How should Life Be Better in a Relationship

[Silverbirch]

Thank you Lester. Yes, that has been my experience.

 

I know there are some good men. I have some very nice male relatives and my brothers-in-law. I also know a happily married couple, and he is very nice to her, and someone like him would probably be a happy addition to my life. My older sister has been married happily to the live if her life for 20 years. She had a lit of unhappiness before he came into her life, and she actually thought she had missed the boat on having children - they have TWO amazing sons!

 

I wish I had given more o myself to my lovely family instead of all the energy I put into re,action ships with men who really were not worth it.

[Hermes]

Silver, you asked me:

 

" I wonder if your strong sense of self repelled men who were trouble - do you think it did - as well as attracting a better quality man?"

 

Yes, I suppose so. But I don't think it is all quite as abstract as that. I am quite certain my sold childhood, stable family, and other factors come into it too. Having good boundaries, without having to even think about it, just having them automatically.

An old friend of mine (also married), we used to laugh back in the days and say we could see the "creeps" coming at two miles off. Heh heh.

 

One can look up the term "jerks" on the net, and reams have been written about how and why so many women don't just actively avoid them, but are fatally drawn to them.

[catfeeder]

My life is becoming good, but I do wonder how I would know if a man was a good person to have in my life - would be worth having in my life. How should life be better for having him I. My life?

 

Good question, and I think the best answers are private and unique to each of us. There is no universal checklist of qualities to pursue that would be of any real value, because it's a million intangible things that don't mean anything until they're personified by someone in front of us.

 

Like you, I'm middle aged and solo. Unlike most single people my age, however, I've never married. I passed through the usual stages of societal prompters without having been in the right relationships during those times. Once I made a choice in my 30's to possibly adopt a child one day rather than bear children, I released myself from any bio-clock pressure. Once that urgency was gone, so was any perceived 'need' to make any legal commitments.

 

I started off young as a serial monogamist, leapfrogging through a series of relationships lasting 2 or more years until my mid-30's. I've lived with men, and I learned a lot of relationship stuff before I was mature enough to handle going solo. Once I ditched the dependency stream, I floundered for a while and then grew into myself. I decided that my problem was never one of getting into relationships, it was getting out of them once I recognized that I'd committed to the wrong matches.

 

So I stopped doing that.

 

I still believe in marriage, even for myself one day. I just don't feel an urgency about it. I have many married friends, some of whom are happily married, and rather than feeling envious of them, I feel inspired by them.

 

My bottom line regarding any relationship of any kind is that, overall, it needs to enhance my life in some valuable way, or it's not sustainable.

 

I believe that's true of most people. So the question becomes of any relationships we might view in hindsight as primarily 'bad' for us is, what secondary gain did we settle for that kept us involved the thing? I think once we can learn how to satisfy those gains internally or through other kinds of relationships, we're cleanly positioned to view all relationships as voluntary rather than as the lifeline we may have believed at the time. This frees us to walk away from any relationships that don't benefit us in what we view as PRIMARY ways.

 

So the only way to test that is to take the same risks as everyone else and get to know people well enough before investing too much. We open, we observe through seasoned optimism rather than cynicism, and we trust that we've grown into wise enough people to avoid settling for less than the chemistry and simpatico we've learned to value through trial and error.

 

Head high.

[Heather Dawn]

My boyfriend and I discuss this a lot, because we feel our relationship is very special - and one of the reasons for that is that we were both perfectly content being single, so our relationship was truly born out of love and wanting to be with each other, rather than out of need and wanting to be in a relationship. Huge difference.

 

But to answer your main question, my boyfriend has brought SO much to my life that I couldn't begin to put it into words. He loves me so much that it's almost a tangible thing - no matter what I'm doing, or where I am, I carry his love with me. And I love him just as much.

 

I'll never forget when he showed me a text from his mom on his first birthday after we were together (we've been together 3.5 years now). It said, "I sense a peace in you ever since you met Heather." She just didn't know that it went both ways. So in a way, I guess that's the overarching umbrella encompassing all the many little ways my life is better with my boyfriend - he gives me peace.