10 Lessons You Learn From An Almost Relationship

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1. Before you get into a casual relationship with someone, ALWAYS clarify things with each other earlier. Always tell the other person what are you looking for and what are you not. If in doubt, always ask questions. Never assume what the other person wants without them telling you so.

2. Know about the other person’s past relationships. It tells a lot about someone and their approach in relationships. Find out what happened and why didn’t it last. It is important to know how do they approach things and relationships so you don’t end up having assumptions because no two guys will treat you the same way.

No relationships are made equal. Each one of your experience is unique, so you can’t compare how a guy treated you before to decipher if another guy is interested or not.

3. Know where to draw the line. This is very important. You can’t do everything that a couple in a relationship does and still calls it a casual relationship. Spending the whole weekend together, telling each other everything and staring into each other’s eyes? That’s not casual.  There must be a boundary that you cannot cross because there is no such thing as a ‘grey area’ in between casual relationship and official relationship.

4. There’s always a ‘driver’ and ‘passenger’ in such relationship. There will always be someone leading the direction of how things go and passenger who just so happen to either wants the same thing, or hope it could be a backdoor to something serious and change the other person’s mind if they ‘driver’ wanted something casual. And most of the time, the passenger will be the one who will get hurt the most.

5. No expectations. Don’t have any expectations that he is supposed to call you or reply your text. Or that you guys are supposed to spend time on the weekend together. This is a casual relationship. Because with expectations, there comes disappointments. And disappointments eventually create anger, sadness and doubt whether you are good enough. Don’t fall into your own trap because the other person doesn’t fill in your expectations.

6. Just because it ended, doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you or it was something you did. It just so happen that at one point one of you realise your expectations does not live up to each others and you simply wanted different things. There is no point trying to hold on to something like that because one day someone will be hurt. It could be you, it could be him.

7. If the person who didn’t want a relationship bother to talk about what happened before ending it because you start to have more feelings, it really is because they do care about you. If they do not care about you, why would they bother to clarify and put things on hold? They would just continue to lead you on and eventually you will find out they are seeing someone else. Or things ended later down the road because they got bored of you and what would their reason be at that time?

“I told you I didn’t want anything serious!”

Wouldn’t that be worse? Or one day they will just go radio silence because they realised you are ‘doing too much’. And you just sit there and kept wondering what went wrong without knowing the actual reason.

8. I know you are going to look back at the good stuffs and feel hurt thinking about it because things will never be the same. But that’s life, things don’t always stay the same as much as you wanted to. Maybe if you look back at how things were, you would’ve seen there were actually flaws and not everything was as perfect as you thought it was.

9. No communication. Upon being swept up your feet, living in the moment of bliss and happiness, for once believing it was perhaps love… No communication is a good way to finally ‘think’ about everything. Reflect on what happened between both of you but at the same time reflect on what you want for yourself.

Does this mean you won’t ever talk ever again? That you will no longer even be ‘friends’?

Maybe, maybe not. But taking a time-out from each other is a good way to reset and think about things that you might not have thought of for the whole time you were in that ‘relationship’.

10. Be thankful. If you have never felt as happy with someone when you were with that person, be grateful. Perhaps he showed you the feelings that you thought you’ll never feel. Perhaps he looked at you the way nobody had ever did. Or he made you believe in love again after you’d lost any faith in relationships.

Even though it hurts today and maybe for a while, but one day you will cherish all the good times you have had together. Although it was not a happy ending you might have expected, it was something. A lesson in life, a blessing in disguise. You will be okay, eventually.