“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ~ Oscar Wilde

~

The minute I start thinking about relationships, my brain jumps to they are this, that, and the other…well, let me just say, they are all sorts of funny!

Of course, they aren’t easy, but we also complicate them a lot…at times more than what’s necessary. And why not? They are our playgrounds, right?

That’s where we learn to relate with another, play, tumble, fall, rise, get angry, make up, make out, fall out, so much! We experience the world and ourselves through relationships. And the most intimate ones are the ones that show us the mirror to who we really are at a given point in time, who we need to be.

Good, healthy, loving relationships fill us up with joy, laughter, play, light, life. They make us come alive in ways we don’t even realise. But the not-so-good ones, the complicated, confusing, troubling ones, also do the same, just in different ways.

We’ve all had that one bad, unpleasant, or complicated relationship, haven’t we? Where no matter how hard we tried, nothing fit, nothing worked. We felt more depleted than filled up. A good, happy life felt like a distant and at times impossible dream. The more we tried to move toward it, the farther away everything seemed. And we didn’t even realise when we started getting distant from our own selves…became spectators of our own lives.

You wish you never had that one person, that one relationship that made you feel everything that you didn’t want to feel, but you’ve had that, haven’t you? And if you haven’t, that’s okay too (in fact, lucky you!).

The thing with these troublemakers is that as much as we don’t want them, we need them. Because there is something (or perhaps a lot of things) that we haven’t or aren’t willing to learn. No matter how much we resist, the universe will keep testing us, giving us opportunities to grow. What we do will always come down to free will. We can suffer or we can evolve, and both come with their own kind of pain.

So when faced with a relationship that is anything but feel-good, or where the feel-good doesn’t seem to last, where you have to fight to be heard, understood, seen, where there is too much begging, pleading, or perhaps nothing at all, just a deafening kind of silence, they are here to show you something. A lot of things. All the ways in which you are not learning and growing.

While we all have our own journeys to undertake and lessons to learn, here are some things that a bad, difficult, or troubling relationship is here to teach all of us:

1. A good relationship, the right person, will never let you scream, shout, or shrink yourself to be heard, seen, and understood. All of this will simply flow.

2. A bad relationship is one where one or both of you will be fighting for power and control, and well, that’s politics, not a loving companionship.

3. It teaches you that your boundaries matter and they will automatically be respected, understood, and made space for by the right person, not pushed, exploited, negotiated, or brushed aside.

4. A bad relationship will always make you feel small, invisible, too much but just never enough. It will leave you questioning your thoughts, emotions, needs, and sometimes even reality. A good relationship will honour all of it.

5. A relationship that’s not meant for you will never let you grow. Every attempt of yours will be thwarted, and it will chip away at every aspect of your life, leaving you feeling bitter and rotten from within. A good one will let you expand organically. It will give you wings to fly and will light up every aspect of your life.

Most importantly, a bad relationship and the wrong person will continue to make you feel that you are unworthy, not good enough, and that you have to keep doing things to prove otherwise. It will exhaust your mind, body, and soul, leave you empty.

It will show you the mirror, the one you’ve been avoiding. It will show you how deeply unworthy you think you are to stay in something that is eroding you day by day. And it will force you to either rise up, meet yourself, or stay small, invisible, miserable, in a cycle of blind hope that one day something will change.

It will give you a choice to either literally fall in love or rise in love to meet your higher, all-deserving self, to invite an expansive kind of love, and before you get there, you have to learn that your self-respect should and must matter more than your desire to be chosen by someone—anyone—and that sometimes in order to get what you truly need, you have to let go of what you want, because sometimes we can want the things that tear us apart. We’re blind enough not to see them. So the universe will shake you up and push you out till you make a choice.

Whether we learn or not will always be up to us. The fact is that not every relationship is meant to last. Some are meant to break us so we can learn to put ourselves together—differently and, frankly, correctly. And as much as we’d like, these lessons don’t arrive on a fixed schedule. They unfold when we have the capacity to hold them. There is no such thing as being late to your own awakening. We meet certain relationships only when we are strong enough to survive them, and we leave them only when we are ready to rise beyond them.

As they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears, and sometimes that teacher looks like heartbreak, confusion, or a relationship that refuses to work no matter how hard you try. It’s not a question of when you learn. It’s a question of whether you choose to listen when the lesson finally makes itself known. And the moment you do, another path always appears.

Agreed, all the difficult, bad relationships are painful, messy, exhausting, and well…bad or even horrible. But you can’t take away from the fact that they do make for good teachers.

Sometimes you need a (figurative) hard whack on your bum to actually get up and do something meaningful with yourself and life. To realise that you were always worthy—you simply were blind to yourself.

But you can always rewrite the story.

Your story.