“Avoiding men is the secret to a healthy life” I read this headline in a newspaper and I could not agree more.

“Why am I thinking like this? Am I being a feminist” I had the next thought.

“I could be…. but this article feels so right. Do men too feel the same about the women?”

“Yes. Ofcourse. Don’t you read the daily wife and girlfriend jokes on social media. Have you ever read a husband or boyfriend joke? Does this mean men are more unhappy or the women do not express their unhappiness so openly?” my mind was having a flow of thoughts.

“Then why do people look for the life-partners? Why do we think that finding our soulmate will bring the ultimate peace in life?”

The roots of concept of love were shaken with this newspaper article.  The fundamentals of love, finding the true love and one life is equal to one true love which I had grown up watching in the bollywood movies were being questioned.

“Is this newspaper article trying to find shortcuts to a healthy life by avoiding men or women and just ignoring the actual problem?”

Most of us have such thoughts at some point in our lives especially after a fight or argument with our partner or if going through a difficult phase in our relationship.  Behind all these thoughts, the actual problem needs to be understood.

No relationship can flourish where the partner/s try to change his/her counterpart as per their own personality. When we try to judge things about the other one and try to look at everything from our own point of view without realizing the other person’s needs and priorities, such negative thoughts are bound to be there.

A relationship only flourishes when love supersedes every other emotion. When love, which should be the most important parameter in a relationship, takes the back seat and our perspective about the right and wrong takes toll over our thinking, such thoughts happen. It could be a man or a woman or both of them who may try to control the life of their partner, thinking that this is the best thing for them to do. Here, we need to remember that we do not choose our life-partner to change them into the person that we are.

We do not get married or get into a relationship to mend a person’s personality. In fact, we get into a relationship with an imperfect person who is as imperfect as we are. So, we need to accept that imperfectness too without the expectation to evolve them into the perfect human as per our needs in future. If mending and molding a person as per our needs is our intention then we should not get into that relationship because it is bound to become toxic in future.

There are a some compromises and adjustments that every couple has to do for a healthy relationship but at the same time the things which are important for your partner’s happiness needs to be understood and their differences in the personalities also needs to be respected.

When the focus is not on the perfectness but on the happiness and love. When we understand that not everything needs to be worried about.  We we learn to accept things with a open heart.  When we stop thinking with our mind but with our heart because this is love not a financial balance sheet which needs to be perfectly balanced. At that point we will start to disagree with all such thoughts of avoiding men or women for a healthy life.

If we try to work with all our heart on ourselves, not our partner, everything around us would be perfect. The perfectness in our relationship depends on us.  Just as, it depends on us whether we see that the glass as half full or half empty. In the same way, it only depends on us if we want  to make our life-partner behave as our Better Half or Bitter Half.

-Rooprashi