Sustaining Relationships

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Sustaining-Relationships SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS
HOW TO BUILD FULFILLING RELATIONSHIPS THAT LAST
By: Allen Domelle

Creating a relationship is a natural process, but being able to sustain that relationship requires hard work. We often hear that someone has fallen in love. Sadly, you will find that many relationships fade over time. The reason this happens is because you don’t fall in love, but you grow in love. Many times young people say, “I have fallen in love.” They have not fallen in love, but they have fallen into infatuation. You can’t fall into love, rather you choose to love and then grow the love that you chose to give to someone.

Life is about relationships. You cannot go through life without having relationships. Nearly every week of our lives we start a relationship with someone. The key is not starting the relationship, but the key is sustaining the relationship that was started. For instance, when you have a new person who joined the church, you have started a relationship. When someone new comes to a child’s school, they have started a new relationship. When someone comes to begins working at your place of employment, you have started a new relationship. Day after day we start new relationships. We start relationships in the store when we see the cashier week after week. We start relationships with the bank clerk when we deposit money into our account. Nearly every week you start a relationship because you cannot exist in life without them.

Anybody can start a relationship, but very few are able to sustain the relationships that they have started. For instance, anybody can start a marriage relationship, but according to the Forrest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri, 50% of marriages end in divorce. The rate of divorce on second and third marriages climbs even higher. The reason is because anybody can start a relationship, but few people have learned to sustain their marriage relationship. Furthermore, just because someone has started and kept a relationship, does not mean that they have sustained a good relationship. You should want your marriage relationship to not only continue, but to sustain the joy that you had when you first got married.

Your ability to sustain relationships will affect your ability to keep your job, stay in church, and to build lasting relationships. Many people jump from one job to the next because of their inability to sustain relationships. People often jump from one church to the next because of their inability to sustain good relationships with the people in their church. They will stay for a year or two, and then something happens that causes them to be disgruntled resulting in them jumping to another church. This happens because these people have not learned how to sustain a relationship. Likewise people have problems sustaining relationships with friends. You often see someone who is on good terms with someone for a while, but then you find them breaking their relationship because they don’t have the ability to sustain relationships in life. The whole reason this happens is because of the inability to sustain relationships. If you’re going to have a fulfilling life, then you are going to have to learn how to sustain relationships. Life the short, and we must learn how to sustain the relationships that we have.

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