The convoluted workings of volatile relationships

BY DOMINIQUE JAMES

 

Relationships have an amusing way of taking care of itself. It works the way it wants to work, and it is almost independent of what you are trying to do and how you want it to be, hard as you might try to steer it.  In other words, the dynamics that run through a relationship with another person, whether a member of your own family or a stranger with whom you’ve decided you want to build a relationship with, is at best, dynamic. You can try to look into the future and predict the outcome of a relationship, and you can direct it with all of your might, but in the end, it just never happens the way you want it to happen.

 

This reminds me of a famous Beatles song, “Let It Be,” since that’s exactly what you should do to a relationship at all times — to just let it be. Taking things easy rather than dominating or controlling a relationship, which is tantamount to saying that we should not “dominate” and “control” other people, is how a relationship should be handled. I think it’s truly very wise decision to just let things be when it comes to a relationship. We don’t have ask other people to change and do things our way just because it doesn’t fall within our sacrosanct notion of what other should do or how they should be as a person.

 

Yes, we know that’s the way it should be, and logic tells us that it is the right thing to do. We enter and engage into a relationship with all the good intentions in the world, and then, along the way, we get inexplicably entangled because the unexpected human element in both you and the person you are trying to have a relationship with takes hold, and everything we thought to be logical and right are all blown out into nothingness. A lot of things just doesn’t seem to make sense.

 

I often wonder, or marvel, at our resilience as human beings when it comes to relationships. First, we build on it and we are happy. Next thing we know, everything is falling apart and we are miserable.  And then we swear to end it all in ways that are vengefully satisfying to us.  We try to imagine how we would deliciously extricate ourselves away from the situation we’ve found ourselves tied in. We’d devise all sorts of creative means to serve our notion of righteousness. And then, after getting all worked up, we’d get so tired thinking about it that the only thing to do is to sleep it off.

 

And marvels of all marvels, when you awoke, refreshed and replenished, things seem much better and all around you is much brighter. And no matter how much detail you’ve put into planning your exit strategy from a relationship that has gone sour, or how much emotional turmoil you’ve invested into a venomous relationship, you just learn to shrug it off and carry on.

 

The beauty of introspection is you can exorcise yourself out of it. You can work yourself up into a high level of frenzy, and then, after sleeping it off, things are never the same again. Everything is “turning up roses” (so to speak), that is, until the next conflict comes along.