One Thing to Make All Your Relationships Better

I’m talking all relationships. Romantic, family, friendships, the ones with our kids. The relationships with our boss and co-workers. The one between us and the barista at Starbucks (mine isn’t that complicated, but you know… there are those people).

Relationships can be hard AF. We all live from our own perception of what’s happening inside our relationships. And most of the time when we’re having a difficult time with somebody it’s because that person isn’t doing what we want and we get all bat-shit crazy and start texting like a lunatic to our friends…

“My husband doesn’t do anything I ask… He just sits on his computer or phone all day long while I make all the plans, cook, clean and manage the social calendar.”

“My boss expects too much of me. She gave me another bullshit project and never hears me when I tell her I have too much on my plate.”

“She’s not texting me back. I text her yesterday. She’s playing games with me. This is bullshit. I went onto her Snapchat and she posted something an hour ago which means she’s ON HER PHONE. Which means she got my texts and she’s ignoring me! What should I do? Should I block her? Should I unfriend her? I’m going to unfollow her. I’ll show her.”

You get the drift…We have expectations of people. We want people to do things our way. We have this inherent need to want people to think like us, respond the way we feel we’d respond or think that the things we think are important are also important, to them.

We often expect people to read our minds and figure out what we want from them even when we haven’t communicated it. Then when they fail to telecommute information from our brain to theirs we get pissed off and think WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THEM?

So guess what? They aren’t always going to do things your way. They’re going to do things their way because they are their own unique and fabulous individual!

They grew up with different parents than you. They’ve had different life experiences than you which has shaped their thoughts, opinions and perception about things.

They may have grown up in a different culture or been raised with a different religious background than you.

Not to mention they are most likely a different astrological sign than you and we all know how complicated things can get when somebody’s Venus moon is in opposition to our Mars!

So we need to do one simple thing in all of our relationships…

Allow people to be who they are.

All of us want to be accepted for who we are, not who other people want us to be. There’s nothing more emasculating and disempowering than having another person tell us that they way we think, how we do things or what we believe in is wrong.

If we want people to be a certain way in our relationship then we need to be Ok with those same people telling us how we should be in the relationship. That means being OK with them having opinions about how we think, behave and do things.

I’m not saying we all don’t have room for improvement in all of our relationships Nor am I saying that anyone should put up with behavior that’s downright disrespectful or abusive.

What I’m saying is that at the end of the day, relationships can be hard AF because we’re all different. But the key to loving, supportive and feel-good relationships is acceptance. Acceptance for who another person is even when it’s different than us.

And the willingness to cut them just a little bit of slack so they can authentically be who they are without judgement, shame or making them wrong.

At the end of the day I think that’s what all of us really want from the people in our lives.