Your Choice: The Oasis Or The Desert

How does your relationship really make you feel?

We’ve been told time and time again that a relationship takes work. Work. Hard work. Real work. But if your relationship feels the same as powering up your work station and opening Microsoft Excel on a Monday morning, is that really a good relationship?

It is true of anything in this life that if you want it to be good, it takes effort to make it that way. In our relationships, however, is effort the same thing as work? Effort implies something you do because you want to. Work implies that it’s something you do because you have to.

There are things in a relationship that are always going to feel like work. Doing the dishes, washing the car, and taking the kids to school. But you’d be doing those things outside of a relationship too. That’s just being a competent adult. Life admin and chores are something we all have to do.

So what should a good relationship actually feel like? It’s wrong to expect a single person to make us skipping-down-the-road happy every day. That’s not possible, even if it were desireable. That’s too much to ask of another person. It is realistic to always feel safe with and committed to a person.

Marriage is a vocation. It’s not enough to want to be married to another human being. You have to want to be married full stop. You have to want to be a spouse willing to take on all the duties that entails. If marriage doesn’t exist to make us skipping-down-the-road happy everyday, what is it for?

Our relationships don’t have to make us happy every day, but they should fill us with an overwhelming sense of contentment, safety, and wellbeing. The space you share with your spouse should be the ultimate safe space in which you both thrive.

Your relationship should feel like how an artist feels about the effort of making a painting, not how the artist feels about the crummy day-job they do that allows them to buy paint and pay rent. Those are two very different types of ‘work’.

Your partner in a healthy relationship should feel like the oasis, not the desert. If you’re ever second-guessing your relationship, ask yourself one question about your relationship overall: Is this the oasis or the desert?

The oasis might not make you happy every day, but you should always feel safe and comfortable within it.

Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett