The One Sentence Everyone Thinking About a Relationship Needs to Hear
Four words that will change your life
Recently, a Twitter personality I follow made the big announcement: they were getting married. Yes! It was time for that life-changing moment when he took the plunge and vowed to say those magic words, “Til’ death do us part.”
Congratulations to him, he seems very excited to be embarking on the hopefully lifelong commitment of marriage, a commitment that comes with great risk and great reward, and a lifetime of bliss for those who are willing to work through the challenging times that are just about guaranteed to come along.
Most relationships regardless of marital status are the exact same way, they start off with high hopes and all-too-often come crashing down at the least convenient time in our lives. Years of trust-building can be destroyed in an instant of bad decision making.
But what if we could do something about it? What if we could improve our chances of success? There are no magic bullets in life but I know for a fact there is one sentence that I repeat to myself every single day that helps spin the odds in my favor.
Let’s be real, here, considering that 46.3% of all marriages end in divorce, you’d be forgiven for being skeptical, or even cynical, as you balked at the fifty-fifty odds given to most couples these days. Over the past century, a lot of people have opted out of marriage altogether, skipping the formality and saying no to the lifelong gamble, deciding to just cohabitate instead, thereby giving themselves an emergency exit in case they need it — one that doesn’t come with family courts and dividing assets. Those headaches aren’t worth the divorce papers the fresh-smelling ink is printed on.
While most people do indeed make their marriages last a lifetime, almost half of them don’t. That’s a lot of failures. And it’s not just marriages that fail, casual relationships fail much more readily than full-blown marriages do.
If it was any other facet of life, we’d likely give up, but we humans can’t live without love — we crave it in its various forms from familial love to fraternal and sororal love, and especially romantic love, we need love in our lives to reach the peak of our possible happiness.
If all goes right when we pledge our love to someone else, we transform ourselves into the next phase of our lives and grow into someone beyond who we are today, as marriage challenges us to become someone better for our partners. Loving another person can help us to love ourselves much more fully because it gives us a sense of achievement and accomplishment.
If all goes wrong, we open up an unexpected and nightmarish chapter of misery that will eventually resemble hell on earth. Fights are had, property is destroyed, restraining orders are issued, and wouldn’t you know it, everyone has a bad time. There’s not a lot in this world that’ll ruin your life like a toxic relationship.
As far as Mr. Newly-Engaged on Twitter goes, I’m confident he will take the former path of joy and I’ll be here to support him if he accidentally stumbled upon the latter path of misery and ends up pulling his hair out while clutching a bottle of whiskey alone, crying in the corner of a seedy hotel room somewhere.
That’s what good people do, they console others through their failures rather than lecturing them, which is precisely what this article is about…it’s what good friends do, good family members, good lovers, and hell, even good pets.
The question arose in my mind, what is it that separates the former group of successful lovers from the latter group of discouraging failures? What makes the winners and what breaks the losers? What is it that makes some relationships go tolerably smoothly and others crash and burn faster than a fighter pilot who’s just taken on heavy enemy fire and lost both engines?