The Right Relationship Starts with You

Attracting and Creating a Beautiful Relationship

By Cathie Barash

It is amazing how wedding ceremonies can all look very similar to one another. There is the gorgeous dress, beautiful decorations and festive surroundings that mark a fantastically planned wedding day celebration. However, once the marital festivities end, the differences in marriage relationships can look completely different from one another.

This is because we all have different levels of maturity, personal growth, and love within us which is evidenced in our interactions with others. These varying degrees of growth will influence the health and criterion we use for selecting a partner, and drastically impact the emotional availability we experience in our relationships. It is important to note, that choosing a partner of good character means being a partner of good character as well. We have all heard that like attracts like and this certainly applies to our choices in mates.

Therefore. . . the more we know and love ourselves, the more likely we will choose an emotionally-healthy partner too. Learning about ourselves is a process, and making personal changes can be a challenge because we don’t know what we don’t know.

This means that we are not always aware that we need to mature in a certain area until we experience pain which usually comes from making mistakes. Not knowing what we don’t know can be equated with the growing-up process. As toddlers and teenagers, there is a certain level of understanding we have which is limited, because of our age and level of development. When we look back over our life, we can see how many things we didn’t know but only learned through errors in judgment.

As we grow older, we realize in retrospect how much we didn’t know at each stage of our development; even though we were quite certain we did know all there was to know at each point along the way.

With maturity, we usually develop willingness and open mindedness, to learn the life tools necessary to broaden our vantage point, and expand our consciousness beyond what we already know. We start researching and asking questions in order to gain information when making decisions, and not just base everything on our own perceptions and ways of doing things. We eventually realize that we can’t be an expert on everything, so we begin to admit this fact and seek out those who know more in a particular area of life than we do.

We begin exploring our internal world by checking in on our thoughts and feelings and see how they might be affecting our external world. This introspection helps us to reassess our thoughts by reframing the negative ones to more positive feelings and results.

When the careers, homes or friendships we want don’t materialize as fast we think they should, we start to trust and believe that if our desires don’t materialize the way we expect them to, then maybe what we wanted isn’t in our best interests; in spite of our strong assertion that they are.

We can take actions to create our desires but sometimes, not getting what we want is a blessing too. Often, it means that there is a more suitable job, home or friendship down the road than the ones we believed were good for us.

The learning process continues throughout adulthood. It is always important to remember that we are forever a student of life, and that there will always be new insights, and levels of awareness that will be revealed to us through the experiences of our life.

Making mistakes and experiencing the consequences from our actions is useful in teaching us to see something in a different light, and reveal a better way to do something. Painful challenges and feelings that surface in our life, usually force us to search for an understanding of why something is happening, and to reach out for help in coming to grips with it, in order to excavate old habits.

Being aware and accepting that there will always be things to learn means that our current skill set can be improved, and better solutions to problems can be learned to make our life easier and share it with others too. Knowledge is power, and all of our experiences have led us to all the wisdom we enjoy today.

The Right Relationship starts with us and that involves taking ownership for our choices, personal growth and self-care activities while eliminating excuses for our actions or the lack thereof. Happiness begins with us, and it is only through self-love that we can experience and serve the world from a healthier emotional plane, and attract healthier partners and life experiences as a result as well.

If a beautiful marriage or a partnership is what we desire, then a beautiful relationship with ourselves is a great start.