When you think everything is someone else’s fault or doing, you will suffer a lot. It’s when you realise that everything springs from only yourself, you learn both peace and joy
- The Dalai Lama
We are a generation of very exhausted people, being constantly tired (both mentally and physically) and irritable. It feels like we are all time-bombs ready to blow up any minute, on anything even as small as who moved my pen or why did you call me thrice. Think about it, don’t you often get annoyed with the least expected things? You feel sorry about it afterwards, to have shouted at your loved ones. But most of the time you can’t help it. Everyone has so much on their plate already that they can’t care for one more: one more house task, or one more unwanted appointment, or even one more person in our lives. We are all so ‘maxed’ out. Our work takes up most of our energy and the rest goes into the responsibilities that we can’t run away from. Then where is the time for love and understanding?
But here is a catch! When you are so tired, you are so exhausted, so frustrated, all you need is love. You need lots and lots of understanding, patience and care. But who is going to give it? We are a generation of exhausted people, remember? When both partners in a relationship come back home tired and irritable needing love and having no energy, enthusiasm or understanding of giving love, the relationship is meant to be doomed. It creates a vicious circle of feeling frustrated, demanding love, not getting love and feeling frustrated.
To top it all, we also come back to a screen, a social world filled with unrealistically exuberant lifestyle posts of people in our vicinity, and simultaneously a political world filled with destruction and sorrow. This generates a string of unfeasible demands and expectations in our head from our life and our partners.
“We only live once and our life is so mundane, our life is so ordinary, I can’t control anything, we don’t have that connection, or he/she isn’t right for me, we don’t have that spark that this couple has, look what her husband bought for her or look how he surprised her, how she is managing everything so perfectly and blah blah…”
Honestly, their life is as ordinary as yours. Somebody might be thinking the exact same thing looking at your updates. It’s that everyone chooses to filter the best of their lives, manipulate that a little and put it on display for the world. The girl that just updated a status about being cheerful, was crying two days back and is seriously messed up in her career right now. But she is not going to update that. The couple that updated their trip selfies actually had a fight right before them. The “food porn” photos don’t necessarily mean it was a lovely dinner. Nor do foreign trips symbolise an enriched life.
But a generation living with ideologies of FOMO, YOLO and Never Settle will not get it. We want it all and we want it now. And we don’t have the time, patience or energy to build a meaningful relationship. A longstanding relationship is a sapling that was nurtured well to become a tree. If your solution to things involve getting under or over someone or just escape the reality, it will never work.
To build that relationship you need to work on yourself. You need to be the best version of you. You need to give love before receiving it, and not your idea of love, the love that your partner needs, the love that your relationship requires; time, patience and understanding and a life to be lived, not displayed and followed. So make time, give love, be patient and work on yourself.
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