship is eventually going to end.
If I work on reducing that core part of me, then I'll be able to properly commit to someone. I refuse to classify myself as someone who 'just doesn't do' serious relationships any longer. I also need to stop overanalysing my emotions, or lack thereof. I need to recognise that I'm not going to feel head-over-heels for someone 24/7, and that it doesn't mean I have some weird defect that renders me incapable of feeling long-term love. I'm not an overly emotional person, and prefer to approach things with logic and reason. Lucky for me, my partner provides the perfect foil - he's very cool-headed and rational, but he's also more romantic and feels things more deeply than I do. It's nice to finally have met someone that I actually aspire to be like.
Your comments are very welcome. From next week, you'll be able to find links to more of these blogs from more users, on the front page of the Relationship Thread in the Topic of the Month section.
Good blog, I like that at the core of it and this topic I guess is a drive for self-improvement through increased self-awareness, something that seems lost on a lot of people
Yeah. I'm not the most modest of people normally; I don't tend to do self-esteem by halves. Either I think I'm fantastic and right about everything, or I think I'm fatally flawed. Instead of oscillating wildly between the two, I try to channel this ambivalence towards improving my approaches to things. Whether my self-worth is high or low at the time, I'm always motivated to better myself.
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