My Two Cents on Relationships

Since everybody knows that JIP is a relationship guru, I’m going to let everybody in on a little secret: relationships aren’t that hard. There. I said it. I honestly don’t think they are. The actual relationship in itself is not the issue; the extra ingredients that we like to add to it are the real issue. We go out of our way to make relationships way more stressful, drama-filled, and unpleasantly eventful than they have to be. Why do we seem to enjoy doing this?

Let me preface this by saying that I’m talking about people in monogamous relationships; if you have some sort of arrangement with several guys/females, great for you…there’s no way around your drama. But I believe that one of the main problems with relationships today is that everybody has their own agenda. You have people fighting to maintain the upper-hand, creating an unnecessary power struggle. You have people testing their partner to see what they are able to get away with, creating insecurity and trust issues. You have people leading each other on for their own personal gain/satisfaction, creating pain and eventual heartbreak. This all begs the question: why are you really in a relationship in the first place? If your intentions are not pure aren’t you really doing more harm than good?

I’ll call my proposed solution “The Pursuit of Happiness model” (word to Kid Cudi): if we all put our egos aside and genuinely searched for a person that makes us happy, then we would all be fine. That’s the hard part… finding that person that is your match. Once you find that person there will be bumps and bruises, but that’s life. But those bumps and bruises shouldn’t come from running games on each other, infidelity, or trust issues in general…those are unnecessary problems.

Under this model, people would still break-up of course because everybody is not made for everybody else, but the pursuit of a happy relationship would be much more pure because it would be built off of good intentions. It’s a shame how much people talk about how they’ve been hurt in past relationships for things other than just not being made for each other. Then the cycle just perpetuates…they pass their pain and anger from the past on to the next person and so on and so forth.

Now I know as well as anybody that it’s basically impossible to get everybody in the world to adopt this new way of thinking…there are too many evil forces out there for that. But what we can do is apply this knowledge to our own personal interactions. Life is hard enough as is; we shouldn’t make our relationships that way.

Who knows though? Maybe one day we will completely change our collective mindset and the world will be a much happier place. In the meantime we can dream, right?

Cheers to happiness and the pursuit thereof,

JIP