This insightful quote highlights the connection between humility and humiliation. By staying humble and grateful, we can avoid the pain of being humiliated and instead embrace a sense of awe and appreciation for the blessings of life.
In an intimate partnership, agreements and rules are mutually chosen. Fairness means abiding by these sacred alliances or renegotiating if they no longer align with the relationship's ideals. With mutual fairness, the need for score-keeping disappears.
Honesty, authenticity, and transparency are the bedrock of trust. They predict whether your partners will be who they say they are. Gaslighting and ghosting do not exist in these relationships. The people in these partnerships make mutual decisions based on reality rather than assumptions made in confusion and conflict.
It is often scary to take the risks needed to challenge oneself and others in a long-term relationship when the consequences might be hard to bear. Yet, thoughts, beliefs, and actions withheld to maintain a questionable harmony often backfire when those pent-up behaviors erupt.
Long-term relationships too often fall prey to the same-old predictable interactions. Though it is often comforting and more secure to know what your partner might or might not do, it is never as compelling as new thoughts and personal transformations. Couples who balance commitment to their relationship with continuing personal transformation are the most likely to keep each other engaged.
There will always be challenges in every relationship, both from within and from without, and some couples have more than their share of losses. Yet, staying broken and buried by those legitimate heartbreaks is likely to steal time and energy from recuperation.
No relationship can survive an unequal responsibility for the things that go wrong. Nor can it tolerate promises for change that never materialize. Accountability can only serve its purpose if behavior change follows the recognition of contribution.
Seeing the lightness in things when they get too heavy. Relieving tension in self and others. Laughing at yourself. Making others feel better. Shaking off your own sadness. These are crucial reasons for humor being a wonderful quality that often helps a situation heal.
We are always all the ages we’ve ever been, and there are times when the child in us desperately needs a safe haven to feel, to cry, to complain, and even to rant powerlessly.
Almost all relationships are, for the most part, transactional. We strive to keep our commitments but, of course, reasonably expect reciprocity when we need it in return. But the fairness that drives those agreements sometimes must be upended by an unexpected crisis that requires giving beyond the fairness that is normally present.