BUSINESS
Rigid Roles Can Kill a Relationship
By Mary Elizabeth Murphy
I recently ran into an old girlfriend from Ohio, and we played that age-old game, “Remember the time…?” In an instant, our relationship was rekindled as we regaled each other with stories of old friends, old flames, ill-advised things we’d done together; you know, war stories. After an afternoon of laughing so hard we cried, we vowed to keep in touch with each other this time, and for once, we kept that prom- ise.
For a while, anyway.
For a while, we exchanged phone calls, emails and texts about the past, and for a while we were girlfriends again. But after a time, we ran out of things to talk about. After all, the past only con- tinues until the present, and we hadn’t seen each other in years. Our store of reminiscences had simply run out. Unable or unwilling to talk about the time between, the present or the future, we once again fell out of touch.
This happenstance encounter and the corre- spondence which followed put me in mind of this column. After all, I do write about relation- ships here, and I had just failed to cultivate one that had been awakened after lying dormant for some years. What had happened? Where had
we slipped up?
As I pointed out above, we were either unable or unwilling to discuss anything but amusing mem- ories that we shared. We had failed to take any steps to create new memories. Trapped in the past, our relationship was forced to stay there. In essence, we had missed an opportunity to have a new friendship; instead relying on the comfort of the one we had had years before.
These opportunies are missed all the time. We don’t necessarily miss it for the same nostalgic reasons as I’ve described here, but the same trait in a failed relationship is universal. In begin- ning our new friendship, we did not or could not see each other as anything except the women we were when we really knew each other. We made no attempt to get to know each other as the women we are now, and in doing so we as- signed each other roles that were not conducive to a successful relationship.
Whether you are beginning a new relationship or rekindling an old one, be it personal or profes- sional, it is extremely important that roles are not so rigidly defined that the connection is doomed from the outset. This role assignation is different
30 Connect and Grow With Women In Our Community
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42