Imagine there is “a wood” in front of you, a period of your lifetime you want to travel through with someone as lonely travel is difficult. And together you start your way along a path as it looks like.
And suppose for some reason you go astray and find yourselves in a swamp. Relationship has deadlocked; there is no way out of it. So the tasks you entrusted it with are not performed any more. You knock about and quarrel with your partner; together you need to go back to the beginning, but you can’t be bored, you regret the time spent and the only thing you want is to blame.
**
One of the partners says “Enough, time to split up”. The other one, on the contrary, gets even more attached (as nobody wants to feel abandoned) and starts suffering drudgingly, as he or she wants to get the partner to return.
But to get the partner to return you need to meet him or her again. To relaunch relationship. The sense of this action is quite clear: the one who has left should feel abandoned as well. He or she should go through a sad feeling that the one who was meant to suffer for him or her till the end of the days has cured and has already found a new partner. And he or she may turn out to be a fool to have abandoned the partner. Or an idiot who didn’t have wits enough to understand that the partner was the chance for happiness but it is already late.
**
Though the sense is clear it is not at all easy to perform the task emotionally. This subject, to abandon to get one return, is risky. There is no guarantee, like with everything in life. You may leave him or her and it will probably make the partner happy. He will sigh with a relief, and will start off with a clean slate. But without you.
One thing is important to understand here. It’s all about getting to the other side of the wood, but not about sitting at the swamp forever, conjuring the prince who has turned back into a frog. There is a task. And it does not matter who you perform it with. Relations are for people, not that people are for relations. Relationship is means. But you should know what you have these means for.
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This thought best understood maintains relationship: we are together because we travel one direction, and fit together, not in an ideal way but in the optimal way. If the optimum changes there will come other people to take the place.
So it is all not about getting your partner to return, like taking by force or starvation. It is about understanding the sense, what you live for. So it’s about something that is beyond him/her, yourself, and relationship. This position allows you to see the system detachedly and from a distance. It makes the system easier to govern. And it keeps relationship safe.