TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK, OR NOT

In the past few months I have again been thinking a lot about the terrible things people are doing to each other in their relationships. Whether a Woman or a Man are involved, I have been told, makes no difference.

Both sexes are unfaithful, both are lonely, both are angry and both are reacting, it seems to me at least, without much thought but with a lot of feeling.

Quite a long time ago, I was writing about ‘road rage’ and how our patience with each other as a society had declined. Road rage was one manifestation that had become tolerated, if not accepted. It was a symptom not the cause, I thought, of deeper problems.

More recently I wrote about The Cheaters and The Liars. What do you do when you are involved and invested with people who betray your trust? Do you quickly forgive and/or forget? Do you give them another chance?

Or, do you just tell them to take a hike, begone, hit the road, quit wasting your time and energy or some variation of giving them their walking papers?

What about that other chance? Is it a ‘first offence’ or just one of many, many wrongs coming one after the other and to no one’s surprise not being able to turn it around and make it right?

Do you just leave at the first sign of what you have come to consider typical signs which past experience has taught you are just the beginning of the end? 

Do you try to push down your fears that you’ve already ‘been there, done that’ or do you try to reassert your optimism that each person is unlike any other and deserves a chance, regardless of what we feel because of a past experience?

All of these are questions that are not unreasonable for us to ask ourselves when faced with a situation which can make or break a relationship.

I regret that I cannot give you (or even myself) an answer without being there or being personally involved myself. 

All I can say is trust yourself and the knowledge you have of what you need and want out of life, and what you know you can live with and want to live with today.

The decision you make may not be the one I would make, or one that anyone else you know would either, but they and I are not you.

You must do one important thing, be true to yourself. As Polonius said to his daughter in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice – ‘But most of all to thine own self be true, and it will follow as the night the day, thou canst be false to any man’. Good advice, even 400+ years later.