Mr or Mrs Right Now!

I read an article yesterday advocating something along the lines of “get married – right now” – wait no longer for Mr or Mrs Right – mm well, please, please make sure the person you marry or live with is a friend with whom you have a few things in common. This is particularly pertinent right now as 2 of my female acquaintances have horrendous problems, problems which have been going on for years - mainly because they got married "because they thought they should, they were afraid of being left on the shelf, they were afraid of being left alone" or some such. Yhis is impacting on their friends, families, their mental health, in one case their ability to work and function as a member of society!


A good friend is someone you can think aloud in front of, a good friend is there to pick up the pieces and a good friend will always welcome you back, a really good friend will also put their foot down and say I don’t like that (whatever it is you might be saying or doing - like your latest fad or partner) but you know it’s okay I still value you as a friend. Whether that friend is male or female and in the relationship you truly deserve the most important friends are My oldest friendship goes back to age 11 when I started Grammar school, she phones me when she needs to talk and I know if I need her she will be there for me, she also came to my second wedding (see the end of this book if you need to) and she came to my late husband's funeral, she just said “I’d like to be there.” My other very good friend I’ve known since I was 16, we were pen friends at school, she’s in a different country, if I need her she is there, when I go to visit them I usually get taken along to “sort something out”, I also get taken to school (she’s a head teacher) – we listen to one another’s worries, and we go to the Opera, I don’t that in the UK, well rarely.

Friends are important, it’s important they are non-judgemental (after all we are only judging from what we believe to be true, it might or might not be true for us, but it certainly ain’t true for the other person). Friendship is kind of like the most precious balloon you ever had as a child, let it fly and bounce on the wind at the end of a string and if you pull it close, treat it with care, because if you squeeze too hard it will burst into pieces and you can’t, however hard you try put a balloon together again. You will need your friends on the way to your relationship, you will need them in your relationship, and you will need them after your relationship, nothing is so good it lasts eternally – do you know these lyrics?:

“Nothing is so good it lasts eternally
Perfect situations must go wrong
No-one in your life is with you constantly
No-one is completely on your side”

They are from “I know him so well” from the musical Chess (and I have permission from Sir Tim Rice to use the lyrics) and there are more lyrics than this and I’ve taken these out of context, but for a reason. At some point your partner or you may leave the relationship. If we marry, we marry “till death do us part” and that I think is possibly the “nicest” (said with great care here) way for a relationship to end. For some people relationships will end earlier than we would like them to. This can be due to death which happens at an untimely stage (I don’t really think there’s right time to die – it hurts the people who are left at any age). For some people it will be someone else’s death that ends the relationship, the death of a child, another loved one, sometimes one partner becomes so ill they are no longer the person you met and partners make (for me) interesting choices about how to deal with this situation. Some people are just not the right people at the time, and we have to acknowledge that and move on.

With a lot of work, and it takes a lot of work to sustain any relationship, you will keep the relationship and that includes your friends. This year a young woman on one of my courses whose marriage was a few months away set her “Life Purpose” and in that she stated something along the lines that her husband to be would have to be there for her to fulfill her life purpose. The guy on the course working with her came to me and asked “is that okay, I thought it’s a good idea to have in this only things we can have on control over (or we reasonably believe we can) and not to rely on other people”. Yes he was right, so I took Sarah (that’s not her name) on one side, as she was already starting to get upset at the thought that her future husband might die. Now I am in the position (if you haven’t been to the end of the book you might want to peek now or just believe me) to say, hey people die. The love of your life can die (or just walk out) and you might be stood there saying (shaking like a jelly and falling apart) I can’t go on, and if your life purpose is that you can’t continue to live without that special person, you will be stuck, very stuck.

So a) nurture your friends, notice they are not more important than but just as important as your relationship and b) make sure your partner is a friend!