Stregthening "I" to maintain "US or WE"

Love is really an act of faith. When I was younger, I had no way of knowing, or understanding, this simple yet absolute truth. I just assumed two people met, fell in love and, like all my favorite storybook endings, lived happily ever after. It really wasn’t until this relationship that I’m currently in that I learned that love is more than pink bows and sunshine, but that building solid partnerships takes effort. And that the process of working on one’s self, as well as the relationship, helps to make it last, and flow more smoothly. After all, two shaky halves don't make for a super-strong whole. But it's an act of faith because inevitably we don’t know how it all will turn out. No matter how much time and work we put into a relationship, in the end, we aren't guaranteed it will last. we breka up some times. So when we meet someone we want to build something with, we must simply give it our all and hope for the best.

We hope the love grows, and remains, even through the arguments, disappointments and hardships. We hope that he or she will be the person we want to stick it out with, even when life throws us hurdles and things feel terribly tough. That’s the hope.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About how two separate individuals, each with their own sets of issues, baggage, lives, needs, goals and desires, come together as one? How do they create a single, loving, healthy, mutual partnership? Because the way I see it, unless both people work on their “stuff” individually, they will just bring it into the relationship, and the same issues will keep popping up over and over. There are our individual issues, and our relationship issues, and oftentimes the two are all tangled up together. As a couple, we try to work out the kinks of our relationship, but working on ourselves, for the most part, is an individual process - and one which can absolutely bolster the partnership. The strength of the "I" seems to be necessary when it comes to maintaining the health and the happiness of our "us".

But is there a point when, even though two people may be madly in love and want nothing more than to live their lives together, they still can't make it work? Because there are certain fundamental "make or break" areas in which they can't agree, or even compromise? So the team breaks down because, in those cases, love just isn't enough? It hurts to think that there are circumstances where love isn't enough. Even though I'm grown now and I realize that relationships aren't always hopelessly romantic and perfect, I still hold the sanguine notion deep in my heart that love can conquer anything; that love is all there is; that if two people are truly in love, their relationship can survive any obstacle.

Unfortunately life and love aren't as idealistic as I once imagined them to be. I have learned that recently, many times over. I don't say this in a negative way; I am actually grateful for the doses of hard reality life has force-fed me. I am a much stronger, and more balanced, aware, and confident adult because of them. Maybe in the end, this is what it takes to build a functional relationship: two people surviving, working through and learning from their own life experiences, and then coming together to create (and sustain) something that is jointly fulfilling, joyful and lasting. I hope so, because, though not as simple as a foot fitting perfectly into a glass slipper, that seems dreamy and wonderful to me too. Doing the work to reap the rewards--working hard, living life, working on oneself as well as the relationship, and fighting for love.