As we age, our relationships, and our expectations for them, change. Especially when it comes to romantic relationships. When we’re young, he or she has pretty eyes, I love their smile, or they’re nice to me, might be enough. As we grow older and our life becomes more complicated, most people need more from their partner. Whether they realize this initially or not. Sex is obviously one of the variables that changes, but there are other considerations:
Do we have similar goals, interests, and ambitions as our partner? Do I fit into their life, and do they fit into mine? How do our friends and family get along?
Are we able to connect and communicated? How do we each handle and work through stress? How do we work together through challenges both inside and outside of our relationship? How does trauma and our past affect each of us? How do we support each other? Does our partner help us to feel loved, accepted, supported, understood, and desired? Or do they make these things more difficult for us?
How do we each approach our finances? Where do we each want to live? And in what type of lifestyle? How do we plan for the future? Or do we? How are our values similar and different?
What are our other commitments? How do we carve out time to nurture our relationship, ourselves, and our goals? What’s most important to each of us? How do we each fit into that? How do we not?What do we value individually and together?
What does family look like for each of us? Do we want kids? How many? What does raising kids look like? Do we have kids from previous relationships? How do kids, and previous relationships, affect our relationship?
Am I attracted to to this person? How is our sexual chemistry? How is our emotional chemistry? How is our communication? What do we talk about? And what do we avoid? What do we do together? What do we have in common? How are we different? And how much does that matter?
What does it mean to be in a relationship? What are our standards and expectations for ourself and for each other? Do we talk about these things? How do we discuss them? What are our commitments to the relationship? Ourselves? And to our partner?
We could keep going, but you’re probably getting the point.
Dating is the process of sorting all this out. We’re sorting through people, and we’re sorting through questions like those above. It’s a lot of trial and error and learning. During this process, we learn a lot about our partner as friction arises, and as we attempt to work through that friction.
If we don’t, the relationship will generally die. Or at the very least, one person will be miserable from suppressing themself, which likely means they aren’t getting their needs met. Most people will become resentful from this, and they’ll eventually make the other person’s life miserable because they’re unhappy. This too will likely to cause the relationship to slowly die.
While dating, we also learn a lot about ourself, as we gain more clarity around who we are, what we need, and how to communicate that. This is assuming that we’re listening to ourself during this journey.
All of these experiences change us. At #AskLoveQuestions, believe they’re worth thinking about, which leads us to today’s love question:
dating #relationships #love #boyfriend #girlfriend #marriage #coupling #love
If you feel comfortable, please share your answer, and then write something encouraging and thoughtful in response to someone else’s post. Also, please consider sharing, or asking the question to one of your fellow living creatures, so the conversations can continue.
#dating #relationships #boyfriend #girlfriend #marriage #coupling #love
If you feel comfortable, please share your answer, and then write something encouraging and thoughtful in response to someone else’s post. Also, please consider sharing, or asking the question to one of your fellow living creatures, so the conversations can continue.