Relationships are hard

Relationships are hard. It's something that I've heard over and over, and I've never doubted that it's true, but I feel like I've been really deeply learning the truth of it through my experiences over the last year or two. And lately I've also been thinking about what's important to me in my relationships and what has made the good ones so strong and the bad ones so disappointing.

I think all people want to be understood and affirmed, but feeling the connection of understanding and shared experience is maybe the most important way that I feel close to other people. That moment when somebody's talking about their own experience and they describe perfectly what I've been feeling is priceless. And then there are those rare people who can listen to me and, even if they haven't experienced what I'm going through, they still show such empathy for me. I feel very lucky to have some really great people in my life, and I feel like they teach me how to be a better person in relationship to others as well.

And then there's the buzzkill: the relationships where understanding is elusive and empathy is seemingly out of the question, where you hold out hope but it's continually challenged. I've been struggling with this type of relationship over the past couple of weeks, feeling misunderstood and disregarded by someone I care about. Because I can see more clearly what I appreciate about my healthy relationships, the void in this one is all the more gaping. My instinct is to have a tough conversation to try to reach some point of understanding each other, but I am also really frustrated by feeling that if I don't take the initiative to deal with it, it will just never be dealt with. I know ultimately I'll have the conversation, but...it's hard. It's hard to be humble enough to admit I've been hurt and to choke down the disappointment in order to seek reconciliation.

To come full circle, though, I'm realizing that no relationship just stays good, and the best I can do is to know myself well enough to be aware of how I'm feeling about it so that I can take action to reconnect with the other person. I used to see my feelings as a liability, but now I'm finding them incredibly informative and constructive. They're helping me bring more things to the surface that would otherwise bubble underneath and continue wreaking havoc.