Who Knows What You’ve Got Doesn’t Always Take Care Of It

Perhaps someone very close to you knows very well how special you are and the light you radiate. However, it doesn’t always take care of you as you deserve. Perhaps he thinks you are like a beautiful deep-rooted tree that nourishes, shelters and never complains. Maybe what you don’t know is that someday you might be the one to get tired of someone who takes love for granted.

We’ve all heard the classic refrain “I didn’t know what I had until I lost it” more than once. However, reality shows us another type of version that is much more real, much more contradictory and refined: there are people who, even knowing very well what they have with them, end up neglecting.

Sometimes relationships, like bones, break. We all know that. However, this rupture does not always happen overnight in a punctual, traumatic and devastating way. Specialists in romantic relationships know that these processes are slow and exhausting, and it is precisely this progressive lack of attention to the other that ends up depositing itself in the personal and emotional universes of its protagonists.

Cultivating, on a daily basis, an attitude of appreciation, an empathetic and detail-oriented attitude will allow us to strengthen these bonds with the people we love in a healthier way. However, it takes a strategic and decisive dimension to achieve this: will.

 

When people take it for granted that you will always be there

You are not like a rock that one day breaks off a mountain and is trapped in a soft hollow for decades. You are not an insect trapped in amber, nor the ancient roots of a conifer. Nothing about you is eternal or everlasting. People are like the wind, they are breeze and they are like the water that runs in the river. Life is movement, growth and eternal development.

Just as our own inner being is dynamic and inscribed in a process of constant maturation, so too are our emotions. Therefore, whoever understands love as a stable and permanent dimension is wrong. Love is always hungry: it needs to be fed and fed. It also needs to be valued and cared for, it yearns to be tickled, to hear the music of laughter, and to get drunk on wordless complicity.

All of this forces us to understand something very simple, something very basic and illustrative: that love, more than being found, is constructed. Therefore, when we start taking things for granted, what we actually choose is to stop investing, to stop building, and choose to stick to the outdated idea that those who love will always do so in a devoted and unconditional way. The voids won’t matter, the silences, the contempt won’t matter, because for many love is like that resin that binds insects forever and ever.

Irrevocable and eternal love, more than a truth, is an apology for our society. “I will love you forevermore, whatever you do” is an assault on our own dignity. Because in relationships, not everything counts and not everything is justifiable, and if we get used to being “take it for granted”, the day will come when we too will take it for granted and assume our own unhappiness.

If someone doesn’t take care of you, take care: impose distance

Think about the relationship we need to care for most is that we have with ourselves. This philosopher’s stone of human well-being is often overlooked for a very simple reason: sometimes we understand life in terms of the bonds we establish with others. To think that love justifies everything and that it is at the same time our source of self-fulfillment is nonsense with serious side effects.

Those who know what they have and don’t care simply don’t deserve us. Realizing this is a moral necessity, a sense of survival and the lifeboat of our self-esteem. Because otherwise, if we don’t jump off that drifting boat, we ourselves will no longer take care of ourselves, we ourselves will be the victims of this cult of sentimental sacrifice that annihilates lives, which attacks those hearts that forgot to love themselves.

On the other hand, it is worth remembering what Abraham Maslow once said: “If the musician wants to be happy he has to make music, if the poet wants to be a poet he has to write, if the painter loves painting he has to paint… All this gives shape to this dimension in which the pyramid of our needs culminates: self-fulfillment”.

If we understand this, we will also understand the following: if someone loves us, they will have the natural need to make us happy, to promote our strength, to offer us that pulse of life with which to contribute to the growth of their own loving relationship.

But if those beside us do not consider us and take it for granted that we will always be there no matter what happens, they are contributing to repression, and repression, never forget, is the root of unhappiness. Let us then learn to choose the right path, let us put into practice this true and loyal commitment to ourselves to remind ourselves that love is caring and that love is dedication, appreciation and daily attention to the affective bond.

Images courtesy of Maggie Taylor.