Relationships

We, people, have pictures of all kinds of things in our heads. The ideal. The future. Stuff we assume. When you’re young (whatever that might be) we picture what our life will hopefully look like. The kinds of “toys” we will have or where we might live. We do the same with the way we picture relationships.

Without getting deeper into how these pictures are formed, I think it’s fair to say that most of us have or have had relationships that came into focus looking totally different than what was in our head (or what we saw with others). Oh boy. Now we’ve done it. My father doesn’t look like that dad photo or my sister resembles a stranger. Again, there’s way too much to unpack to get to “how” this came to be. I’m just sticking with the idea that the picture of any relationship may not be the one you had in mind.

Ok. So be it. In any relationship, there’s only 50% that any of us get say in. That makes people who like control cringe. But it’s true. Sometimes, accepting the relationship for what it is or isn’t is all you can do with your 50%. That’s not to say that the picture is static, not changing. It’s more of an acceptance that maybe there’s a different picture in the file that we have to choose from. If you’re like me, you change your screen saver consistently, so it’s not a foreign concept. Acceptance doesn’t have to mean we’re giving up.