I haven't been in many serious relationships in my life. I have a lack of experience. I really learned so much in my relationship with Janna, but like all good things, it has ended. I learned a lot about myself, and how I need to be more considerate of others, and about some of my own weakness's.
It's frustrating when you give your whole heart and in the end get hurt. This is how we learn and grow. I believe it's all part of our mortal experience that God intended us to obtain when he sent us here. We're here to gain mortal bodies, and experience the heartaches and pleasures that come with the use of a physical body. Since family is so important to God's eternal plan of happiness, I honestly believe that gaining experience in a relationship is probably the most important thing we can learn here during our time on earth, especially if eventually this relationship should and will turn into an eternal relationship that will last through eternity.
It takes a lifetime to figure out ourselves and become perfect. Part of becoming perfect involves learning how to accept, love, and appreciate others. You would think that Godly attributes that we all inherit naturally wouldn't make it so hard to have success in a relationship. Also within a relationship, you would think that with such a strong connection and so many mutual similarities that you would be able to eventually work things out and accept and love the differences that exist in each other. But there seems to be the natural man that gets in the way of accomplishing our ambitions. It's odd how so many of us are naturally stubborn, insecure, selfish and indecisive. I think overcoming our own selfishness, and learning to have charity is eventually what we are learning to achieve. It can't be easily achieved if we aren't willing to accept differences in others. Sometimes we have to give up some of our freedoms, and our autonomy in order to accommodate other differences in those we love. This should be mutual. Nobody wants to drag their spouse to the celestial kingdom.
Unfortunately Satan doesn't want us to succeed and will do anything in order to keep us from coming anywhere close to marriage. He's against anything good. He will use simple things that aren't necessarily evil in order to distract us and keep us from succeeding and reaching our mortal goals. Is this part of the learning process God wants us to get that comes more natural to others than some, or is it human will that determine how much we fall when we're tempted? We know that wickedness never was happiness. We might begin doing things that we don't see wrong at all, because we have become so desensitized to how things should be. We tend to want to follow the world rather than follow God. Interesting how that's what we naturally do. It's also funny how we begin to reason, and rationalize the good between the bad. We can't have one foot in one side, and the other foot in the other and expect things will flow smoothly.
I wish I could say I was good at staying on the good side all the time. Learning to control our actions is part of the mortal learning experience that we are to achieve in the great plan of happiness. Overall, we should never forget that God has promised us blessings if we will but do his will and follow Christ. We can't expect blessings if we don't do a good enough job on our part. It's essential to fully repent of our past transgressions and continually persevere always. If we aren't realistic about life, and don't set goals, then how on earth can we expect to grow and become better in anyway? How would you even expect God to even send blessings? I don't know how anything would ever work out, cause we're not perfect. Dedication, commitment and perseverance is probably the key. At least with those things, you can conquer your faults one-by-one until a lifetime has gone by and you are that much closer to perfection. What a journey life would be if you were actually able to work on this with someone you loved so much and cared so much about.... Someday.... someday....
Another important fact that I learned and became very aware of is the distractions of text messaging and chatting using modern technology. There is NO substitute for person to person communication. That just makes things worse when you don't communicate important issues in person. Whenever this happened I forfeited important opportunities for developing and improving interpersonal skills. There is no substitute for laughing together, crying together, and creating rich and enduring bonds of emotional intimacy. To feel the warmth of a tender hug or kiss, to see the sincerity in the eyes of one another as you are talking to each other in person is much more valuable and goes a lot further than megapixels, online chatting, or text messages. Things always get misinterpreted anyway using this type of technology for physical expression. Satan wants us to sacrifice the kinds of experiences that will allow us to experience things as they really are, using our whole bodies. Satan knows that we can be displaced from the full range of physical capacity and experience that can only be obtained in person. We could easily lose ourselves in this type of technology, and cyber experiences. It is very possible to become past feeling. And with this I mean that it's possible to disconnect gradually from things as things are really meant to be, physically. I always had more success talking in person, rather than combating out a conversation over a text message. Things just become confusing. Don't get me wrong though. These things can be used for good. It's important to give reassurance of love, info and other relationship functions via text message, or other technology. But you can easily avoid absolute senseless arguments that manage to blow up and break couples apart every day if you don't abuse the importance of your physical body in a relationship.
