The first time that I heard someone say, “your current situation is a result of your decisions”, I was disgusted, to say the least. I imagined how a woman with three kids couldn’t escape the clutches of an abusive man. I thought of an array of reasons why she could be trapped by a tyrant. I later learned how even the most violent of relationships were once sweet but signs, however, were showed and signs were ignored and eventually, it became a trap. A trap may look and feel inescapable but it actually always surmountable. If you take a really hard look at the situation then you find that the victim feared to lose the benefits and comforts that come with leaving the tyrant. Also, they feared the challenges that would come with striking out on their own. The most consistent result out of a person who challenged their fears is confidence they never thought they had before. They later become new people because they awoke what they already had but did not know. So it is safe to say that the victim should confront and admit their role in the complacency that nurtured the escalation of the would-be abusive relationship. By sheer definition of the term relationship, a connecting link is at the center. So whatever your partner does in the relationship you are connected to the cause of the action or affected by the result. So let’s see how you could be destroying or contributing to the demise of your love thing…

A COLD SHOWER THREESOME

When you are trying hard to be a couple but she has that one needy friend that is practically a boyfriend too. God forbid you can’t make it to a said plan, she is always on hand to step in and fill in for you. This is the kind of friend that would throw tantrums or sulk should any of the friends in the group befriend other friends outside of the circle. Your girlfriend is her girlfriend. She probably weighed in on your progress to getting this lady. Your object of desire has no privacy because her phone is overly accessible to her girlfriend. You have to check if she is on the other end before you send a dick pick on a random midday Sunday. It is easy to blame your girlfriend’s girlfriend about this three-way situation. But your lady is  also largely to blame because she allows this other woman to happen to the both of you. At that time, she should be protecting, firstly, you from being accessed by another woman and, secondly, what you are building. The question is what are you doing about this situation? Will you try and stop it, and risk being vilified for asking her to let her girlfriend find her own way in this world so you can begin to find yours together? This threesome is happening to your bro and your penis isn’t getting wet, bruh!

EXPECTING WHAT YOU GIVE

Forget it… no one will ever love you the way you 100% expect to be loved. There only possible way someone can love you the way you want to and expect to be loved is if you love your own self. Which in any case is the very first point of departure when seeking someone to love you. When you have loved yourself you become aware of what fulfills you. And, what you can give, allow and most importantly, what defines someone not loving you. This is how you are able to let go of people that say one thing and act the other before they have drained all the love you have for yourself just to feed their egos. Ever been with someone but can’t shake the feeling that you are a failing representation of an ex? Or that feeling that you are expected to be a certain type of person and your only sin was that you were a walking body carrying a penis or vagina and this body of yours should do what somebody else should be doing; her male friends, that other couple you know, some colleague or a childhood friend is doing. Here you are striving to match levels of other couples; going into debt trying to keep up. It will always be a loss for you because the more debt or commitments you get into purely to make your partner happy will imminently fail because they are not your passions. Failing that, then the very partner you were doing these for will have no choice but to leave because you are failing to provide her what she/he considers evidence of loving them.

FEAR

Love is a dog from hell. Love hurts and at one stage most people have loved deeply and were burnt. This burning is the same as the burning one would have had as a child when you played with a candle to find out just how much pain fire can possibly induce. With all its glow, grace and beauty curiosity pulled you towards the flame. You soon found out that it is a powerful phenomenon that needs to be approached with an equating responsibility and self-control. You learn that you can’t control the phenomena, it’s natural and wild. You learn that you can only control yourself. This self-control can be excessive where even in adulthood you’ve closed yourself up from the glow, and beauty romantic loves offers opting instead for flickers, afterglow and smoke rather than love itself. They say hurt people hurt people. This could be vengeance, it could be – being selfish in your relationship that it defeats the definition of being a relationship. Then it becomes a tool to satisfy whatever your objectives are in having access to an individual. At this point, you will be sabotaging yourself while also ruining the next person’s perception of what love means. If we do this enough times we will surely find it harder and harder to find or know when a love thing is real.