In this post I will firstly discuss how my relationship is going and then will share my views on what makes the relationship function well.

It’s the end of August now, which makes our relationship around nine months old. Our love for each other only deepened, but we did start arguing more, because of the difference in who we are.

And that’s okay. I never expected it to go smoothly all the time. We are two strong individuals with different likes and dislikes, and living together of course creates some clashes.

But the glue of our relationship – love – has only strengthened, because we found that although we are different, we are okay with that and our differences make the relationship interesting and ever fresh.

His Venus is in my house of pleasure, which tells a lot to those who know compatibility astrology. He is the one who can relax me fully, and I do need relaxation as I tend to be a workaholic. He is like a sunshine in my life, bringing play in my days of serious work.

He also makes me laugh. A lot. He’s like a child sometimes, doing the most unexpected and sometimes foolish things. Like once he left a candy on the shelf in a room, and we live in India, where ants are everywhere!

After an hour or so he felt like eating something, so he remembered the candy and the next thing I know it’s in his mouth. After a few seconds he realized he made a mistake – I saw it in his expression – and rushed to the bathroom to save his mouth from ants’ wrath.

I love when he does things like that, it really brightens my day.

Then one day he came up with what he thought to be a brilliant idea of getting a “love-link” (or whatever it’s called) tattoo on our wrists; so that when we place the wrists together, the love-link picture is complete. He also suggested to have each other’s names tattooed on wrists.

I was totally against it (I have no interest in tatoos) which made him really upset. But after an hour he forgot all about it, and was being his sunny self.

There’s no guile in him. With me he is never double-faced or double-minded. He shows all that he is – the negative and the positive, and I love this about him and this also makes me trust him. He also trusts me, and he doesn’t trust any woman except for his mother and sister.

I, on the other hand, provide him with stability. My readers tend to think of me as quite unpredictable because I research and change views based on findings; but as a personality I’m always the same – my mood is mostly totally peaceful and my daily routine doesn’t shift much.

He has so many personalities in one (being a Gemini) so I never know what to expect next. Yet my personality is always the same, and this makes him relaxed and it grounds him. And I do like his multiple personalities because this kind of variety provides balance (it balances my unchanging personality).

I’m perfectly happy going to the same restaurants, eating the same food, going for the same kind of walk during the sunset. Once I find something I like, I stick to it.

The waiters of my beloved restaurants know what I like, and I simply have to say “the usual” and they know exactly what to make. I find that this makes life very simple and it saves time. This also reminds me of what Shah Rukh Khan said about his unchanging eating habits. He said that his chef quit job because he could no longer force himself to make the same daily food for him.

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t search for novelties at all, and sometimes I’m forced to change because the world is moving on and I have to catch up with it, or because something unwelcome happens that I’m forced to react to.

My boyfriend loves this consistency which he lacks. So we complete each other in this way.

However, neither of us are perfect, so although we complement each other, we never search for fulfillment in one another. It’s true, when we are together we are like a unit, but we are always aware that we cannot base our life or happiness on one another because we are two independent characters and anything outside of our own selves changes because of the impermanence of life.

So when it comes to our relationship, it’s going very well in the opinion of both of us. I anger him sometimes, and he annoys me from time to time, but when we think about such times we only laugh. We are well aware that relationships aren’t perfect but we believe ours is actually really good.

Which takes me out of the personal relationship update into the general teaching on relationships based on my experience. Many relationships end because people expect them to be ideal and their other halves – perfect. People expect their other halves to complete them.

Only you can complete yourself – no other being can. So if a relationship starts with this expectation, it has an expiry date already.

Destructive media influence

Another thing that damages the chances of a successful relationship is the media. It portrays through Hollywood movies and ads a loose lifestyle which implies satisfaction. But the very opposite happens if such a lifestyle is pursued. People start feeling empty and soulless.

One of the worst aspects of the media propaganda is the encouragement of multiple love affairs. When a person has multiple partners, he gets weighed down by multiple soul-ties which rob him of mental clarity and make it highly unlikely for him to form a lasting and meaningful relationship.

I’m amazed at the discordant energy that even the Western youth (not to say older people) have around them. It just makes me want to run away. It’s because they have so many soul-ties that their energy fields are a mess.

Each intimate relationship eats up a bit of your soul, and that’s why people feel so empty after yet another partner.

The way out of this depressive state is cord-cutting and celibacy. It’s my personal experience (and I observed it in the lives of others as well) that when you stay free from soul cords and stay celibate, eventually you end up attracting the person that’s your soul-mate and marriage is a huge possibility then.

It’s so sad that our culture encourages such an irresponsible lifestyle. People are more aware of the ingredients in their foods than the personal history of people with whom they choose to sleep. In India, this kind of lifestyle is still seen as horrid, and I see it in that way too.

I thank God I wasn’t lured by the media into such a soulless activity. I was too introverted to be affected by such a propaganda. I followed what my soul wanted to do, and this made me stay away from meaningless sexual encounters many people frequently have.

It’s not normal, neither is it healthy for your body, mind and soul to have many sexual relationships. It’s especially damaging for women, because they naturally get more attached, and quicker. So such an unnatural lifestyle messes with their heads and makes it very difficult for them to have a healthy long-term relationship.

There are so many dysfunctional families today, and I largely blame the media influence for that. If people would disconnect from their gadgets and connect with their hearts, the meaningless activity of changing love partners as socks would cease.

It’s easy to change sexual partners today, but it’s difficult to make one relationship work. And unfortunately our society doesn’t like to fix things – it likes to buy ever new stuff instead.

I wish more people would wake up from the nightmare of one-night-stands. Despite of what Hollywood movies imply, such activity neither makes you more self-confident nor is it a normal thing to do. In fact, the opposite is the case. It destroys your self-esteem, and it makes you feel empty and replaceable.

It makes you treat people as sex objects and not living souls; it makes you unable to experience any growth in a relationship as it has no chance to progress; it causes mental fog (due to multiple soul-ties) and it increases the risk of STDs. It’s really a no-win.

It’s my hope that more people wake up to realize this. Frequent change of sexual partners cannot make you happy. If there’s some problem not addressed which is covered up by the seeking of novelty, it must be brought to the surface and solved.

People who live unnatural lifestyles (most people in the civilized world do) have aching wounds that they try not to see. They cover them up in many ways, one of which is engaging in frequent one-night stands.

I believe if the society returns to a more natural way of living (and my mindfulness center may help with that in the future), temptations as such would gradually disappear. But that’s a whole new topic altogether, which I hope to expand on in a future article.