Being emotionally capable for a relationship

It's been said that being a partner means being responsible for somebody else's feelings. And all the nice things of a relationship includes being able to open up to one person, making it a very fulfilling experience. At the same time, this is exactly the part of relationships that require the most work in order to maintain happiness.

At the risk of making sweeping generalizations, women usually understand the lay of the land a lot better than men when it comes to emotions. To men, emotions are a minefield. Women can see the traps a mile away. Chances are, as a woman you've been encouraged to share and talk about your feelings, whereas as a man you've been taught to repress them. In other words, she's had plenty of practice and would pretty much have an excellent understanding of emotions. Or so she'd like to believe.

Can you imagine expecting a 10-year-old girl to be emotionally capable of a relationship? capable of life? Inexperience plagues every newcomer to the world of romantic relationships, and it's safe to say that inexperience is the reason fights become screaming matches, how molehills become mountains, and how nearly every negative relationship encounter is exaggerated in difficulty. Man or woman, anybody can be guilty of not being able to control their emotions in a relationship.

To bring it back, my point is just because one is a woman doesn't mean she's got the emotional capability to handle herself in a relationship. Yes she may be more aware and more adept at identifying emotions, and probably able to get her emotions across, but can she do that well enough to teach it? After all, being able to teach something implies mastery of the topic, and when it comes to relationships, being able to be emotionally capable means being able to teach their partner how to see conflicts in the relationship for what they really are, how to talk things through, and how to give emotions (one's or the other's) the attention they crave without hurting the other person.

Being able to successfully take responsibility for another's feelings means being able to do more than be responsible for your own feelings.

Resolve

Would you in your relationship, rather...
argue and fight often but make up easily? or
argue and fight rarely but have a hard time resolving each fight?

Tough question, but of course it's best to strive for not fighting often and being able to resolve it quickly whenever it does. Because each argument and fight that a couple has is one more chance opening for the relationship to end, and each failure to resolve a fight is one more crack in the foundation of the relationship.

It may be pre-prescribed that a certain individual may or may not have a propensity towards arguing, and that can be altered depending on factors like the target of their spats, and how little patience they have overall.

Say in a relationship, a person suddenly gets nitpicky towards their partner and not towards anybody else. That can affect it. Then again, it can be other factors like simply being exhausted from the day. There are lots of external pressures that can cause a person to inappropriately project their frustration onto their partner. It is the internal factors (like whether we pick fights over everything to how we truly feel about the target of our frustration) that each person can learn to control to make their relationships happy.

I have come to learn that I'm actually quite a feisty partner. I may not always fight fair and I say some low-blow comments that are intended to hurt. I am very mean when hurt. Other than that, I know on a normal day that I am a nice person who knows and tries to make others happy. There are plenty of people like me, who, when their partner hurts them immensely, they become remorseless of inflicting the same kind of pain on their partners. But things can change. The longer you stay with a person that's good for you, the more you realize to pick your battles and learn to let go more easily. Sometimes a relationship evolves into one where there isn't much arguing because there hardly is any communication, to one with a lot of arguing from the increased communication, to one where the arguments subside, or wash ashore very easily. Sometimes that evolution is evident in one person going through several relationships. It's a journey one can choose to take to learn how to love, not just in romantic relationships, but in life overall.

I'd like to dedicate this to my boyfriend who wrote to me, "I think it is our willingness to forgive and work with each other that makes us so special." Even when I am fuming mad I still love you.