Gratitude

I was thinking the other day about why relationships don’t work out. Why you can be so in love with someone one day and then some time later there is nothing left but hurt and resentment.

I think that when you have so much of your emotional energy tied up into one person, it becomes more difficult as time passes to not associate every emotion with them, whether that person is the cause of the emotion or not. When you are happy, you attribute part of the happiness to them. And when you are angry, you do the same.

With really long relationships, and maybe the reason divorce is so common, we all go into relationships with a set of expectations about our lives and what they are going to be. Then, when the expectations (about our jobs, our lives, anything) aren’t fulfilled, the person closest to you can become the target of that misplaced disappointment. If you always dreamed of becoming an author, then years later it hasn’t happened, it’s easier to blame the person you are with for holding you back or to direct your anger at them than to be grateful to them for sticking around while you were flailing about being miserable.

And maybe once you start hurting each other, you start pushing each other further and further away until nothing is left between you but space. How do you bridge that gap once it is created, and how do you mend the places that don’t seem to fit together anymore?

It would be a much different world if we could somehow try gratitude in place of bitterness.