How To Build Ideal Relationships?

What is A Relationship?

A Relationship is some sort of a connection between people & their surroundings. Surroundings may include Nature, people, animals or even non-living things. The actions/change of/in one affects the other and vice versa. There is a kind of mutual interdependence which leads to either positive or negative consequences for those involved in the relationship. These relationships may be direct or indirect. Direct relationships are more of a natural relationship which are bound by physical interaction & proximity, for example blood and other human-relations. Whereas indirect relationships are where those involved in the relationship may not be close to each other but depend on each other in an indirect way. For example, there are various microbes, insects, worms in and on the Earth’s surface which perform important life processes that help us remain alive. 

Human Beings & Relationships

Human beings are an ever-increasing constellation of relationships. They have a relationship with everything around them including Nature, fellow humans, animals and even non-living things. We are born only because we were able to develop a relationship with Nature and with our parents. And as we grow up, we keep building, maintaining & strengthening more and more relationships to fulfill various kinds of needs of ours. To fulfill our economic needs, we find a job for ourself. To fulfill our emotional, biological and social needs, we find a partner, fall in love with them & start a family with them. And to fulfill our spiritual & ecological needs, we strengthen our relationship with Nature. Our survival, success and the quality of our life depends on the extent and quality of our relationships. The more meaningful and better relationships we have, the more happier, peaceful and successful our life becomes. 

Relationships Need Nurturing

But almost all human relations are not natural and a majority of them need us to explore, build & develop them over time. Apart from our initial relationship with Nature & our parents, we have to build every other relation from scratch. We have to reach out to people to build meaningful & successful relationships with them so that the quality of our lives keeps improving. If we are not willing to work towards building & maintaining relationships, not only our future relationships but even our present relationships would be threatened. That is, if we don’t respect Nature & our parents, we might loose them which would threaten our very survival as Nature & our parents are the seed & the roots of our existence respectively. 

Building Relationships Needs Balanced Efforts

Similarly, if we try too much to build and maintain relationships, this may also threaten our relationships. Relationships work best when they remain balanced. If only you are trying to make them work, either you would get fed-up of doing it one day or the other person would feel over-burdened with your too much attention. Both the persons need to contribute equally towards building the relationship. Relationships are like flowers that need the balance between strength and gentleness to blossom & to reach their full bloom. So, we need to put the right amount of wisdom & effort into building any relationship. 

Build Relationships Organically

Relationships should be built naturally and not forcefully. Apart from your initial couple of relationships that were a gift of Nature to you, you need to become an ‘Agent of Nature’ to build your subsequent relationships. What this means is that you don’t have to TRY and build relationships with people. This is because such relationships won’t be organic and won’t be of much benefit to you. They would always remain fragile, opportunistic, hollow & short-term. Also, you will have to put in a lot of effort to keep them alive which would give you a lot of stress. And relationships should give you love & joy, not stress & anxiety.

To build relationships, you just need to be natural in your approach. You need to be open to meeting all kinds of people and let your relationships get built naturally with the right people from amongst them. Such relationships have no compulsions and they keep you free of any commitments or expectations. And Freedom is the most important ingredient of all successful relationships. Relationships without any expectations liberate you and let you be yourself. This is all a human-being longs for in a relationship. If your relationships are beautiful, they will also be beneficial to you. But if you will try making them beneficial to you, they would lose their  beauty, sanctity & magic. So, our relationships should not be built according to our choices but according to Nature’s choice for us! When you being born was Nature’s choice and not yours, you should trust Nature with all your other relationships too. This is how we should build all our relationships! 

What & Why Ideal Relationships?

But we not only need to build relationships but build them in a way that makes them ‘Ideal’. Ideal relationships are relationships that are beneficial to both the persons and to everyone around. These relationships remain stable and grow stronger with time which makes them long-lasting too. Ideal relationships don’t involve expectations but they set people free to have their say & their way. And yet they are a source of mental & psychological strength to the people involved in them. Physical proximity or blood relations don’t matter here. People are with each other by choice and not bound by any compulsion. Both people care about each other instead of thinking of their own petty self-interests. And this strengthens the bond between them over time to develop a relationship that transcends all boundaries and limits. 

Ideal relationships are needed by everyone in order to live a quality life. It’s unfortunate that today every relationship is based on our wants & needs instead of the joy of simply being with each other. When we are concerned only about our benefit in a relationship, it becomes an ugly situation especially for the other person and sooner or later the relationship is brought to a sad end. This is what is happening in modern-day marriages which are ultimately resulting in divorces & separations. Even if a relationship is going great for both the persons but it’s not in harmony with the people around, the relationship would be brought to an end. A group of thieves might enjoy their relationship and ‘bonding’ but since it is counterproductive to the society at large, it would be brought to an end by the police. As a human being, we should always focus on developing ideal relationships with everything & everyone around us as they are essential to our physical, mental & spiritual growth & progress.

Building Ideal Relationships : With Yourself

How do we build ideal relationships in our lives? The first and the foremost ideal relationship that you need to form in your life is with yourself. You need to be peaceful, happy & joyful by your own very nature. Only when this happens, will your other relationships would mean something to you and you would be in a situation to make them ideal. Your ‘relationship’ with yourself is the base to your other relationships which makes it important to strengthen your bonding with your own self before you try to do it with others. To have an ideal relationship with yourself, you have to understand yourself in totality. You need to know how your mind & body work and how to use them to work in your favor. If only we are able to do this, will we become able to gel with other people and their minds & bodies. We have already explained this in detail in our other blogs. To know more about how to become peaceful & happy from within, you can read other blogs on our website applyingspirituality.com. 

Building Ideal Relationships : With Nature

When you are a naturally happy person who enjoys her/his own company, you are ready to form ideal relationships with others. Your first relationship that needs to be strengthened is your relation with Nature. Nature is supreme. It can be seen as a common god for everyone. Nature comes ahead of our parents because our parents are also products of Nature. If Nature wasn’t there, no one would have been born. If our relationship with nature is weak, we will live a sub-par life full of ailments which would seriously affect our ability to maintain our relationship with our parents or build new relationships with our friends or partners. So, first we need to strengthen our relationship with Nature.

How do we strengthen our relationship with Nature? Becoming spiritual is one of the best ways to get started. When we come to know the basis of our existence, we automatically get connected with Nature more intensely. The life within us is a gift of Nature and it is the most profound thing within us. When we understand our life’s nature, we connect with Nature very easily. To do this, we don’t necessarily have to give-up our physical belongings in life but we have to withdraw a bit from them and relate ourselves a bit more to  the life within us which is not physical but spiritual in nature. A great way to do this is to stop doing things with a view to gain something tangible out of them. Simply doing things because they make you happy, lets you connect with nature & its magic.

Another thing that we can do to strengthen our relationship with Nature is staying close to it. You can take frequent & regular trips to forests or the nearest mountains. Going in the lap of nature surely strengthens our relationship with it. The silence, the serenity and the purity of Nature lets us get connected to it in no time and that too without bounds. It feels like connecting to the whole Universe in one go. Nature also reminds us of our mortal nature of existence which inspires us to do our best every moment of our lives!

Another way to form an ideal relationship with Nature is to use it, promote it and play with it. When we plant a sapling or do agriculture or just play with the soil, it connects us with Nature. It reminds us that WE are also Nature. When this feeling sinks into our consciousness, we would not only stay close to Nature but would also work towards its betterment and protection. Various environmental movements  in the world were a result of a deep sense of our relationship with Nature. Today when rivers are drying, air is being polluted and land is getting contaminated, it is nothing but the weakening of our relationship with Nature. This is threatening not only our relationship with it but our very survival. Hence, staying close to Nature, relating to it more and pitching towards its betterment are significant ways to form an ideal relationship with Nature.

Building Ideal Relationships : With Parents

After Nature, we come to human relations in which the most important relation is with our parents. Our parents brought us in this world. Every cell in our body & every drop of our blood is given to us by our parents. If we are a tree, our parents are our roots. Only when our relationship with our ‘roots’ is healthy, will we be able to grow many branches and bear fruits in our lives. If we can’t maintain & strengthen our relationship with our parents, we cannot do it with anyone in the world for the simple reason that our parents are the most caring people in our life. If we can’t take care of them and behave well with them, we cannot build an ideal relationship with anyone else in the whole world. Every relationship of ours will fall apart if we are not able to maintain a healthy bond with our parents.

So, what can we do to strengthen our relationship with our parents? The first and the most important thing is to never forget  their role in our lives. We couldn’t have existed without them. Even if this one thing sinks into our consciousness, we will remain thankful to them throughout our lives and our relation with them would keep on strengthening. The second thing is that never look at our relationship with our parents from the point of view of economic benefits. Their existence in our lives itself is the biggest blessing for us. We should never weigh their importance through the lenses of money or any other benefit they gave or did not give us. The next thing is that we may disagree with them, we may have differing opinions but we should never raise our voice on them. We should never try to belittle them, their efforts or their advices. They have more experience of life than we do. So, we should at least be willing to listen to them first. But this doesn’t mean that we have to strictly follow what they say. They just want us to listen to them. What we do will always remain our choice. We shouldn’t forget that they love us the most in the world and that they would always want the best for us. So, we just need to listen to them and use their experience before making important decisions in life. This is all it takes to have an ideal relationship with our parents.

Building Ideal Relationships : With Children

Parents don’t need to be taught or told how to build an ideal relationship with their children as it comes naturally to them. The only thing to tell here is that parents should not try to force their ideas & opinions on their children even if they know that they have more experience and think that they know better. They just need to be a little less scared about their children. They should just ensure that a suitable environment is provided to their children to do what they want to do. Remember that your child will respect you and follow into your footsteps only when he/she will feel that you are a free person who gives freedom & space to others to do things their way! Parents-Children relationship is already one of the most beautiful relationships. The only thing we need to do there is to tone down the fear and increase the freedom quotient!

Building Ideal Relationships : With Siblings

Every relationship other than with Nature & with our parents is not a natural one and needs a lot of patience, efforts and application to build, maintain & strengthen. The sibling business is a very tricky one. This is because they are your blood relation but they are not your parents. In your minds, they are your biggest competitors as you may feel you have to compete with them for your parents’ love, affection & attention. Siblings are less than parents but like forced friends and that’s what makes the relationship a lot complex & tricky. But even this relationship can be made ideal.

The first thing you need to do is to forget that they are your siblings. This will remove the competition from your mind. Then you just have to see that your parents love them and that your siblings are nice to your parents. If you love your parents, you should be happy about this. Another thing is that, if you can forget they are your competitors, they can become your best friends. They will take care of you. They will make you feel good. They will protect you and help you with any problem that you may have in life. Sibling Relationship is the perfect example to discover that if we can open up just a little, great things can happen to us!

Building Ideal Relationships : With Life-Partners

The next relation we need to make ideal is our love/marriage relationship. This is the most difficult relationship to build according to people simply because they are not blood relations and two complete strangers need to make a relationship work over here. But shouldn’t these things work in favor of this relationship? Blood relations are harder to maintain than other relations as the former are binding upon us. Love relations are our choice which are a result of our freedom & expression and should thus become beautiful once they get formed. If we can’t have an ideal relationship with our self-chosen life-partners, it just means that we are bad decision-makers. So, love relations should always work for us. Similarly, since love-relations involve two persons who are complete strangers to each other, there is ample space to explore each other which should strengthen the relationship right from the beginning. 

Before we see how to build ideal love/marriage relationships, we need to see what we need to avoid doing while forming & maintaining them. This is because love relationships mostly fall apart not due to not doing the right things but because of doing the wrong things. So, the first thing that we should not do here is TRYING to find a partner. Trying to find a partner just shows our desperation for love and our non-openness to meeting all kinds of people before we find the right one. It will only make us make the wrong decision. We should either leave it to destiny or we should become wise enough before we try finding a partner for ourself. But the problem here is that we can never know whether we have become wise enough which tells that it’s best to leave it to destiny. The person which Nature chooses for us is always better than our choice for ourself. This is because we can only choose him/her according to our own likes/dislikes but Nature would choose the best possible person who will bring out the best in us in every area of life.

The next not-to-do-thing in love/marriage relationships is taking the other person for granted. We should never think that that person will stay with us in-spite of whatever we do with them. We should always know that if we don’t take enough care & give enough time to them, they will go away forever and we will be left alone. We should always value our partners and their efforts towards making us happy and peaceful. And we should always be at our best in order to make our relationship work. One important thing here is to always balance our love and work-life as balancing is one of the biggest thing lacking in relationships today! 

Now, what are the things that we need to do in a love/marriage relationship to make it ideal? It’s ART! Acceptance, Responsibility, Trust are the three most important pillars of any love/marriage relationship. 

Acceptance means that you should accept the person you love as a whole. Their likes & dislikes, good & bad things, cute & annoying habits, good & bad moods, everything! If you just want the positive side of a person, you don’t love them but are just trying to get something from them one-way. But the reality is that we cannot get something out of someone without accepting the person in totality of who they are. Hence, infinite acceptance of the person you love is of utmost importance.

Responsibility means that you have to assume that both of you are sharing the responsibility of each other and to make the relationship work but in reality you have to take complete responsibility of the relationship. It must be your responsibility to ensure that the other person is happy and that the relationship is sailing smoothly & well. You should never blame anything on the other person for anything. You should just remind them of what you feel they are not doing right but it should be their choice & freedom to work upon the issue. This is because blaming things on our partner makes them feel suffocated and bad about themselves. Your only concern should be whether they are trying to improve. If they are trying even a little, you should be happy. And even if they aren’t, you need to let it go and shoulder their share of the responsibility. After all, its your love-affair, not a revenge story!

Trust is the last but a very important pillar of love & marriages. By trusting your partner, you are telling them that you don’t consider them to be separate from them and that you trust them as much as you trust yourself. It is like your partner is a part of yourself. If you don’t doubt or question your doings, you shouldn’t do that to your partner as well. You should always believe that your partner wants as much good of yours as you do for yourself. 

When you master ART in a love/marriage relationship, it is bound to become ideal as you have matured enough to make your love-affair successful. Such a relationship would not only teach you relationship-skills but would also make you a better & a more capable human-being!

Building Ideal Relationships : In Economic Transactions

All other human-relations are either official, formal or economic. These are to be taken in a way which all economic transactions should be taken. When money is involved, the only thing that needs to be kept in mind is Honesty! Always remember that the money which is not ours would give us trouble sooner or later. If we love our families and we believe in humanity and sensibility then we should deal in every economic transaction with full honesty, integrity & righteousness. Be conscious of your Humanity where Emotions don’t work for you. Hence, to make economic relationships ideal, all we need is Honesty!

Building Ideal Relationships : With Animals

Human-beings also capable of developing relationships with animals. Many of us have pets at our homes in the form of dogs, cats, cows, buffaloes, horses, monkeys, birds, etc. Is developing ideal relationships with animals possible? Is it important? Well, since we are already keep them at home, it’s clearly possible. But what is the importance of doing this? If you can develop a direct relationship with an animal, it says a lot about you. It showcases the spiritual side of yours. When you can’t talk to somebody but you still understand what and how they feel, it’s nothing less than a miracle. It shows that  you care about lives in general even when you aren’t able to connect with them that well. You are capable of sensing their feelings and acting towards making them feel better. If your dog is your best friend, it shows how good a human-being you are. It shows that you don’t treat a dog or any other animal any less than a human-being or any other life. Any human-animal relationship is already ideal as it has broken all language barriers to get started!

Conclusion

Life becomes ideal only because of the ideal relationships it contains. When we become able to develop ideal relationships with everything & everyone around ourself, life feels magical and we start living it from a different level altogether. Never settle for anything less than ideal relationships in life as it will reduce the quality of your life enormously. Ideal relationships make the whole world your family where everybody loves you and wants to be like you. So, build ideal relationships and become the best version of yourself to live your best possible life!