The Failure of Relationships

I have been having a lot of conversations with people lately about the failure of their last relationship. (Either a lot of relationships have been ending lately, or I'm just hanging out with a lot of people who are at key transitions in their life. Since I've been in a key transition for a couple years now, it's quite possibly the latter.) They all describe how wonderful their relationships were, and how long they lasted (sometimes as long as 25 years, sometimes as short as 6 months), and what they think are the reasons it ended. ("She cheated." "We grew apart." "He was abusive." "There wasn't enough sex." "He only wanted sex.") It's always sad when a relationship ends. Because it's hard for most people to be alone (and even those who can handle being alone still crave human contact). Because so much time and energy went into creating and sustaining the relationship for as long as it lasted. Because life was just more beautiful and satisfying when you were in love. We've all heard it. Most of us have lived it. But there's something more going on here than just the classic, cliche tales of breakups. In talking to these people, I asked them about how they got along with that person now that the relationship had "ended." And while there were a few who truly had no more contact with their ex, most had some form of continuing contact. Some even said that now that they had divorced/separated/broken-up, they got along better and were good friends. Those with children in common often said that they still collaborated in raising the kids, and met regularly to talk about those remaining ties. And it occurred to me that their relationships didn't "fail." They didn't "end." The relationships had just...changed. They still had a "relationship" with their ex. It just wasn't the same relationship that they had before. And now, instead of looking at those relationships as "failed," I started to see them as part of the natural order of things. Because everything changes. *Everything*. The weather changes. The seasons change every year. The world changes in geologic time. The stars themselves change in "galactic" time. And we change. Our moods, our experiences, our wants and desires. We change all the time. And so must our relationships. To think that a relationship is a static thing that will forever remain the same is just silly, once you think about it. I mean, all of us know that relationships take some work, and that to stay together sometimes takes *hard* work. But does separating mean that the relationship "failed?" Or just that it ran it's course - it had its time in the sun and then changed, moved on. It takes two to make a relationship work. It only takes one to change it. The amazing thing isn't how many relationships "end" (or change) - it's how many happen at all, how two people can make something that must inevitably change last as long as we do. It's a normal human emotion to fear change. Change is uncertainty. Uncertainty causes fear. We fear what we cannot control, invent stories and fictions to explain that which we neither control nor understand. But change happens whether we want it to or not. Constantly. All around us. Everything changes. But...even though a relationship changes, it should take nothing away from the fact that it happened. It existed for a time. It was real. And it was good. That should be a good memory. Not a bad one. We should revel in the goodness of our current relationships. Appreciate them. Because they are ephemeral. They will change. And then we will have new relationships in which to revel and appreciate.