Consider all we attend to each day, and most of us simply find it hard to invest in a good relationship, let alone carve out the hours necessary to mend or tend a difficult one. If you’re day is anything like mine, it may go a little something like this:

Dropping kids off after school, work deadlines, pressure to keep your job. pressure to compete (especially now), pressure to be original, friends calling in real crisis and friends in perpetual crisis, staying fit and young and sexy and time to re-do the kitchen, send the kid to college, get your parents in to an extended care home (if they don’t kill you first), and … RELAX! why don’t you (with all that extra time).

And what if you have to factor in something like this:

Go home, climb in the shower and get ready for my date tonight!!!

And You Thought You Had A Challenging Relationship….

WHEW! I’m exhausted just typing that! I heard a great story years ago about a kid whose mom asked him to make her some eggs. She instructed him to scramble one and fry the other. Being a good kid, he did just that, the stood and beamed proudly before his mother, presenting her with what he understood to be the answer to her heart’s (or stomach’s, if you will) desire; eggs, one scrambled, the other perfectly fried! “Oh. NO” she protested. “I wanted that one scrambled and the other one fried!” pointing ruthlessly at his obedient offering.

For me, this kind of crazy-making relationship is, at minimum, challenging, not to mention arduous.
One point to make here is that most of our lives are full. So how do we go from overwhelmed (or, at least, I am bloody tired and I really want a relationship) to gracefully finding that one special person who actually does make your load feel lighter?

How NOT To Find A Good Partner

Maybe you do a version of one of these options:

a) Meet someone you’re attracted to and have sex right away since you think chemistry is the best indicator of a great choice of partner.
b) Sign up on every online dating service, line up endless dates and then, like a total maniac, unleash your inner daemons and hope one date finds this attractive?
c) Drink alcohol and or take a few sedatives, anti-whatever ( because, hey, everyone else does). Go to a bar or nightclub and get your groove going and then just see what happens, because you’re reasoning is in no way impaired…if anything, being high brings out your real self, and tons of people meet their soul mates in bars!
d) Stop…drop and roll?
e) Or maybe STOP, drop in with yourself and see first where you might be leaking some valuable life-force energy. (Hopefully you chose E, in an ideal world, anyway.

Loving Yourself Is The First Step

So here’s a little relationship heads up (in case you didn’t choose “E” or in case – like most of us – you have a hard time choosing “E” all the time!):
If we don’t have time for ourselves…neither will they.
If we don’t MAKE time for ourselves…neither will they.
If we don’t know how to manage our own lives well…neither will they.
If we do find someone to “take us away from all this,” one or the other gets tired of the burden and eventually the relationship dies. Check the statistics; people who have the fewest relational tools are most likely to have dissatisfying and destructive relationships. Period.

Great Relationship Shortcuts

Give yourself what you want from a partner and you’re exponentially more likely to attract a really good one!
And last, having tools and skills are pointless if we don’t use them so~

Surround yourself with supportive people and you are more likely to stay on your path of growth and good self-care, and leave what isn’t that behind!