Love and Relationships: What if

‘’I can’t control my destiny, I trust my soul, my only goal is just to be. There’s only now, there’s only here. Give in to love or live in fear. No other path, no other way. No day but today.” [Rent]

You wake up one morning and find yourself beside your partner in the midst of your life as you know it and you wonder to yourself, ‘’Was this all destined to happen like this?’’ Were you destined to marry your high school sweetheart? Were you destined to stay in an unhappy relationship? Were you destined to fall in love from a blind date that your friends set up? Were you destined to wake up beside the one person you love so much and want to share every moment, all your dreams, aspirations and the future with? Who knows? –Destiny?

The partner that you have is the partner that you were meant to have. That’s what people tell you. Anyway, I would like to believe it. Everything else in the world seems so completely random. What if one little thing you say or do could make it all fall apart? What if you had chosen another life for yourself or another person? You might have never found each other. What if you had been raised differently? What if your mother was never sick? What if you actually had a good father? What if you had chosen to live in a different country? What if? What if?

The only constants in life are the variables! Variables are the many ‘’thank God that happened!’s in your life that have contributed to your relationship.

These are the little things that happen that at that moment seem so unfair and in many cases disappointing, but at the end of the day it feels like an angel did something just for you. Picture this, August 3, 2011 [Sophia Petrillo’s voice – Golden Girls]: in Egypt and trying to navigate through the gay underground world. On my way to meet a friend, but it turned out that I mixed up two numbers. Needless to say, when I arrived, I was in for a big surprise… I was meeting the ‘wrong’ person (at the time I thought). Throughout the evening, I tried to ‘’escape’’ (I am glad I didn’t), but couldn’t. We ended up at dinner where he invited another friend to join us. Little did I know that that friend would turn out to be someone special in my life. What if I had met the ‘right’ person? What if I wasn’t brave enough to dig my way into Egypt’s underground gay world? What if I hadn’t made a mistake with the telephone numbers and actually met the person I intended to meet, would my summer vacation have ended differently? What if? –Destiny?

At some point in your existence you start to wonder about all the elements of your life and how the many variables have played their parts so that you can end up happy. On some level, our parents/socialization/how we were raised have impacted our lives and by extension the quality of our relationships.

Do you believe you have control over your life and the events that happen in it, or are you just mere puppets hanging by strings of fate and so often are played on this stage of life? There are those people who like the idea of control (and I am not talking the S&M kind; well, not today…) and therefore embrace the fact that we have ‘’control’’ over what we do and what happens to us in a relationship. At least, we can blame ourselves when we mess up (as we often do) and unlike shopping online, we can look someone in the eyes and give them a piece of our minds when we are not pleased with our situations. But then, who likes to point fingers at themselves? Not me! Oh no, as human beings we love to dish the blame on someone else and who better to blame than, fate/destiny/life?

As we move through life, the force of fate creates events that we only appreciate when we reflect on our existence. [ Ronald Harmon ]