Glines on Relationships

Healthy Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:51:00 +0000

Many people have attempted to define what constitutes a healthy relationship. These definitions come from those of us currently in relationships. We look at ourselves and think we can use our relationship as the standard for healthy relationships. If we analyzed our romance from an outsider’s perspective, our opinion would change overnight.

We should never judge the relationships of two people we have never met. Each relationship has a different dynamic and comes with its own unique set of challenges. We should wait to meet both sides of a relationship and observe their dynamic before we decide to form an opinion. You will have a hard time finding something more annoying than arrogant couples looking down their noses at other couples.

A healthy relationship should act as an island that keeps any unnecessary influences at sea. Relationships between major celebrities end because the couple thinks they deserve to put their two cents in. The only successful Hollywood marriages come when the man and woman practically exclude themselves from constructive society.

Everyone looks at celebrities with a critical eye because they have more money and opportunities than “regular people.” While they might have a somewhat easier life, they still have to deal with many of the complications we all experience in relationships. You might not have the paparazzi sitting outside your house right now or the news media talking about you every hour of the day, but you likely have people in your life that do nothing but try to find weaknesses in your relationship.

If you want you have a healthy relationship, you need to block out everyone who wants your relationship to fail. You cannot rule out rejecting anyone in your life. Some couples try too hard to impress an old friend or family member, risking the success of their relationship on the opinion of someone else. In the case of family members, you only have to worry about impressing their immediate family (mother, father, sisters, brothers). Nobody else matters.

You have to find a way to maintain quality friendships within your relationship though. You will have your best friendships with people who have your best interests in mind. Someone who wants your relationship to fail is the furthest thing from a good friend. You might have a hard time letting them go, but if they could potentially ruin a lifelong love, you will not miss them in the long run.

It’s hard to keep a relationship going when it’s just you and your significant other, let alone a bunch of other people trying to insert themselves. When your relationships starts running purely on the opinions of others, it’s not your relationship anymore. You have to maintain a certain level autonomy from everyone else in your life.

You should do everything in your power to keep a good relationship going. You should spend every waking minute thinking what you can do to make the other person happy. The best relationships take time to grow and require work every step of the way.

Young Love

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 02:48:00 +0000

What age should you start pursuing love and all it has to offer? People debate this idea based on nothing more than the idea that those who have not put in as many years on this planet as them. They say young people haven’t learned anything about life because they have experience very little of it. While you could apply this argument to some situations, it doesn’t apply to every young person out there. A person’s ability to succeed in the romantic world at a young age depends on their level of maturity. Far too many people think young and immature have the same meaning.

Some young people are as mature as adults twice their age and some adults are as immature as someone half their age. We should never use age as a measurement of someone’s maturity. Each young person can handle a different assortment of life experiences. Parents should only intervene when their child’s romantic ambitions hinder their academic studies. Romance should blend in to the overall tapestry of our lives, not serve as the main component. A child’s education should always remain as top priority. They should eliminate anything that jeopardizes their chances of getting a quality education.

If a child can maintain their grades while having a romantic relationship, a parent should keep their hands off the situation. A parent should also stop a young romance when it verges on a sexual relationship. Parents should use their common sense when evaluating if their child’s romance has become sexual or not. In most cases, a young romance never approaches this risky territory. It’s understandable for parents to want to protect their children from everything evil in the world; however, an overprotective atmosphere could have its share of consequences. You should never condemn someone’s parenting style though because each parent does the best they can.

Love knows no age, gender, race or nationality. We all have the capacity to love at every stage of our life. Society dictates what form this love takes every step of the way. When we attempt to venture outside of what society accepts, society tosses us into the darkness. Society wants our children to start dating at a certain age across the board. Applying age requirement works for some children who can’t handle a romantic relationships or venture into unsafe territory when they’re part of one. There’s no way to apply one rule to the overall population and have it remain valid though.

We must keep an eye on our children, but we can’t dictate the flow of their life every step of the way. If we want our children to succeed, we should try to make them self-sufficient. Parents need to keep themselves in their children’s lives without becoming too overbearing. A well-regulated child will know what to do in the romantic world if a parent teaches them what to do within it, not if they keep them away from it altogether. A parent should encourage a child to venture into the social world while advising them when the child comes to them for advice.

Online Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 03:51:00 +0000

The internet has become an inseparable part of our lives, whether we like it or not. It provides us with a convenient way to look up information about anything we want. It also gives us an escape from having to deal with face-to-face interactions with other human beings. There is nothing wrong with talking to people you have already met that live in other states. You have met them before and you two share some sort of bond. When you meet a stranger online, you venture into completely different territory. You should keep your online interaction to a minimum and schedule a time to meet in person. You should not seek any sort of relationship with someone that lives in another state.

An alarming number of people choose to establish and maintain relationships with others strictly within an online world. We forget the importance of interacting with someone in person has for a new relationship. You cannot get the same benefits from an online relationship that you would from a real-life romance. You might try to rationalize the situation and put your relationship in the same terms as those you see in your day-to-day, but the differences between the two relationships are like night and day.

The internet has become the most efficient means for making a connection with other people you would otherwise pass over. You should take advantage of every networking you have on the internet, but any bond you forge in that space should carry over into the new world. You will not have a healthy existence unless you make face-to-face interaction a big part of your life. You might think talking to someone every day online or exchanging messages from time to time fills this void, but you will end up feeling unfulfilled in the end.

We all want to love someone and have someone love us. We would go the ends of the earth to find someone with whom we can spend the rest of our lives. We must first realize that the person we want could live around the corner or just a couple miles away. While a relationship with someone who lives in another country or state might seem appealing, you will lose the battle trying to maintain it. Some relationships that start online end up lasting forever, but that only happens when the couple decides to meet in person rather than carry on their romance online.

When you focus your romantic efforts online, you will miss out on what’s right in front of you. Someone you have known for years could have romantic feelings for you and you wouldn’t know it because you spend all your time pursuing another person that lives hundreds of miles away. We all must open our eyes to the world that’s outside our front door. Online relationships shouldn’t occupy more time than it takes to send a single email. There’s so much more in life to do and experience. You might sacrifice love when you sign off, but you will get so much back in return.

Trust

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:09:00 +0000

You can earn and lose trust, but you can never regain trust. Earning a person’s trust signals the start of a relationship while losing their trust often means the beginning of the end. You might think something leads to the breakdown of trust; however, one part of a relationship can often squander the other person’s trust based on suspicion alone. If you cheat on your significant other and do not tell them for several months, that is a legitimate breakdown in trust. If your significant other claims that you have cheated and you cannot convince them otherwise, you can blame their jealousy on your relationship’s downfall more than anything else can.

Many people try desperately to regain other people’s trust once it has vanished. Unfortunately, in most relationships, this pursuit will get you nowhere. The most stable, successful relationships might have some luck in re-establishing trust, depending on the circumstances. In the end, the same rule will always apply. You can never regain trust once it is lost, unless minor events lead to the breakdown in trust. The severity of these events depends entirely on your unique relationship. One relationship’s catastrophic event could serve as nothing more than a blip on the radar in another relationship.

A person’s capacity to forgive could always change the outcome and make the rule of trust obsolete. When we love someone, we have a tremendous capacity to forgive them, no matter what they might have done. To an outsider, this forgiveness might seem irrational or foolish because they do not understand the bond you share. You might even think it is foolish, but you go ahead with it anyway because love has a way of overpowering any negative thought we might have in this situation. This explains why husbands and wives return to situations we see as nightmares.

A person who is innocent of a crime should never have to own up to a crime they did not commit. The same goes for relationships. We often find ourselves in relationships with someone who has a tendency to become jealous. This jealousy convinces them you have done something wrong, even if you spend every waking moment with them and tell them everything. In this battle, you cannot win because your significant other has lost touch with what is really going on. If they sat back and analyzed your relationship honestly, they would realize you deserve more than suspicious and fabricated accusations.

When you find yourself in a relationship with a jealous individual, you need to address your concerns about how their feeling directly. You have to tell them you do not like how they accuse you of doing something wrong. You cannot bend to their will and shut yourself out from your friends and family because it makes them feel better. If they refuse to change, you should leave because you could spend your time better elsewhere. You and the person you are with might not like it, but you have to do what makes you happy when the person you are with stops making you happy.

Laughing at Unfunny Jokes

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:04:00 +0000

You might have heard that laughing at every joke your date tells will somehow endear them to you. While busting into laughter at everything they say might produce good results in the short term, you will not like the long-term implications. If they tell bad jokes, you should react with nothing more than a blank stare. Anything else will make them think they should keep telling jokes. They will keep trying to tell jokes, thinking they can do no wrong because you laugh every time. One blank stare will end the bad joke telling forever. Your date will either stop trying to tell jokes or make an effort to improve their lackluster humor.

However, if they tell a good joke, you should give them credit for it. A funny person will feed off your positive reinforcement and keep you rolling in the aisles for as long as you know them. Funny people have a way of wanting all the attention for themselves though. Evaluate every humorous person individually and separate the selfless ones from those that have oversized ego. A relationship will not work if one or more of its sides have a large ego. Egotistical individuals often put their needs over yours and those of the relationship.

In the dating world, you do not want to earn any points with dishonesty. Laughing when you should give them a blank stare isn’t much different than lying to them about other matters. Dishonesty should not rear its ugly head at any point in a relationship. You might try to come up with some justification for why you decided to lie to your date, but you have no real reason to do it. Once dishonesty makes its way into a relationship, it never leaves. It festers and becomes something much worse down the line. Any problem you leave unattended will later explode into a full-blown catastrophe.

Never attach any rules to how you react to members of the opposite sex. If you follow a certain set of rules, your interactions will become stilted and awkward. You need to loosen up. You might think it makes sense to read about how to communicate with certain people. In the end, you have to figure out how to talk with people based on who they are, not on what a rule that says you should laugh at anything that resembles a joke says. You will have a lot more fun if you react the only way that feels right.

Laughter has a way of bringing people together. You remember the people with whom you have shared a genuine laugh. The people you tried to impress with fake laughter fade into the endless abyss of memory. If you want to build long lasting relationships, you should do it with genuine interaction alone. Nothing else will produce the result you desire and the relationships started with artificial will vanish faster than they started. The dating world would improve considerable if we all learned to show our true colors from the beginning.

Compromise

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:54:00 +0000

Many marriages fail because the husband or wife never wanted to compromise. When you enter a relationship, you must leave your ego at the door. You longer just have to worry about your happiness and satisfaction; you have to take the needs of another person into consideration. Problems might arise and you might have your share of differences, but if you compromise with your partner every step of the way, you will escape any conflict. You cannot get away with compromising some of the time. In every discussion, you must throw up your hands and compromise, even if it means conceding something you want.

For hundreds of years, men have maintained they dominate women in every aspect of life. Of course, this absurd way of thinking does not apply to every man, but many have foolishly decided to adopt it. These men strut around believing they have all the answers and scoffing whenever a woman disputes their golden opinions. It doesn’t matter if they come up with something that’s clearly incorrect. They still push the issue and do everything they can to “prove” their woman wrong. Their ego is unable to handle the possibility that they don’t have all the answers.

Women also have their own subset of sexist thinkers as well. Unenlightened women see men as sexist cretins that can’t even tie their shoes, let alone perform reasonably complicated tasks. Men could form the best arguments with these women and still end up feeling as if they lost. As with the prejudiced men, these women punish all men because a few men caused problems. After a bad relationship, a scorned woman might feel this way about men. They need to realize that every man they meet isn’t their ex-boyfriend. Men and women should judge everyone they meet based on who they are, not their gender.

Once men and women get past their hang-ups, they should have no problems reaching a compromise. Both of you should have the right choice in the back of your mind. You can present your viewpoints in a calm, rational manner and come to a consensus that will benefit both of you equally. Sacrifice definitely comes into play here. Every couple has to surrender eventually to avoid a much more serious problem. A compromise can end a disagreement before it festers and explodes into a knockdown, drag out shouting match. It doesn’t matter what your significant other did or said. Let it go. You will feel much better if you stop stewing on little things.

Couples who can’t compromise on anything will have more than their fair share of problems. The collective ego of two individuals can sometimes take precedence over the welfare of the overall relationship. These couples don’t realize that their egos fall by the wayside to help the relationship succeed. A relationship will fail if either side lets their ego dictate the pace. Couples made up of two selfless individuals that constantly compromise and defer to each other will never end.

Contact After the First Date

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:51:00 +0000

Everyone thinks they know when you should contact someone after the first date. Do not listen to them. There is no set time frame. If you contact them too soon, too often, too little or too late, you might seem desperate or disinterested, depending on which one you choose. You never know which approach to choose until you pick one and evaluate the results. We have fallen into one of these categories and realized we took the wrong approach. Do not over think something that is actually very easy to understand.

A text message can serve as a subtle means for contacting the person you are interested in. You should not wait long before you send this text message. Again, there’s no set time frame for when you should establish contact. Once you have finished the date, you should determine your next move based on how well the date went. Do not play hard to get. You might read that it’s cute to play hard to get in numerous articles and on countless websites. It’s not. It’s annoying. If you play hard to get in the dating world, stop it.

You can contact the person you just had a date with whenever you want. Make sure you limit yourself to one call and one text message though. A time frame for when you should establish may not exist, but the line between interested and psychotic does. If you’re not sure which side of the line you’re on, put yourself in the shoes of the other person. Would you take yourself on a second date if you acted like how you’re acting? If you answer no to that question, you should stop what you’re doing immediately.

You should spend a lot of time figuring out what you will say in your text message or phone call. With a text message, you can choose exactly what you will say before you say it. Do not send your text message until you’ve read and reread it. You wouldn’t want your potential spouse to read something incoherent and potentially insulting. The same goes for telephone voicemail messages. Run through what you will say before you reach the point where you have to leave your message. You only have one opportunity to leave the right voicemail.

When you’re dealing with online contact, the rules don’t change. You shouldn’t send someone message after message or email after email. Send them one precisely worded message or email and wait for their response. If they never respond, you can go about your business. Do not stew on the fact one person decided they could better spend their time elsewhere. There’s a million people waiting to embrace you behind that one person who decided to reject you. You just have to get over yourself, forget about that person and go back into the world.

Throw Out the Rules

noreply@blogger.com (AllenGlines) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 04:58:00 +0000

Writers and commentators have attempted to define romance and tell you how you should operate within your relationship. They present theories, come up with scenarios and outline a list of rules in an effort to convince you that they know the answers and can help you have a perfect relationship. Many of us bite on this information and fool ourselves into thinking it applies directly to our relationships. Some of us even change our relationships around to ensure they follow the guidelines we read. Eventually, our relationships are no longer our relationships, but rather a creation of the writer that misled us.

If you want a successful a relationship, you need to steer clear from any book that claims to have all the answers about romance. The best advice does not come in a book; it comes from those that understand your relationship or knows you and your significant other. Strangers have no clue about you or your relationship. They will say whatever will sell the most copies, bring in the most viewers and get as many people to listen to their program as they possibly can. They might seem trustworthy, but their trustworthiness serves as part of an image a large corporation created to generate massive amounts of money.

Once you narrow your list of advisors down to people you know, you have to determine the intentions of the people around you. Your friends and family might not have your best interests in mind when it comes to the person you choose. They might let their personal opinions about your significant other cloud their judgment and motivate them to give you faulty advice. In some instances, the advice from a concerned loved one might have some merit. On the other hand, they could have built their advice on a foundation of premature judgments and erroneous secondhand information. The best advice comes from loved ones who want nothing more than to see you happy.

In the end, you should throw out every romance book you own. These books will provide you with entertaining gimmicks, not genuine material you should apply to your daily lives. After you have disposed of these bogus tomes, you should direct your attention to the people you know who try to give you advice. Evaluate their intentions and listen to those who want you to be happy. You should take every piece of advice they give you with a grain of salt though.

You will learn the rules for your relationship over time. Work out your problems with your significant other. Over time, you will develop an understanding of how your significant other thinks and feels. The amount of problems you will experience will decrease dramatically over time. Take your nose out of a book, close your computer and open your eyes. The solution will come to you without you having to look anywhere for it.