The Success Within: Life and Relationships

What if I told you that you were already living a successful life? That everything up to this point has been an achievement?

The statement above is true. It is not a woo-woo statement or a life hack.

You are the greatest part of your life. People, material things, or content are not. You have conquered past goals. When you think about a new venture, you take action and you succeed.

Yes, I know. You are thinking that I have gone off the deep end. Do you feel this section is for a certain type of person that does not include you? I want you to trust me that this will make sense in the following chapter. Keep reading…

Let’s start with a personal story. When I was growing up I thought that I would never find someone to share my life with. Relationship after relationship, date after date, nothing sustainable was happening in my life. I was 24 years old (I know I was young) and I thought I would be alone forever. Mind you, I would get close to someone and think it was going to go the distance. Unfortunately, it never panned out in my favor. My “soulmate” seemed like a fairytale. Every exchange ended the same way: heartbreak.

Although I was still young, I had lost all desire in finding someone. Would I ever find someone to build a life with? I assumed that it wasn’t in my cards.

“Will I be able to start a family one day?”

“Am I going to be happy in a long term relationship or marriage?”

“Why must it be so hard to find someone to connect with on many levels?”

All these visions of past “failures” played out in my head. My life felt doomed to repeat over and over, never getting the results I desired. My frustration levels were at an all-time high.

One night I went out with some friends and it happened. I met my current wife. We met through a girl my cousin was seeing at the time. After hitting it off the first night, many dates followed. We clicked almost immediately. Our relationship developed deeper as we kept seeing each other. Pretty soon we had been together for years.

The first time exchanging “I love you’s” was new to me because it was real. The old questions of “Will I ever…?” turned into “Is this it?” “Is this the person I thought for all these years I would never find?” A life I thought I would live alone had turned into a life of possibilities. For the first time in years, I wanted to see where this would lead long term.

I won’t sugarcoat this and say it was easy. When you are getting ready to settle down, doubt will show up. The time you spend together won’t always be sunshine and rainbows. I used to tell people that we never argued and, for the first few years, we didn’t. After the honeymoon phase, we went from never arguing to fighting over pettiness. The love that you once had doesn’t seem as abundant anymore. The green pastures became a barren desert for us to navigate. Around this time is when thoughts of old come back. Is this another failure in my life? Will working on this be another lost cause?

We worked on ourselves and the relationship. It was tough swallowing our pride and admitting the old ways were not working. We could either separate or identify the problems. The conclusion we came to was that our arguments were nonsense. By sitting down and coming to terms with each other, our marriage blossomed more than ever before.

In our lives, we can look at our problems as a lost cause. My marriage could’ve gone the way so many others do. It could have crumbled before my eyes. My determination made it work because of the love I have for my wife.

Where most would see a failure, I saw a win. If I didn’t go through past traumas I wouldn’t have the awesome marriage I have today. No matter what we are going through at the moment, our lives are a win-win.