I will start by saying I don't necessarily have a solution to what I am writing about, I don't know how the solution would flesh itself out. What I do know is that I'm seeing a trend and it is beginning to trouble my heart. It's like seeing a plane crash and not being able to do anything about it.
It is human nature to need people in our lives, to need relationships, to need interaction with other people in order to be healthy. From the moment we are conceived we have to depend on someone else for our survival. Our mothers carry us inside their body providing us with the nourishment we need to grow and develop. After we're born we rely on our parents (if we're fortunate enough to have two) to feed us, clean us, dress us, take us to the doctor, to make sure we grow and mature into healthy individuals. If it were not for our parents taking care of us, if we were born and then left in a room alone, we would die. I believe the same is true with our emotional development and health when it comes to our relationships with other people.
I had breakfast with a priest a few months ago. I was curious about the Catholic faith and wanted to ask him some questions. Father Jon was a nice guy, he answered all my questions, paid for breakfast, and even said I could take communion if I attended his church. He began explaining the impact he has as a priest in people's lives. Talking about a family within his church he told me the parents had been regular members for years. While they were at St. John the Baptist they'd had children and their children had grown up and were beginning to get married and have children of their own. Although the parents still attended St. John's their adult children did not attend regularly, only on special occasions and holiday's. As the children grew up and began getting married they would call the church and ask Father Jon to facilitate their marriages. He said something very interesting that still sticks with me. He said, "even though this families children do not regularly attend my church, I will always be connected to their lives because I've been a major part in some of the most important events in their lives. When something important happens they know they can turn to me for help."
It's unfortunately too natural that we can so easily dismiss people from our lives. It doesn't matter what connection we have with people, it doesn't matter how long someone has been in our lives, it doesn't matter that we've been together through thick and thin. When something happens within the relationship we have the unfortunate ability to completely dismiss that person from our lives. When something happens and we become hurt or offended we retreat from the individual and begin the process of removing them from our lives completely. How did we come to the conclusion that removing someone from our lives, forgetting the memories we've created with them, and beginning the long journey of moving on will somehow be easier and better for us than fixing the relationship together and moving past the pain and hurt?
We place such little value on people. We can go from loving someone and being deeply connected to their lives on one day to wanting to have nothing to do with them on the next. From what I can gather I don't see these same issues with relationships in older generations. In today's culture we are told if something doesn't work we should get rid of it and get something better. Your car isn't performing properly? Don't fix it, just sell it and go start a new lease. Your cell phone isn't the latest and greatest gadget? Get rid of it and get a new one. From what I've been seeing and experiencing over the last few years I see the same mentality in relationships. The relationships we're in aren't working out the way we'd like them to work? Dispose of the person and go start a new relationship with someone else. This issue has been placing intense pressure and pain on my heart lately. The most painful emotion I've felt in my life is going from being deeply connected to someones life and then having to move to essentially strangers in the crowd.
To be clear, I am not saying we should stay in dysfunctional and damaging relationships for the sheer reason of not giving up on people. If a relationship isn't working out, if things continue to go wrong and it's causing dysfunction, it's okay to end the type of relationship you are in but still keep the person in your life. If two people are dating and it's clear things are not going to work out, by all means stop dating. However, don't completely remove the person from your life. Don't throw the person away, value who they are and remain in their life.
I dated a girl a few years ago and the dating relationship didn't work out. Nothing major happened we both simply realized we weren't good together within the contexts of romance. However, we are still friends today. Neither one of us made the decision to completely remove the other from our lives. We spent time apart but we've remained good friends to this day. To be honest, I wish this was the case with all of my ex-girlfriends. You cannot simply go from loving someone to hating their very existence. Well, you can but I don't believe you should.
It just feels like we don't love people any more. Instead we use people for what they can give us and when we've determined they are of no more benefit or value to our lives we get rid of the person.
I guess at the end of my life I don't want to look back on a list of people that I once knew, on women I once dated and had great experiences with, people I gave my heart to even for a short period of time, and see just names on a list or faces in a crowd. I want to look back at those people and know they're still in my life, know we are still close and still friends. I want to look at these people and be able to say we still love each other in some way.
I am not sure if this makes any sense to you. I've been looking back at my life lately and seeing people I knew years ago and people I've known recently or still know. There are a lot of people I see from my life and there is no relationship any longer with that person. If I wanted to call the person I couldn't. That's what bothers me the most and I don't think I'm alone in this kind of thinking.
So what's my point? Stop throwing people away, stop running from relationships over silly things. Start placing a higher value on other people's lives and begin loving them better.
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