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Having piqued your curiosity with the title of this article, you might be thinking about one thing and one thing only being that thing that is lacking in more than less of the marriages and relationships of today. No. It’s not sex—even though sex is important, there is one element that is so vital, yet missing. It is that fighter spirit. People do NOT fight for relationships anymore the way they used to in times gone by and in the same way our grandparents and great grandparents did. We need to ask ourselves WHY this is the current state of affairs.
There are a number of reasons why people fight less for their relationships, and to be clear, when we talk about fight, we mean do every possible thing within their being to make their relationship or marriage work. This fighter spirit element if missing in relationships where there is abuse—sexual, physical, emotional or psychological, or where there general safety and well-being of the parties or the children involved are threatened is justified, due to all the prevailing circumstances. But where minor issues come to bring challenges to your relationships, you need to have that will to make it work by putting your best foot forward. It may require some compromise, some changes here and there, for all parties involved. It may require time and resources, but it can be worked out as long as both parties have a mutual desire to fix things.
The fact of a ‘mutual desire’ is essential since a relationship or marriage cannot be upheld when one party has given up on it.
Some of the factors which have generally caused and resulted in people walking out on their marriages or relationship in the blink of an eye include, lack of counseling about what to expect in these relationships; too much power or independence on the part of one person, or both, but these days particularly among women who think, because they are making the dollars, they do not need a man or do not need to fight to keep him; external influence from parents, relatives, colleagues and friends; the belief that you can find a next man or woman at the click of your finger; or general misguided beliefs that the grass is greener on the other side. It never occurs to some of us that the grass appears greener on the other side because we are looking at it from a distance, or because maybe, just maybe, the elements of the atmosphere cause a reflection that makes the grass seems greener. I guess what is being conveyed here is that we should not allow ourselves to be tricked into thinking that what we do not know about or what we do not have is something better. Such a belief is drenched in ignorance.
If we take the time to suss out our marriage or relationship, and try to figure out why they are not working, and what we can do to better ourselves and these relationships, we would have less time to day dream about what the grass looks like on the other side.
We need to sit and talk some more with our fore parents and find out what are the ingredients which kept their marriages going for donkey years; you gotta have that ‘thing’ that preserves your relationship; that ‘thing’ that doesn’t just come overnight. The more you build together, the stronger and closely knitted is your relationship. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours keeps us from seeing the “WE” and the “US” in our relationships. It prevents the type of bonding necessary to glue the relationship together. You gotta have that fighter spirit, that burning desire to hold on to what you have no matter what you see before your eyes (save the exceptions stated above and similar factors). You gotta tell yourself that the woman or man you’re with is the only woman or man in the world. That way you will not let your mind play games with you by telling you, you can have another man or woman in the blink of an eye. While that may be true, you know about what you have; you don’t know about what you don’t have.
Remember the 80/20 rule. A lot of us get tricked into thinking that the 80/20 rule means we are walking away from 20% for 80%. Don’t get it twisted. This is probably one of the reasons why there is such a high failure rate in second marriages. Not only do we get tricked by the 80/20 rule, we may also decide that we are only going to give 20% of ourselves because, “Hey, I was hurt before in my last marriage.” “My last relationship didn’t work out even though I poured my life into it.” You see, we leave one relationship or marriage and enter the other with so much baggage that we stifle its success way before the relationship cements its foundation. Then we act like wimps. We don’t want to have issues, or deal with them; Our motto becomes “I’m walking away.” Or “I don’t’ need to fight for this.” We become wishy washy, spineless wimps!
For us to begin seeing a revolution in relationships and marriages again where there is once again longevity in them, it will take a conscious effort on the part of all parties involved to purpose in their minds that they are ‘in this’ for the long haul. It will take us growing some backbone and not running away at the first sign of problems. Talk to the older folks, if you have to. They seem to have the blueprint on how to make relationships and marriages last. The problem is we do not like to read, so we don’t read the blueprint, or we think ‘old people’ don’t know anything about relationships, or we think we know so much we do not need to be counseled by them. Well the ‘old people’ have proven the younger generation wrong. So the ‘old people’ must have been doing something right. Society as a whole suffers due to lack of wisdom and a general reluctance to seek wisdom from those who have gained it through experience. Maybe the younger folks want to have their own experiences to prove themselves wrong and the wiser old folks ‘right’.
Check yourself. If you’re planning on walking out on a relationship right now, think it through. Make a list of all the good and all the bad. If the bad outweighs the good, and if those ‘bads’ cannot be fixed at all, and you have tried your utmost, then you may have legitimate reasons for quitting. But if you have a good man or woman in your life, and you know deep down inside of you that you do, what is your reason for leaving?
- Make a list of things you guys can do to spice up your relationship;
- See a counselor if you can afford it.
- Make a commitment to revisit the memories of your courtship days and try to recapture the love, the laughter, the essence of what brought you together in the first place.
No one promised that relationships and marriages will be peaches and cream all year round. But we’re promised resolution if we have that mutual desire to make them work.
Fight for your relationship. Be not misled by the erroneous assumption that the grass is greener on the other side. It’s not always necessarily so.
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