Where There's a Will There's a Way

My father worked two full time jobs for most of my life. At one point in my life he owned property in three states. He worked hard to do this. From his example I learned early on that through hard work and persistence you can have anything you want; anything is achievable through hard work, patience and persistence.

I carried this philosophy with me through my first career as a hair dresser, through my career in music, though my career in the restaurant industry and finally through my 25 plus years in my IT career while going to school to get, first an AA degree, then a BS degree, and finally working towards a second BS degree and a Masters. I applied this philosophy to everything in my life except romantic relationships. And it got me through. Considering where I came from, I was able to achieve a good many things. It wasn’t until I got married when I was turning forty that I applied it to a romantic relationship.

At that point in my life, I decided that it was time to work hard to make a relationship work. And I did. I applied brute force to my marriage, decided that no matter what happened that I was never going to give up and that I would MAKE it work. In hind sight, which is in fact 20/20 by the way, what I didn’t see was that you cannot apply this philosophy to relationships. Why? Because there is another person involved, It is one thing for you yourself to work hard towards achieving a goal; it is a completely different thing to get someone else to work towards that same goal.

I am afraid now. I recall someone saying to me once in the not so distant recent past, that they were afraid to get involved with me in a romantic relationship because they were afraid of “disappointments”. I asked at the time, who are you afraid will be disappointed, you or me? And his response was “Both of us”.

This is why you cannot apply the “work hard and you can achieve whatever you want” philosophy to relationships. Because in trying to reach that lofty goal of having a happy healthy relationship, there are a lot of “disappointments” along the way. It’s a tough journey, fraught with dangers. You find out the little lies you’ve told each other. The habits that were once so adorable you now find annoying like nails on a chalkboard. And sometimes you find out deep dark deal breaking heartbreaking secrets that you wish you had never known.

I have learned an invaluable lesson in the last few years. There comes a time in a relationship when it is time to STOP working hard. There comes a time when it is time to give up and move on because no matter how hard YOU work, the relationship is never going to work. There comes a time when the disappointments outweigh the love and you just have to mark it up to a goal not achieved and there’s no harm in that. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It doesn’t mean that you are deficient in some way. It just means that you got involved with someone who is on a different path than you. It means that you got involved with someone whose personal rules of behavior are different than your own. And everyone has done it. Even people who now have happy healthy relationships, have been through disappointments, either with the person they are with or with people they have been with previously. No one is immune to these disappointments, they are part of life.

For more than two years, I went to temple every weekend; sometimes on both Friday and Saturday. I would see couples, examples of people who, at least on the outside had happy healthy relationships with their spouses. The woman who would tell stories while we were all working in the kitchen together about her husband whom she had been married to for many years and had three children with. She would still have that gleam in her eye when talking about him that said “I am still in love with this man after all these years”.  I saw many examples of this and this is what I have always wanted.

One of my most favorite sayings is “There is a lid for every pot”. I still believe this; I just don’t think I have found my “lid” yet. Perhaps, at my age, I never will. I was always a hopeless romantic. But when I gave up on my last potential “lid”, I gave up on everything. I gave up the hope of ever finding that one person who thinks the way I do and doesn’t have some deep dark secret they’re hiding from me. I gave up on the idea of finding someone with whom the love outweighed the disappointments and with whom I could finally have the happy healthy relationship I wanted. I gave up on finding that person who when talking about him to a group of women on a morning in a Shul kitchen, would still bring a gleam to my eye, years after we had found each other. Some people are lucky in love. I don’t think I am one of them. I believe I am destined to be on my own. A year ago, this was a devastating idea to me. It is something now, I am learning to accept. And when I’m not afraid anymore, I will venture back out into world. I will find my hope again. Not for romance; THAT hope is never coming back. But at least I will find hope for people again, for life, and the pursuit of other things that make me happy. And I know I will still have disappointments. But without them, you will never know when you are actually happy. The balancing act is best performed when you can manage the disappointments with life’s good fortunes.