Quote:
Originally Posted by jamestl2  How is it possible to really place our hopes and dreams in someone else's hands? |
Therein lies the rub: placing your hopes and dreams in other people's hands is giving them an awful lot of responsibility, don't you think?
I'm going to ignore the debate over biological determinism and who's more controlled by their hormones than who, because that first statement of yours really leaped out at me. Nobody else has responsibility for your happiness, whether you're in a relationship with them or not, and asking somebody else to be responsible for it is unfair. Perhaps if you reframe what you think should happen in a relationship, whether it's about handing over all of that to somebody else to be devastated when they don't provide, or whether it's about growing together sharing hopes and dreams.
I've begun to notice that what we do with relationships is walk in with an outcome in mind. A relationship is successful if he or she is everything we imagined and it lasts "forever". We expect the other person to provide us with something: a sense of being loved, secure, adored, whatever it happens to be, and when they don't do that, we feel that they've failed us somehow. I'm currently in the process of rejigging how I see relationships, moving from a mindset where the partner provides something to sharing life in something and growing together rather than leaning on each other as though we're missing something only the other can provide. Does that make sense?