I am going to start with a question, Are You Willing to Get Relationships Wrong?
I spend a lot of time talking about relationships and I recognize a common desire, and sometimes a desperate fear of getting relationships wrong, and this fight to get them right, people forcing marriages to work, suffering whatever is necessary to stay in a relationship. We have projected so much wrongness against being alone, most people will avoid not only their independence, but their strengths and awareness of what else is actually possible and available for them to choose regardless of their relationship status.
One thing I find quite odd is that most of the fear around relationships is not a genuine fear of being alone but is a fear of being judged by people outside of the relationship. We have seen the movies, watched the soap operas on tv and in real life with our families and friends, and bought that nothing could be worse than being judged as a wrong and lonely loser. We are taught to feel sorry or embarrassed for our friends and family who have not been chosen by someone, and assume that they would be so much happier if they were in love or at least not alone.
How much of our existence is affected by judgments that completely control your choices because you have made those judgments more significant than your own self, and what is true for you? Relationships are brilliant distractions from you choosing to be great, and choosing to have a life that looks different from anyone else’s. We don’t even dare choose relationships that look different because we assume they are wrong or not as good as the judgably right and correct relationship.
And trying to get relationships right keeps you spinning in circles because there is no right or wrong relationship! Judgment, positive or negative, is something that we invented in an attempt to control each other. Whether it is from your parents, your friends or complete strangers, if you have decided that judgment is true, you are completely controlled by it. It’s buying the judgments as real that sticks us in the impossible chase of getting our lives and relationships right.
The feelings of wrongness are suffocating us, and set many on a path of pain and determination to “fix ourselves.” With every judgment of wrongness, millions of projections, expectations, agendas, inventions, conclusions and lies follow. These are also complete lies but your thoughts and feelings convince you it must be true. When you come to the conclusion that you are wrong, everything you think about or choose for yourself will be based on the idea that you are wrong, and add to that feeling.
Deciding to fix your wrongness requires you to divorce parts and pieces of yourself. We hide our bodies, hide our desires, hide our ideas. We bend and force ourselves to be what will be judged as good and right. How much of you have you left behind? How much of you are you hiding? How much of you have you given up on being? And has divorcing parts and pieces of yourself created a fabulous relationship that you cannot live without?
When you are willing to get relationships wrong, that doesn’t mean you are going to have shitty relationships, it just means you are willing to be judged as being wrong. Have you noticed that even when you think you have it right, people judge you anyway? And even if it’s positive judgment, is that enough for you?
How many awful relationships are maintained because they are being judged as right or look happy from the outside? Even in our youth, relationships are used to control our image, so people will look and think of us in a certain way, and then maybe we will believe it ourselves too.
Judgment is not something that you can pretend isn’t there or avoid so it doesn’t harm you, but you can be free from it if you acknowledge that no one else’s judgments of you are relevant. They feel tragic, they seem significant, but the only weight judgments hold are the weight we give them, we are the only ones who can make a judgment valuable by choosing to do so.
This is the key to freedom in relationships and everywhere else. Choice. We have to acknowledge that everything and everyone that shows up in our lives comes from our freedom to choose. You are free to choose a relationship, a friendship, a lover, an enemy, solitude, ten lovers, five boyfriends, three girlfriends, friends you have sex with, boys to flirt with, whatever you desire.
Choices create your life. Not only does choosing create what shows up in your world, choice also creates awareness of your choices and gives you more information for what you would like to choose next. What do you know you desire? Does it match any of the definitions of what you think you are supposed to desire?
As you let go of holding onto judgments, you will also see where definitions are limitations, often with hidden judgments attached to them. First you can ask yourself what does relationship mean to me? What have I defined as love? Where did I learn these definitions from? Am I actually willing to let go of my definitions of relationships and love? Do they actually belong to me? Am I trying to prove my parents or anyone else right or wrong?
It blows my mind to look back on my lovelife and realize that I asked ZERO questions. What would have changed if I asked my first boyfriend what his definition of having a girlfriend was and shared what the words boyfriend and girlfriend meant in my head? I 100% assumed we both agreed what it meant without question. When I got married, I again asked zero questions about what marriage would look like, be like, or what love meant to either of us.
When you are not honest with yourself about your definitions and refuse to acknowledge that you and your partner could possibly and definitely do have very different points of view about the very meaning of love and relationships, you end up wasting a lot of time and energy trying to understand each other by judging each other, and instead of becoming closer, separating because driving down the tunnel of wrongness all the time feels like shit. You either make yourself wrong but some of us prefer to make our partner wrong.
How many relationships are stuck or fucked in the competition of right and wrong? If you are right, you actively choose partners that will show up as wrong in your eyes. If you have decided you are wrong, you will likely choose people who love dominating you with their rightness. There is no way to be in a great relationship if either of you have to be right or wrong. So even our very definitions need to be checked if we desire to avoid the tunnel of wrongness and be free.
