Relationships - a promise of happiness
A foreword to my "love-series"
Assad fled to Russia with his family. Syria has been conquered and occupied by people who are celebrated as "liberators" by the brain-dead. The Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was ceremoniously reopened yesterday after it has been damaged by fire five years ago. Donald Trump was there shaking hands. We can get an abundance of news like this on our screens in real time. Kings, politicians, pop stars, everyone and anyone - "social media" brings every event into our lives. Although we feel better informed than our parents, from an evolutionary point of view we are the first guinea pigs in this great experiment called “internet”. While social media is talked about everywhere, more people, young and old, suffer from tormenting loneliness or difficult relationships than before.
Our own lives are where we constantly play the main role. At least this is how it should be. The most important news in our lives should be those that are about our own experiences. A life consists of one body over a certain period of time. Everybody has only one life. Putin has his. Trump has his. Musk and Assad each have their own. One person does not have two and another none.
To put it simply, our life is like a temple built on five pillars: material wealth (1), our calling (2), spirituality (3), the body (4) and our relationships (5). If all five pillars are present, equally high and magnificent, our house of life stands very stable on them. Even if one pillar suddenly cracks, the other four prevent it from collapsing. If there were only three from the start and then two collapse, everything collapses.
Of these five, there is one pillar that stands out in its importance when it comes to our personal experience of happiness. People were asked at the end of their lives how happy they thought their lives were. The majority judged their happiness based on the size of their social network. The sheer number and quality of our human relationships determines how happy we feel.
Different people want many different things, but we all have one thing in common: we want to be happy. Relationships are an important source of happiness, and because this is widely known, everyone makes a real effort to “have a good connection" with other people. Not everyone is equally gifted on all fronts, and there are many fronts: the core family, the extended family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, lovers and life partners - the field of practice for relationships is everywhere.
That is why no psychological counseling can avoid recording the important personal relationships when it comes to psychological well-being. I would even go so far as to say that no person who has a loving spouse, a large family and a cheerful and adventurous circle of friends has ever shown up in psychotherapy.
At some point I noticed that there are a lot of gaps in definition when talking about relationships. I caught myself asking questions again and again and trying to sort out and define the terms. Words like ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ are used by everyone and they always have something to do with feelings, but what exactly they mean and what exactly is going on usually remains somewhat shady.
In these conversations and of course also through my own experiences, I noticed that happiness and unhappiness in relationships have a method. Without presuming to map the field completely but in order to be helpful, I would still like to1) attempt to outline models of love and relationships that work as a basis for further considerations.
2) Later, when it becomes somewhat clear what love is (generally speaking), it must also be clear what love is not. Many unhappy people have hair-raising ideas about love that have become entrenched in their minds, leading to them attaching all kinds of anger and pain to it. I'll say it straight away: love in all facets is a thoroughly positive feeling with a thoroughly positive effect on everyone involved. Everything else is anything but. The drunks, the murdered and all other disturbed people do not belong in this picture.
This series of articles about love and relationships should provide the lonely person or anyone who suddenly realises how to build their relationship pillars more beautifully and sturdily with some material and tools. I am a practical person: what works is right.
All those who are not starting out at some level of the lower antisocial hells, but whose personal problems are, let's say, somewhere in the cherry-green area, should be able to use my thoughts for inspecting their existing relationships and tell what kind of animal they have.
Only clarity creates clarity. A clear awareness of what is going on in a relationship is the best protection against abuse in existing relationships but it helps as well in finding direction and creating desired outcomes when meeting new people. You will be happy to learn that you don't have to dig through the trash when looking for friends and love relationships, but that there are indeed proven recipes for an abundance of love and good friendships.
To use Hermann Hesse’s farewell bid for my purposes: So long, myheart, see what you always knew, see off what never worked and hale!