Developing Yourself For Relationships

By idaly mata on November 27, 2015

First anything’s are tough: the first step, the first day of school, the first time someone disappoints you, the first driver’s lesson, the first rejection. All of it is tough. The important thing is to learn from it. From all those tough moments you are meant to grow, become more mature. Panic, anxiety, and depression may be feelings that coincide with these tough moments, but it is vital that you overcome them.

Being able to cope with the daily hassles of life is essential. People calm themselves through meditation, listening to music, reading, sewing, cooking, swimming, or doing anything that brings them joy. The ability to take yourself out of your negative emotions and channel that into something productive, is an aspect of an individual that should constantly be reinforced.

This kind of behavior, channeling the negative into positive, will make life so much more enjoyable as well as prepare you the toughest experiences in life; be it a death in the family, the sickness of a close friend, the divorce of parents, the trauma of moving away from home, or the realization that you are not doing in life what you want.

One of those tough experiences that makes being someone whom has the ability to squelch anger and transform it into creation is vital is falling in love for the first time. Nothing in life can prepare you for the kinds of feelings that come with really being in love with someone for the first time. Whatever you thought you knew about yourself or about other people will be tested to the max. You will find yourself confronted with wonders and tragedies.

Love is tumultuous and people so often, so foolishly, enter into it so utterly unprepared. Growing up, we are shown images of adorable relationships with no worries through movies and television; while at the same time most of us saw a single parent home or a home being torn asunder by a failing marriage. Even growing up with a perfect example of what a couple can be is deceptive because we don’t take into account that we aren’t our parents. They could have a great relationship but that doesn’t mean we will too.

People are far too complicated for love to be taken lightly. Through each of our own daily experiences no one can ever be like us, no one would ever be able to completely understand. This is why another essential personality trait is being able to communicate effectively. No matter how much we wish it were true, other people can’t just know what we care thinking, what we want, what we need, or anything that isn’t the obvious.

It seems my generation in particular has the acute disability of proper communication. Expressing their feelings is just too difficult a task when they are not behind the security of a keyboard. So much is lost when communicating with someone when there is no face to face interaction. When others my age do interact it is often tense and awkward. Technology has unfortunately made us this way. It started when our parents would leave us in front of the television or desktop computer while they went to work.

Smart phones made portable and prolific an escape from human interaction that had previously been relegated to our homes. With any sense of anxiety of saying what you truly want to say, you’ll find yourself constantly having arguments that could have been avoided had you been exposed to and expose yourself to verbal communication with others.

Having strong verbal communication skills not only makes having a significant other a much more pleasurable experience, but it also helps with interacting in the professional world. Love makes getting out what you want to say even harder than usual. You want to be the best version of yourself that you can be with this person yet if communicating is hard already, not being someone comfortable regularly talking about your thoughts and feelings raises the level of difficulty significantly.

Another ability that will help in a relationship is acceptance. The fact that everyone is different is why being able to accept a variety of different beliefs, religions, cultures, backgrounds, and various other aspects of a person that makes them who they are is important. It is the ability to know that someone may not think the way you do, but knowing that in the end there are other things to love about this person that keeps you from walking away or having a huge blow up fight.

And the absolutely necessary characteristic that needs to be had by all who want to be in a relationship? Loving yourself. It may sound cliché, but to be in a healthy relationship, you have to be able to look in the mirror and be happy with everything you see, as well as feel. There will be days when you love yourself a little less than other days, but you have to be someone who is comfortable with who they are.

When there is any kind of self-loathing that can often translate to less than desirable traits such as resentment, hostility, depression, anxiety, jealousy, and a myriad of other destructive traits that ruin relationships. While it is okay to have a bad day and lash out, there is a limit to how much that is acceptable. Would you want to constantly be around someone who is volatile? Not knowing if in any given situation they will have a melt down and take it out on you?

Negative energy is not only bad for yourself it is bad for the people around you. Living with the motto “treat others as you want to be treated” is tried and true. You really can only love someone else once you really love yourself.

And even if these things seem obvious, it is hard to say how you’ll react the first time you fall in love. Maybe, like me, you’ll become a person you never expected. It is because I did not possess all the necessary traits that I suffered in my first round of love. Loving someone is facing tough moments. In order to come out of those moments a fuller and better person, we must work on those traits that make for a stronger person.

Growing as a person is not about changing yourself, it is about developing yourself. Once you’ve developed the abilities that I’ve mentioned above you will become a person that can face the world with all its trials and tribulations, love being the biggest trial of all yet yielding the greatest reward. Don’t sell yourself short, and make the most out of a bad situation. At the end of the day everyone just wants to be loved, and in order to always feel that it starts with you, developing you.

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