Chapter 16. Make the Connection
All relationships start with you. You need to know what truly makes you happy, because a relationship can be a bandage for covering issues that may actually hurt or end your rela- tionship. Does that make sense? I have a friend who is only happy when he is in a relationship. It has been a cycle I have watched for years. He
The quality of your relationships with your spouse, children, business associates, and even strangers are critical for achieving long-term success.
never took the time to find out what truly makes him happy in his own life; therefore, he can not know what would make him happy in a relationship, much less what he wants in another person. So he gets into one romantic relationship after another. The bliss of the new relationship keeps him on a high for a while. I will even watch him temporarily take on some of the characteristics of the person he is dating. Then, once things get more serious, he feels they don’t have that much in common, and slowly the bliss ends and the rela- tionship fades away. He really does not know why this happens, except that he feels he keeps getting in failed relationships. He blames it on bad luck. It’s not bad luck. Rather, he is going into a relationship blinded by the craving to not be alone, which we all have. But the way he does it makes it a catch-22. He does not want to be alone, so he grabs onto the first person that takes the feeling of loneliness away. But since he really does not know what he wants for himself and in a relationship, he is destined to be alone yet again. Recently, he asked me for advice on relationships. We had a great talk, and today he has become a happier person with himself because he looked deeper in to what makes him happy. The only way to make another person happy is to be true to yourself. Whether you are hoping for a new relationship or want to enrich a current one, you can follow an easy process so that your relationships can be incredible assets and not chores. This particu- lar section is geared for personal relationships, but since we’re
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