Perks without Works is Dead

Single ladies, let me be the first (probably the 100^th) to tell you…relationships ain’t easy!

Many of us have seen those sad but true and hilarious meme posts that read something like, “This could be us, but you playing” with a picture of a couple in marital bliss or “Everybody else is in love while I’m like…” and it shows a picture of a girl in a room lit only by her phone as she stares at it in bed.

All this to say, the desire for being in a relationship is known across the board. It seems that there are many who wish to find that someone whom they can call their own.

Yesterday, I was watching the movie “Boys and Girls” in which Claire Forlani’s character, Jennifer, asked a very profound question which was somewhere along the lines of: “Why can’t movies show what happens six months later [in the relationship] when everything starts going wrong?”

Here’s the thing, we can look at movies and we can look at the couples we see on Instagram and hope that our Prince Charming is out there clutching our perfect ending, but the posts rarely show the hardships.

Although the prospect of being in a relationship looks fairly dreamy, the work two people must put in to maintain the “fairytale” is far from what Disney portrays.

The problem with many young women in our generation is they want the perks of having a relationship without fully thinking through the works of it.

There comes a time where people just give up, they stop putting in the work and separate under the excuse of “we just fell out of love.” Or maybe they didn’t do the correct amount of work before they got into a relationship first to prevent having to go through the trouble of a breakup (that’s another post).

There will be arguments, there will be times when you don’t want him around, times when you’d rather be by yourself, and of course everyone experiences different trials, but never think your relationship is exempt from turbulence. Your troubles are NOT over once you get the one you want.

But do not dismay, there is a healthy way to go about disagreements (again, another post).

A wise man [Myles Munroe] once wrote, “You know you’re ready to date when you don’t need to.”

The best thing to do is to stop wanting and start letting life live. Before you know it, the more you don’t think about a relationship the closer you’ll be to that right man just popping into your life unexpectedly, and the more you will feel like a whole person. But you have to be willing to wait it out.

“Happily ever after” can in fact exist, but not until each partner does his/her due diligence.