Relationships are a weird thing. There is nothing else like it. It is a life-long mystery that two people can join their lives together to become one life, and still, remain as two independent people. It is a paradox, but somehow, it is possible. It must be, since it happens all the time. All I know is that graduate school was a heck of a lot easier than trying to understand women. I have one theory that helps me to understand that a little, to begin to understand how that works. My theory doesn't give the answer, but to me at least, it seems to make the answer a little easier to grasp. I came up with this theory while I was in college one day. I think that to understand how a marriage/relationship is supposed to work, you have to understand a mosquito and a natural spring.
A mosquito flies around, finds a suitable person, lands on him or her, and then begins to slowly suck the blood out of that person. I think that many people are like mosquitos. They look for a guy/girl that they can "land on" that will give them what they need and will sustain them. They think, "This person will make ME feel good, be intimate with ME, and fulfill MY needs, so I'll marry this person." Thus, they are like a mosquito "sucking" from this person. Then if you have two people doing that, then you have 2 mosquitos, each sucking blood from the other. It may sustain both mosquitos work for a short time, but it will not work in the long term.
Instead, you could be like a spring. A spring has a never-ending supply of fresh, cool water under the surface and lets that water bubble up to the surface and provides fresh water to drink. You can understand yourself, develop yourself, and grow yourself until you have an endless supply of love, compassion, and devotion deep in your life. Then, you can find a person, and like a spring, provide "water" from deep inside to that person for your whole life. Then if you have two people doing that, then you have 2 springs, with each person dedicated to nourishing and providing for the other. In this way, each person is always giving, and each person never goes thirsty. I don't have all of the answers, but I believe that this theory makes it a little easier for me to understand how a relationship is supposed to work.
But how does that work in the real world? Hmmm... that's a tough question. I'm not exctly sure. But maybe we're not supposed to fully understand that. Perhaps instead, we are supposed to live our whole lives, striving to understand that, always working harder to grasp what this concept means and how we can live it in our lives.
Do you know what King Solomon wrote about that? He was one of the wisest people who ever lived, and he wrote this about romance 3000 years ago:
"There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden."
So if Solomon couldn't understand it, I guess I should give myself a break for not having it figured out by now.