What most prevents you from expanding your relationships, to make them lifetime relationships?

Do you lack time or interest? Are you lazy or shy? Or does the reason you ignore or renege on your potential lifetime relationships go much deeper? Could it be fear or mistrust, bitter memories, or insecurity?

Shelley, an attractive and talented leader, surprised me. She admitted, “Relationships can be so depressing. I’m too afraid sometimes to reach out.” She continued with, “I battle questions like, how do I look today? Or how come so-and-so isn’t speaking to me?” Later, she asked, “How come I can’t do anything right? Can I ever get past this stage?”

“Do you feel this way on occasion? Or all the time?” I asked.

She sighed. “It’s constant.”

Shelley explained her mother died when Shelley was twelve. Before that, her mother had been ill for years. She couldn’t give Shelley much attention. After she passed away, her father tried to raise her and her brother. At the same time, he had his faults. For one thing, it seemed he never could say anything good about her.

Relationships That Seem to Stunt

“He still can’t,” Shelley said. “No matter what I do, there’s never any praise, any recognition. I only get criticism for how I could do better.” She longed for one sincere, honest word of appreciation from him. Sooner or later, that affected all her relationships. She appreciated friends who told her they admired her; but couldn’t seem to draw closer. In short, when a relationship settled into a normal routine, she tired of it. She moved on to someone else.

To show love if you’ve never been given unconditional love is difficult. Babies must be cuddled and hugged and cooed or they’ll die. As a child grows older, he or she needs to see love in action, to watch how love works. What are some growing lifetime relationship models?

3 ways that love in action grows lifetime relationships:

1.) Parents can be models of practical everyday love to kids.

2.) The laboratory of family teaches children the basics of social relationships.

3.) Dependable commitments provide a solid social structure. Within healthy community interaction of any kind. With the give and take of school mates. In a church. Fighting causes together.

Bonds of unity and love produce wholesome development of personality. That’s the ideal. However, today children tend to grow up in what Alan Bloom calls, “the school of conditional relationships.”

In what one way are you combating this harmful trend? Further, what will you do to recommit to the hard, but satisfying task of doing lifetime relationships?  

Adapted from Friends Forever/The Art of Lifetime Relationships Janet Chester Bly

Find out more about doing lifetime relationships here: https://www.blybooks.com/bookstore/relationships/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Extra Resources

Down memory lane article, “The First Time I Saw Him.” Stephen Bly and Janet Chester Bly love story at Book Fun Magazine.  Punch on Janet’s photo on the cover … https://adobe.ly/2F2Mi8q

For more inspiration for working on lifetime relationships check out the More To Life Magazine blog: http://mtlmagazine.com/the-art-of-lifetime-relationships/ where Janet Chester Bly is a guest blogger.

Other articles on parenting and doing marriage lifetime relationships on Janet’s Free Stuff Download page:  https://www.blybooks.com/free-stuff-download/

Check out blog article on lifetime relationships, “How To Love Cantankerous People” at Upgrade With Dawn Wilson http://www.upgradewithdawn.com/blog/2014/7/24/how-to-love-cantankerous-people.html

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