We must stand alone in order to stand beside someone

Ask people today what they think of dating, or the chances of meeting someone and it becoming a real something, a real relationship...

One where it withstands not only the joys that can be shared, but also loss, controversy, illness, conflict, and societal change. Also differences of opinion and the passage of time. One where you can be heard without fear, fear of losing your authenticity just to fit in, or to please. Or where age begins to impose fragilities that were not there before. Where "situationship" has replaced relationship.

No replacement for something that does not fear definition and that does not fade but deepens.

To be beside this kind of exchange, this kind of relationship, we need to have a complete relationship with ourselves, where we have personal acceptance and a sense of personal pride and understanding of the whole of who we are including our flaws. Where we are known to ourselves at the deep level of our own soul.

Ask, and you will not be surprised to discover how the ubiquitous unlikeness that this will actually happen is now the mainstay of our jaundiced belief. Mainly because we go into our relationships so ill-equipped and rely on initial felt joy, chemistry and attraction without thinking or taking into consideration not only what matters, but what matters to us. Chemistry is heady stuff and intoxicating, but it is not connection and is often mistaken as such.

We have the sweet shop of the swipe, as our great hope for love and connection and this frail option as our conduit to "happily ever after".

Where nobody behaves properly because our standards have fallen so low as only to ensure engaging in something with someone that isn't actually anything!

What does this constitute? This is not only what is on offer to 30-year-olds potentially out there in this LaLa land of dating, looking to start a family with someone in a partnership or a marriage, but it also applies to those of us who are older and wiser (supposedly), who know what matters in our senior years and somehow though are not applying this wisdom, but moreover, falling in line with the shabby standards on offer.

Not that fairy tale beliefs are all that we should cling to, but it gives us something to aspire to. What has replaced it, if not in truth a profound nihilism as its sad but true alternative.

We live in an age where only youth and social media popularity uphold our felt and known relevance. Where connection is endlessly talked about on social media, but the roots and foundation of what makes it possible is something we are too busy to embrace.

How we look and what we have. Where curiously we have at our disposal discussions, debates and podcasts about everything. But where for the most, it is superficiality that is lauded and king. So we join the throng armed only with what we wish and long for, and we settle, and when we do, we suffer.

Where upon investigation into love, and so much else, these are openly discussed. But who is upholding anything when the ephemeral is chosen because the "new" alternative is less hard work? And we wonder why things do not last.

Why these relationships do not last

They do not last because when it is easier to blame than self-investigate, we are all too busy laying what is not working or painful at another's door. Did Jesus not say, the Saviour of the world, in his integrity and profound wisdom and authority, "Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, but you do not notice the log in your own eye"?

Here we have the only thing that we can change and amend through humility and self-reflection. But what is sage and arcane has been forgotten. Knee-deep in the buzz words of what are fashionable awarenesses, we shrug our shoulders and opt-out.

Focus on what we can actually change - ourselves

When we develop the ability to focus on who we are with our own flaws and the humility to recognise ourselves and choose something higher and better, we can begin to really know who we truly are, and who we can stand beside.

In this, our outline is not compromised, and we can show up whole.

I do absolutely believe that when we are in rhythm with our own soul and truth, we are in a state of a preferable and undeniable emotional homeostasis. Here we are far more likely to make better choices.

It is from this emotional diving board, that is where the potential lives to have relationships that are not transactional but transformational.

We all arrive at a dividing line, a fork in our internal road, between where who are and who we were, cannot continue partaking in self-betrayal, and when we must face the myths that we have upheld in lieu of an integrity that is no longer negotiable. Our silence can no longer be complicit.

So at the beginning of our day, and also at its end our need to belong and to connect comes into our deep knowing and awareness, when our heads are upon our pillow, when we are alone with our truths. Here we need to be in alignment with what feels "right" with both our soul and conscience.

Let us therefore not leave this to our fears, where something with someone rather than nothing, or a pale ill-considered version of what we need and hope for will just do, let us have the courage to face our own truths. And honour our own needs.

Our relationships, both romantic and friendly, and our choices around them, will most probably - no, l will go as far as to say, will without doubt, be of the most huge importance because our happiness will depend on the choices we make and give either a life that is happy or that is unhappy. So we need to understand ourselves absolutely and without shame.

Investigate your value system. What is important to you?

Are you a person who needs to talk, to communicate deeply, one inspired by debate and personal investigation?

If so it doesn't matter how great the beginning is, chances are when faced with a situation that requires this kind of exchange if it's not there or accessible you will feel an emptiness where there should not be one. Eventually, you will go somewhere outside of that relationship to find what you need. And that my friend is an inevitability.

Please consider this

We need to aim for and aspire to what matters in the long game, what is capable of sustaining us. We are not taught this, and now more than ever because of the scarcity out there we think we need to tick boxes, rather than show up authentically in case we lose someone.

But how can we make choices that are sound without knowing who we are truly, rather than succumb to an ideal, or for women the loud ticking of our own biological clock? For heaven's sake, we are medically considered to be a geriatric pregnancy if we are over 34! Even though they now call it a pregnancy of advanced maternal age! We scorn age rather than respect its experience and wisdom. And we use it to marginalise a norm that makes our uniqueness irrelevant.

Where older people are dismissed and not revered. we need to start listening, really listening to them to their wisdom.

Listening is very underrated.

I know a quote that is relevant here.

"We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening of this kind is one of the most potent forces for change that l know. "

- Carl Rogers

I think this is so important and so true. Not only do l think this but it is what l have learnt.

Standing alone is not loneliness, it is sovereignty. 

We need to understand what standing alone means. So that we can be at someone else's side without losing ourselves or being propped up by what is flimsy.

It is something that has been authenticated by us, and for us, by choice through the integration of our own anima and what is crucial for psychological development and maturity that is un-negotiable.

We need to hang out with those who celebrate who we are, those who give us the benefit of the doubt, and who hold the place they have made for us, in equal measure to the place that we have made for them. Here we are safe. Safe with ourselves and safe without the need to fawn or invent.

This takes courage but having courage is not about whether we fall down, or fail along the way, whilst we are reaching for something better, it is about standing our ground for what is right for us and for knowing what that is.

Being able to stand alone, to be able to stand beside someone and to stay.