Is this you….?
You are in a relationship. At the beginning, it was all effortless, easy. You loved spending time with them. You concluded they must be long term potential because it was so easy, you just seem to ‘fit’. Fast forward a year, 2 years, 5 years or more, and suddenly all these thoughts are reversed. Why don’t we get on like we used to. Why are we always arguing. Why does it seem so hard? Surely it should be effortless. Maybe I am with the wrong person….. can you relate?
If you can relate, there are 2 things I want to tell you. The first is you are not alone!! This is a very common pattern for many people to play out, and leaves so many people wondering whether they are in the right relationship, and maybe even starting to make moves to find someone else, someone they can once again have that effortless relationship with.
The second thing is the bit you are less likely to want to hear, but perhaps if you do hear it, and more importantly, if you actually hear it, then we need not have so many relationships having time called on them prematurely. That thing is that relationships are NOT effortless, and they are hard work at times.
If you don’t go to the gym and don’t take care of your diet, what happens, you lose your health.
If you don’t keep practising a skill you have (maybe a musical instrument for example), what happens, you lose that skill.
If you don’t water and look after plants, what happens, the plant dies.
So why is it you think you can get away with not taking care of your relationship, and not putting in the effort but still expect it to be ok and not die? Interesting one.
I suspect there are two things are play here.
The first is that you wrongly assumed that because it was effortless in the beginning, it would always be that way. Sorry! Well, I am not sorry, but the actual truth is, that if you both put in the same effort and treated each other as you did in the early days, then it would still be very similar and feel a lot more effortless than it does. BUT… you both most likely stopped doing what you were doing. You probably both let life get in the way, got a little complacent and dare I suggest a little lazy. Oops.
The second is that no one has actually shown you or taught you how to do relationships well. Not consciously. So in the early days you just did everything you could to impress. You were not aware of it, but without really meaning to, you were meeting each others needs, and things worked well. And then you stopped.
Imagine picking up a guitar, and trying to learn how to do it. No teacher, no instructional videos. You just pick it up and think it will be easy. You tell a mate, who has a guitar but can’t play it either but they are happy to give you advice about what you should do, you try it and it doesn’t work! You’d get fed up and bin it. And yet this is how we approach relationships!
So, what is needed appears to be a realisation that hard work is required, a conscious effort and commitment to do what needs to be done in the relationship, and, some kind of understanding of the key skills that are needed to make a relationship work, which are not common practise or even common knowledge in the word. If we have both of those, we have great relationships.
I can’t give you the desire to put in the effort, but I can give you the tools and the understanding. So if you are willing to put the effort in, then maybe we can work together and you can go back to that great relationship like you had in the beginning.
If you’d like to learn more, use this link to arrange a no obligation, free initial call. You might be pleasantly surprised to learn how quick and effective some of these tools are to turning around a relationship, and not just turning it around, but making it better than it ever was…
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