What are you Willing to Sacrifice for a Relationship
It is a burning question. What about yourself are you willing to change for someone else? Who in your life would you be willing to give up?
What would you do if you started dating someone and learned that you had to change who you were, or drop some friends to make that person happy? How far are you willing to go to make that person love you or simply make the relationship work, and how much SHOULD you have to give up to make it work?
I’m a very firm believer, from experience of course, that the more you try to change someone, the more you end up changing yourself. I also do really believe people are not capable of changing who they are at the core. But how often is it that we meet someone that we’re interested in, and we become someone totally different? At what point is it ok to ask someone to drop a friend or two because you don’t like them, or because they are of the opposite sex, is it ok? I don’t believe it is.
I’m a huge believer that you should not take out on your current significant other, what a past significant other did to you. Therefore, unless the person you are with give you a reason to not trust them, why should there be an issue with them being friends with someone of the opposite sex. Which of course leads me to say, if you can’t or don’t trust the person you are with, why are you with them. That leads me to the next, and possibly more important point…. You start dating someone, and you drop some real, true friends because the other person isn’t secure enough to “allow” you to be friends, and then it happens. You break up for a completely unrelated issue, now there you are with no boyfriend/girlfriend, and no friend that you had before because you dropped them. What then?
There are always going to be things that people don’t like about you, that’s just the way life goes. But the truth is that if someone likes you, cares about you, or loves you, they are going to ACCEPT those things about you, just like they would hope you would accept them for who they are. When we look for relationships, or meet someone we would like to be in relationship with, it’s become natural for us to be who we think they want us to be….don’t you think that eventually they will see the real you? What then?
Clearly, I’m no expert on relationships, and maybe this is why. So often it turns out that people aren’t who they claim to be.
What would happen if we entered into a relationship being who we really are, and if we gave the other person the opportunity to decide if the REAL you is who they want to be in a relationship. You are who you are, what you are. By trying to change that you either end up full of resent, or eventually reverting back to the real you, and losing that person anyway, just after you have both invested so much of yourself…You end up losing more that way. I mean really, if who you are isn’t good enough, what’t the point in pretending to be someone else? What good is it to you, to lose who you are for someone else, and to possibly lose some amazing friendships, that you will probably never be able to get back.
Is Selfishness Inherent?
Due to some things I experienced today, I began to mull over what it means to be Selfish. I was wondering if Selfishness is an inherent trait, and honestly, the more I thought I about it, the more I believe that it is. I started cycling through all of my friends (and I have some great friends), to see if I could come up with any who I believe actually think of others before they think of themselves. I was shocked to find that I could count those people on one hand. Wow, is that really possible?
I decided to look at myself, because, well….it all starts with me. For my entire life, I have prided myself on the fact that I think about other people before I think about myself. However, I can’t say that is always the case, that would just be a lie. In the last couple of hours, I have come to the realization, that we are all selfish beings, to some extent. Maybe it’s inherent, maybe, as humans we believe that the only way we could survive is if we put ourselves above everyone else. After all, we’ve been taught that it’s the survival of the fittest right? Maybe, just maybe, we come to a point where we begin to treat people, as we believe they treat us. At what point does a selfless person become more selfish, because the people they are in relationship with take more than they give? And if you feel that you must change your behavior in that way, is that relationship really worth having? The question is, where is the line?
What kind of world would we live in, if we spent more time worrying about other people, than we worry about ourselves? Where would we be in our journey, if we did things truly for other people…without wondering how it will benefit us? What kind of relationships would we have, if just sometimes we slowed ourselves down to think about what we do, what we say, and how we say it will affect the people we love? And why is it that sometimes it is so much easier to perform selfless acts for strangers, than the people that we say are important in our lives?
“The selfishness must be discovered and understood before it can be removed. It is powerless to remove itself, neither will it pass away of itself. Darkness ceases only when light is introduced; so ignorance can only be dispersed by Knowledge; selfishness by Love.” ~James Allen
These are the types of things I ponder on. I often dream of a better world for the people I love, and can only hope that while I’m here on this earth, I will do my part, and change someone’s life.
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