Is It A Relationship Or A Prison?

The choice is up to you

There’s a perceived issue with most relationships: they become dull, stagnant, suffocating, toxic, or filled with resentment.

Those are just symptoms of a greater problem.

We all have a choice in how we want to share our lives with someone

We all have the choice to be a prisoner in our relationships. Though it’s not going to offer you a chance to learn and grow.

We’ve built these fronts when we get into relationships. It wastes years of our lives being fake. Anything less than honest dialogue is not a relationship.

A real-life example

I lived with my last partner for close to 3 years.

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help, but we stopped going on dates. We rarely set aside time as a couple. We lived as two people who occasionally had sex.

I didn’t speak my mind about her frequent personal trips away from home. It was her way or the highway.

I had a partner, but I still felt isolated and alone.

She ordered door-dash food nearly every night for us. I hated it. I failed to address the problems related to our poor sex life, bad spending habits, and the time away from each other.

I feared rejection, confrontation, and the excuses I might hear.

In the long run, it wasn’t worth pretending. I lost someone I loved dearly because I was afraid to be fucking real.

The facade of your relationship is guaranteed to eventually collapse

Instead of screening out the right people with authenticity, we craft a facade that we want people to see.

It’s a finely tuned, high-effort ordeal to get people to like us. We think we must create a version of ourselves based on an assumption of what the other person might like.

We go on dates or meet people hoping they’ll like who we pretend to be.

I am completely guilty of this with my ex. I lied to her. She wanted to know if I had been hurt by women in the past.

From her perspective, she had been mistreated by men before. Just as a side note, always ask for more details about a person’s dating history if they bring it up. It’s valuable insight into the potential relationship with this person.

I convinced her that I had been hurt by women in the past. She felt connected to me by this “shared experience”.

As you can imagine, it was hard to maintain this indefinitely as I never had been in a relationship.

When we build something on lies, it will eventually crumble. You might get rejected when you are honest with who you are dating. That’s a fact. It’s better to avoid the stress and be real.

It’s hard to admit, but you’ll never be liked or accepted by everyone, no matter what you do. Why not just be truthful?

The reason it’s so hard is that we’re hardwired to want to fit in; at the same time our society has ingrained in us a toxic belief:

We’re all supposed to be friends with each other. It’s better to be liked than to be respected. We worry about being liked at work, school, and home.

Both of my work environments over the last 10 years have felt like high school. Everyone is/was trying to win favor with someone else.

The absurdity of a lot of relationships is that our partners expect us to read minds.

We go along with things, hoping it could be different, but we don’t communicate the truth. Go on YouTube or even here on Medium, and there is so much relationship advice; you can find thousands of hours of content.

Of course, I understand the nuances of human interaction. It’s not as simple as stating your truth.

Yet we’re certainly adding fuel to the fire when we keep lying about our thoughts and emotions with someone we’re supposed to love and trust.

Why not say it like it is? Tell your partner how you feel, rather than avoiding difficult conversations.

Practice even when it’s inconvenient

It was time for me to be real when I started dating again.

I wasn’t perfect, and I still am not. I worry about what a woman might think of me on a first date. It eased my anxiety when I was on one date when I said to her“You know, I’m a little nervous”.

Admitting the truth will set your mind and by extension your body at ease.

Several weeks before that date, I was dating someone else for a few two months.

She needed to be more vulnerable with me. If we were to have a relationship, I wanted her to be more open with me.

I wasn’t going to tolerate another relationship like my last one.

Eventually, she screened herself out from my life. She left. She told me she couldn’t give me what I wanted.

It hurt to lose her, but that was more acceptable than pretending I was okay with her avoidant personality.

Better to find out now than months or years later that your desires don’t align. Be crystal clear — upfront, with people about what you expect.

If you don’t it’s a lot of wasted time.

Write it down, literally!

For yourself, I suggest you know what you want out of the relationship itself.

You can hone in on the right people, rather than just anyone. Start writing it down. Whatever you want from the relationship, you must be able to deliver yourself.

If you want honest, authentic communication, don’t expect that from someone else if you can’t be fully open.

I’ve done this myself with a list of attributes so I can focus on what’s important to me:

• Physical appearance
• How you will both communicate and how often
• How often do you spend time together
• If you’re going to have children
• Their personality and interests

There’s something to be said about being honest. Being authentic.

If all you want is casual sex, that’s fine, but you must be upfront about it, because the other person may not be. Or if you want a long-term committed relationship, be truthful about that.

You need to be able to filter out the wrong people and stop wasting time.