This is one of those two-way street conversations. In a relationship each party needs to give as well as they get in order to maintain an equal balance of responsibility and satiety, emotionally speaking.

I have had a past online dating relationship in which I lost my feeling of being supported. I spent the first two years of that four year relationship feeling happy and as though we were on an even kilter. I spent the last two years trying to patch up what I increasingly began feeling was more give than get. Being in a relationship with a person that you do not feel supports you when you need it most is like a skyscraper built with a weak base. One leg might be able to support the building for a faltering little while, but eventually the whole thing will just come crashing down. Despite my hardest efforts I was never able to hold my past relationship up by myself. I made it for a couple of years, but the final straw was a sick grandfather and a partner missing in action. I had to draw the line, and so through my heartbreak I did.

Sad as I was the first little while after that break-up, I’ve never felt such freedom in my life as I did when all I had to support was myself. As human beings we need to feel supported. I don’t mean financially, but emotionally. This is more than just a fleeting desire; it’s a necessity for a strong and healthy relationship. Man, woman or child, we all need to know that when push comes to shove we’ll have another person to fall back on, a shoulder to cry on or a sympathetic friend or lover to soothe our wounds.

There is no positive or slight offense that I can think of that has ever necessitated that phrase. Typically one hears this after a case of infidelity, being hit, or some other major wrong-doing. Everyone is different and I’m sure that many happy relationships have continued on after these types of events, but for myself, I can’t even allow myself to consider it okay or forgivable. My theory stands that if you never give yourself the opportunity to question your position on treatment like this, when it happens you’ll be more likely to stick to your guns. That being said I’ve never been hit by a man, and to my knowledge I’ve never been cheated on either. In truth I cannot imagine the roller coaster of emotions that being treated as such leaves with you. I believe this is two parts luck and one part having the presence-of-mind not to put myself into dating relationships with people that might be capable of this type of behavior. But people can be tricky and deceiving; the wolf in sheep’s clothing is not always obvious, in fact they’re frequently most misleading. No matter what the circumstances it is never okay, for males or females, to endure any measure of physical abuse. I don’t care if he just caught you in bed with his father or she caught you in bed with her mother. In relationships especially we all need to be adult about it instead of hauling off hitting someone like a kid on a playground when you’re unhappy or hurt. Trust me, I would imagine my first response to catching my husband cheating as being a very physical one, but I endeavor to remind myself that it’s unwise to counter an emotional response with a physical answer.

From my experience, priorities, such as ‘things in common’ or  ‘items on your check list’ all seem to fade away when you meet someone and they just have that ‘it factor’ for you. The laws of attraction don’t make sense, philosophers for years have wondered it and i don’t think anyone can really explain it. Why are you drawn to some people, despite potentially having none of the items on your list for a partner, and why does that list seem to evaporate whenever they walk in the room. Why, as well, others who have posses every quality you have wanted all your life, you just don’t feel that spark or magnet attraction to. It truly is a “je ne sais quoi.”  Its special, its what makes the world go round, its the thing that drives people to give up everything you have, yet no one can tell you exactly what it is.

So, when i am out and about, i don’t worry too much about meeting people who have similar interests to me, or a good job, or lots of money, I just walk around waiting for ‘it’ to hit me. Now, I’m a person with many failed relationships under her belt, and still looking that person with “it” who is also willing to stick around. So, maybe in hind sight, the people who are online dating have it right…. Talk to people with similar goals and life values as you do, and then wait for the “it.” Maybe I should try it their way first, before knocking it. Online dating world, here I come!!

When my husband and I started dating I forgot about one very important aspect of my husband’s beliefs to check on. In fact, it had never really occurred to me with any boyfriend prior to him either. I neglected to pay special attention to his mannerisms with his family. Indeed I have come to see the extreme error in this negligence, as a person’s family determines much of who they are, why the do the things they do and feel the way the feel. It’s not that I didn’t pay attention to my previous partners’ relationships with their families, but I could see it for myself; their families were always local and I could pretty much immediately interact with them in their family life. My husband’s family, however, is located in different, mostly far off, parts of the country. Therefore I was not able to study his family interaction until we were much further into the relationship. I never met a single member of his family in the first year we dated. His views on family interaction and mine are in fact nothing alike. He works well being distanced from his family, while I have never left the town in which I was born and therefore have never been more than 20 minutes away from my mother at any time in my life. He has a rift with a certain close family member that dictates he does not speak with this person, and I cannot turn my back on a family member no matter what injustice they commit toward me. Since we got married and our families intertwined this has caused some issue. I try to push him to become closer to his family, which I realized, once I stopped to think about it, I have no right to do. But with them now being my family as well, I feel the need to become close to them as I am with my family. Now that I feel I have a right to. The moral of my little story is that you should always take care to root out how a prospective partner interacts with family and how their beliefs about family differ from your own. Just as it’s important to be on the same wave length about religious beliefs and children, you could also save yourself some considerable headache knowing their family values.