Just One of Those Things

It's interesting to see how different relationships become as we grow older. When we are younger we are so sure that our first relationships will be our last. When they do end, as most inevitably do, we think that our world has ended and nobody will ever love us because one person was not right for us. Most people who are in university have hit the stage in their lives when they have loved and lost at least one person who they thought they would be able to spend the rest of their lives with. And for the most part, we have survived. Sometimes just barely, but we get through it.

We occassionally continue to see relationships as things that will be the be all and end all of our lives. After a few endings of things we expect to be the rest of our lives, we begin to accept the fact that not every relationship will lead to the rest of our lives. Some will work and some won't. The ones that won't are not our fault as much as we would like to blame ourselves for the failure of "the rest of our lives."

As we get older we begin to see that the ending of relationships is not always our fault. And it's not the fault of the other half of the relationship. There are some cases when there is a way to assign blame for the end of our relationship, but for the most part that's only our way of easing the grief we feel at the loss of something we held dear. We realize that although assigning blame for the end of a relationship may be the easiest way to deal with the end of it, it's probably not the most productive way to do so. When we cease seeking a way to assign specific blame for the end of a relationship, we are more open to seeing why it really did end. And sometimes it's just one of those things.

It's a beautiful idea to think that all relationships will be "The One," the most fulfilling part of our lives and a large part of the rest of our lives. The reality is that this doesn't always happen. In fact, it usually only happens once. There are so many other times in our lives that the beginning and the end of relationships are not exceedingly well planned, but they make us happy for the time we have them. Looking back on them we can see that they were just one of those things. The things that you take a crazy chance on, just because you can. The end may be something that you could see coming, or something you couldn't, but hindsight gives you 20/20 vision on it.

Relationships can be just one of those things for so many reasons. Usually timing is to blame. Maybe because someone is moving out of a city right when the other enters it, or there is another love in the picture who re-enters or has never really left. There might be an age gap that cannot be bridged by love alone, or the desire for two things that are simply too far apart to ever be reconciled. Sometimes they began in a manner that was suited only to crashing and burning in a magnificent sort of manner. For whatever reasons relationships don't work, I don't think we should work so hard to assign blame for the failure. We can wish "If only" all we want, but that won't change anything. We just need to accept that it can be just one of those things and wait for the day that it is the one thing that is right.