Do Not Make Someone A Priority When They Only Treat You As An Option
We should only value those people who value us as a priority, not those who treat us as an option. It is difficult to do so, mostly because we n ormally keep hoping that their selfishness turns into appreciation and mutual interest.
However, what we are doing is mortgaging our well-being at the will of others, turning a blind eye to the evidence and not listening to our emotional needs; living as prisoners of others’ selfishness.
With these ideas we ruin our present by feeding the hopes of changes that never come, often due to the memory of a past that has no future.
We must be able to realize when something is not working as it should in our relationships. As people, we change and over time, and the dynamic of our relationships with others can change as well.
Those who learn with time
There is a text attributed to several authors (Borges or Shakespeare among others) that reflects what we learn throughout life in a great way. It is a good exercise to review it sentence by sentence and see what it means and how we can use it to understand to improve our relationships.
Over time I learned the subtle difference between taking someone’s hand and binding a soul.
Over time I learned that love means not relying on someone and that company does not mean security.
Over time … I began to understand that kisses are not contracts, gifts or promises.
Over time I learned that being with someone because they offer you a good future means that sooner or later you will want to return to your past.
Over time… you realize that getting married just because “it’s encouraged” is a clear sign that your marriage will fail.
Over time I realized that only one who is able to love you with your faults, without trying to change you, can give you all the happiness you want.
Over time you realize that if you’re at a person’s side just for them to accompany your loneliness, you’ll inevitably end up not wanting to see them again.
Over time you realize that true friends are worth much more than any amount of money.
Over time I understood that true friends are counted on your fingers, and someone who won’t fight for them will sooner or later only be surrounded by fake friends.
Over time I learned that the words spoken in a moment of anger can still hurt the person who said them for the rest of their life.
Over time I learned that everyone asks for forgiveness, but only great souls forgive…
Over time I realized that if you hurt a friend badly, the friendship will most likely never be the same again.
Over time you realize that although you are happy with your friends, someday you’ll cry about those who you let go.
Over time you realize that every experience with each person is unique.
Over time you realize that someone who humiliates or puts down a human being sooner or later will suffer double the humiliation or scorn.
Over time I learned to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans.
Over time I realized that rushing things or forcing them to happen will cause thing to end in a way you did not expect.
Over time you realize that the best actually was not the future, but the time you were living right at that moment.
Over time you will see that although you are happy with those who are with you, you’ll yearn terribly for those who were with you yesterday who have now left.
Over time I learned that trying to forgive or apologize, saying you love,miss, or need someone, saying you want to be friends…at a grave… no longer makes any sense…
But unfortunately… we only understand this only over time.
The truth is that for certain things, time is our great teacher, through which we view and value past mistakes, our expectations and our demands on others and ourselves.
Now this does not mean that time tells or cures all. We are the ones who must negotiate our feelings, address the personal harm that arises from the selfishness of others .
This means that we must take positions and assert ourselves at that moment, without letting others take advantage of us for fear of rejection or confrontation. This is what we call assertiveness and it constitutes one of the basic pillars for building our self-esteem and personal identity.
Learn to give your absence to those who do not value your presence
We may be aware of this but at the moment of truth we don’t face the social pressure. In fact, it is normal that a situation of exploitation hijacks our autonomy and our will.
By being assertive and imposing our opinions and feelings we can learn to retake our lives. Since it is impossible to recreate a life without risks of this kind, it is best to imagine situations that would be potentially dangerous for us and how we could cope with them without being aggressive or passive in our behavior (meaning that we would train ourselves in our minds).
Therefore when there is a situation of inequality and we notice that someone is trying to take advantage of us or nullify our will by their selfishness, we will be able to put what we have imagined into practice.
In this way we anticipate problems and we become more aware that relationships should be based on reciprocity and not on the decline of our identity and our self-esteem in favor of others.
It is important that we learn to say NO, to assert our presence and to look within ourselves for an ally to deal with those relationships based on inequality and selfishness of people who only think about themselves.