Making a Relationship Work

Philosopher William James once said; "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

When couples first date and fall in love, the emphasis is all on the things they have in common. Often you feel like you've discovered your very own, and one and only, soul-mate, and the blending and compatibility are marvelous. the euphoria of new love has something to do with this; after all, we can become enraptured in the madness of love, if only for a while. Then nerves can set in, as you start to get serious about each other, and you start to get analytical. And constant analysis can often kill a perfectly good relationship.

It's better to focus on how you're feeling at the moment, and stay in the moment. When you start questioning how things are going to be in the future, and feed it with memories of past horror stories, you're sacrificing the real for the unreal.

When you think about it, anything could happened in the future, and many things will happen that you couldn't possibly predict. It's likely the things you're imagining (he'll be unfaithful, she'll turn into a nag) will never happen, and things you could never imagine will happen, so there's really no use in playing it out too far into the future.

The important things to know about are how this person makes you feel, and if your values and attitudes towards marriage match, and a match of energy-level is nice, but even that can change over time. Whether they are a morning-person or a night-person, whether you share every interest in common, and whether the toilet seat should be left up or down are not important in the long run. Those are things to overlook, and things you will have to overlook if you're going to live with someone else.

Relationship do work, and the work of a relationship is being understanding and forgiving, overlooking unimportant things, and being positive and loving; it's not about picking the relationship apart, finding fault, or talking it to death. Live it; don't analyze it.

You can turn something pleasant and fun into work if you want to, but remember that dating is supposed to be fun and love is supposed to feel good! There's so much written these days about relationships, you might even get the impression they're difficult. Give yourself permission to go with a good thing, and give you and your partner credit for basically knowing what to do. You don't need to figure out with your head whether you belong together, in fact your head can get in the way and mess up a good thing. Your heart tells you, if you quiet the analysis, and listen it.

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Eugine Loh, 938Live, MediaCorp Pte Ltd