A Relationship Is Like A Garden

You don’t just get a garden. You work in a garden.

A new relationship often feels like the garden of Eden. A bountiful cornucopia, overflowing with rapturous delights. “I have found the promised land!” you may say most emphatically.

But after you ravage all the low-hanging fruit, it starts becoming a little more inconvenient. It takes more effort to climb a tree, going out on a limb for that same sweetness that once came so easily. It takes patience, waiting for nature to blossom on her own time. Your garden will need to be fertilized, watered, and nurtured. You will need to get your hands dirty.

Without tending to your garden, you may one day wake up to find a barren wasteland, overgrown with weeds and thorn bushes.

“What the hell? I gotta get outta here. This garden is awful! What did I do to deserve this?”

Nothing. You literally did fucking nothing. And now your garden sucks.

Now What?

Of course, you can go find a “better garden.” Many people do just that. The nomadic lifestyle is certainly one way to live.

But the agricultural revolution gave rise to civilization as we know it. Cultivating the land ultimately increased our quality of life as well as our life expectancy. Reliable food sources freed humanity to pursue art, knowledge, and other passions. Without the advent of agriculture, I wouldn’t be typing these words on this computer. I’d be chowing down on a squirrel in my loincloth somewhere.

Now, as far as your relationships go, you have a decision to make. You can be part of the nomadic culture or the agrarian society. I’m not here to tell you one is better than the other. I just want you to understand that living on a farm don’t make you a farmer.

There are a lot of neolithic knuckle-draggers foraging for emotional nourishment and becoming outraged at the unsustainability of plundering a relationship. But smash and grab is not a long-term strategy.

If you wanna be a nomad, that’s fine – just don’t expect your relationships to last once you’ve stripped the land of its natural resources. You gotta ride your wooly mammoth somewhere else to go do it again.

But if you’d like to settle down somewhere nice and build a sustainable life for yourself, then you’ve got some serious work to do. And it requires a different set of skills entirely.

It takes outer work and inner work. Interpersonal work. Past, present, and future work.

It takes humility, awareness, willingness, vulnerability, faith, and perseverance.

It takes strength and integrity.

You don’t need these qualities to get into a relationship, but you’ll need them if you wanna stay in one.

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Take a look at your relationship skills by taking a brief quiz. Download the Fix Your Picker healing guidebook. Schedule a free consultation. Follow me on Instagram. Subscribe to my blog below and check out the Resources tab. Find out if you’re a nomad who’s tired of traveling. I can help with that.

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