Relying on other people for your happiness is tricky business. It’s something that everyone does without first realizing that if you rely on the actions of other people to make you happy you will spend much of your life sad. In some cases people will deliberately do things to make you sad and in other cases people will simply do what’s best for themselves contrary to your expectations. Either way you will be very sad.
Regardless of the actions of other people we can be happy. The problem is that we really aren’t taught about that when we’re young. The experiences of our youth shape who we are as adults. Society sees it as more desirable to have many friends rather than few (or no) friends. The big family or group of friends that spend a lot time together has been a popular storyline on TV and in movies for many years. Hence, we grow up believing that happiness is a function of maintaining various relationships. But it’s not true.
There are a number of very good reasons why relationships with other people are not the key to our happiness. One important reason has to do with mobility in the modern age. Many years ago (like back in the 1950s) people typically lived and work in the same general area for a very long time. So people spent much of their lives around the same core group. In the times we live in now people are highly mobile and it’s not unusual for teenagers from the same group of friends to scatter all over the country (or world) when they go to college. The same holds true for when those people start their careers. The same hold true for family members and children. It’s possible that you might stay in contact with people who move away but electronic contact will not give you the same satisfaction as in-person contact.
Another reason is that people change. We grow up believing that we’ll be friends with certain people for life because we like who they are and we’re compatible with them. Over the course of my life I have experienced friends, family members and romantic partners who have changed drastically. Some changed to the point where I really disliked them. These changes shook my inner peace and made it difficult to be happy. I was still hanging on to who they were to me and what I thought that we meant to each other. I expended a lot of emotional energy trying to reset things. That was energy wasted though. I learned that once people changed that nothing I did could un-change them.
People will also act, in various ways, in their own self-interest. We are all faced with many decisions in life related to things like relationships, career, money and health. Many times those decisions will involve separation from people we are close to, including parents, spouses and children. These are difficult decisions but we must make them and the decision to not do something due to a relationship is not always the right one. If you beg a person to defer a decision to stay near you and they listen to you then they will likely resent you if staying disappoints them. The same goes for you if you decide to stay in a relationship and forego a change for the benefit of another person.
Finally, people die. In fact, if you live long enough almost everyone leaves you via death. My mother is in her late 70s and in good health but every couple of months now she tells me about a friend of hers who is either very sick or has died. I can hear the sadness in her voice when she tells me about the deaths of her friends or family members. I don’t want her to constantly be sad though. Her sadness won’t make anyone better and won’t bring back friends who have passed. I also don’t want her to get sadder and sadder as she gets older. We all know what it’s like to be sad and in our short time on this earth I believe we are meant to be happy, difficult though it may be to stay happy.
The bottom line is that if happiness is a choice (it is) then it is still our choice to be happy when other people leave us for one reason or another. It helps to be prepared for the eventuality of people exiting our lives. We mustn’t strive to hold on tight to relationships when other people are pulling away. Interestingly, I have found in my life that when I don’t struggle so hard to maintain relationships that new people enter my life more easily. Instead of struggling to maintain relationships we should enjoy the relationships we have that are active and going well. We should set our expectations with the understanding that all relationships will end.
I have one last, but very important, thought to share with you on this topic. Joyful goodbyes are important. Even if you believe you will see a person again very soon it’s possible that you may not. You should consider that possibility when saying goodbye to someone. If you take it to heart joyful goodbyes can transform your approach to relationships and make you feel a whole lot better if in fact you don’t see that person again.
In The Midst Of A Journey 