Hmmm...

"No matter how long you have gone on a wrong road, turn back." - Turkish proverb

"Choose your partners well. They have more influence over the future than you think."


I was reading two different articles today and these two quotes jumped out of the pages. I couldn't concentrate on the rest of the articles as I kept going back to these two lines. They are from different subjects: the proverb was from a leadership/management article and the second was from a relationship essay. But somehow, if you put them together, they make some sense.

Establishing a relationship (no matter what kind) takes some time and effort. Ocasionally, no matter how much diligence is applied, the relationship fails. So what happens then? Do we just stop in the middle of the road, figure out what went wrong from there and then go on? Do we retrace our steps back to the beginning so we can check for the red flags that we have blissfully ignored? Or do we walk around in circles until we exhaust ourselves? Think of what you've done before when one of your relationships crashed. What worked and what didn't is a matter of personal opinion.

Choosing whom to have a romantic relationship with nowadays has become practically a science. And who's to blame? No one wants to get hurt along the way so we have resorted to IQ tests, personality tests, even psychological and psychic tests! In a way, the second quote is right. Previous failures make us more careful. "Once bitten, twice shy" as the other saying goes. But if we analyzed all our failed relationships, we will never attempt to establish new ones because the fear of failure will always be present. We begin to second-or even third-guess ourselves. The essence of spontaniety that is the magic of romantic relationships is now gone.