Being in this field for nearly 10 years, I’ve seen and heard almost all the stories possible about what constitutes a great relationship and its opposite. I’ve met women who have survived a really traumatic relationship and men who have been through equally painful ones.
It makes no difference at all; whether it be a man or a woman and all the other politically incorrect equations about gender – fact is fact: there are a few things that should guide us into the lives that we desire, in whatever field we wish, especially when it involves our romantic relationships.
Not so long ago, I’ve dealt with one client who had just gotten out of a relationship of two years. She was young, barely in her mid twenties. This was a young woman who’s never been in a relationship before, and did not have any sort of standard when it came to how she should be treated as a woman; a victim of verbal abuse, and later on physical abuse.
This carried over as our session lasted months on and off. She would come by every so often whenever she needed to let out some steam, when she would remember the bad episodes in her previous relationship. From what I’ve gathered, she and another client went through the same problem. This time I was dealing with a man.
He was your average guy who was very smart and silent, who preferred things were put to place and got together with a woman with a tub of insecurities. This showed me a pattern. So other than just having him unleash his burdens to me, I asked about the history of the person he was with at the time. She had excess baggage and that was something textbook did not expound to me very much.
The results were the same. They became victims of co-victims. At one point I thought of setting them up, except that they both really didn’t want to start seeing other people – a result of the traumatic relationship.
Piecing things together, 2 years after, the Young Woman came back and told me how much her life has changed after she had found someone a year after her painful experience. “It was not easy”, she explains. “I was still fresh out of the trauma, but my friendship with this guy I’m now with saved us both.” They hung out everyday, and she did the opposite of what she used to do. “I made sure that the feelings were real, and these are things you shouldn’t base on the first date alone. The best foot forward pattern is always an option for every relationship –even I used to subscribe to that. So, I became my true self the entire time (or so I’d like to think) and thank goodness I didn’t have to try so hard because our friendship gave us that advantage.”
Recollecting stories of relationships from my friends, clients and personal experience, I saw one common denominator. It was the friendship and mutual respect and understanding. This can stretch as far as two people who have totally different tastes in everything, and that’s supposedly another issue altogether, but then again, when you’ve been friends for quite sometime now, all that seems to become next to unimportant.
