Do You Want To Be In a Relationship? Focus On the One You Have With Yourself First
Since I really deserved to watch a brainless movie after my busy May, I decided upon “How To Be Single”. I chose it because of the title and because it took place in NYC (which is always is a big plus for me). I wouldn’t recommend it, because it’s not a great movie, but it happens to deliver a message I wanted to write about here anyway.
The movie is about 4 single women (of course) living in NYC. One of them is Alice (Dakota Johnson, of “50 Shades of Grey” fame), who breaks up with her boyfriend and moves to NYC in order to find herself. Which is not such a bad idea, since I did something similar. Now, after having lived here for a while, I believe that people are more likely to lose themselves here rather than find themselves. Alice says at one point that she had always been with someone and she didn’t know whom she was anymore; that’s why she wanted to spend some time by herself. And this is what many people can’t seem to understand.
From my many years of observation, I noticed that people tend to be in a relationship for many reasons, most of them very strange and not that clear to me. A majority just doesn’t want to be alone, some of them are just looking for sex, some are looking for love, some just want to have someone to travel with, to go to the weddings with etc. And some people are just unable to be by themselves, which always makes me sad. We start a relationship because we don’t want to feel lonely and we start building something that just can’t last. We’re surprised that something went wrong, forgetting that the foundation from the beginning wasn’t strong enough.
Alice’s life in NYC consists mostly of going to parties, sleeping around, trying out different relationship and finding out what works for her. You can do that (which is not a bad option), or you can stop muting your inner voice and listen to yourself, finding out what is it that you really want. What can you possibly offer another person if you don’t know who you are, or – what’s worst – if you don’t even like yourself? I think, and I will always stand for that, that the key to a happy relationship with another human being is building a happy relationship with yourself first. If you can finally face yourself, look at who you’ve become (not who you were, but who you are now), you can build something meaningful. And it’s because you start off as a person who can give something, not one who only wants something. So, before you start a relationship, think of why you want to have one in the first place and what can you give to another person.
P.S. If you watched the movie and wondered, let me tell you – yes, this is what it looks like in NYC. You can party every day (not my case), you can party every weekend (not my case), you can have one-night-stands (which can be amusing). When you live here, you usually have a someone’s number (or a few guys’ numbers) just in case you want to spend a few nice hours with (it’s rather a short-term than a long-term thing). When you go out to a bar, you can easily meet a guy and come back home with him (don’t go out with many girlfriends though, because he’d be afraid to approach you and I wouldn’t recommend to end up at his place on the first night; you can’t be sure you’d survive, there are a lot of freaks over here). And one more thing – the apartments those women lived in in the movie were really expensive and you would have to get a lot of money to experience luxury like that (the prices start from $3000 for an apartment like Alice’s, and only go up, and up, and up).
