The One Thing You Need To Be Better At In Relationships

“If you carry old bricks from your past relationship to your new one, you will end up building the same house that fell apart before”.

This makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Everyone comes with baggage in life, but how we deal with that baggage is what makes or breaks our future relationships. If we are constantly under the burden of our past, how will we ever create a more fulfilling future for ourselves? Mostly people talk about how past experiences negatively affect our present and future relationships and how we should not let the past weigh down our chances for a better future. However, I would want to talk about something that hasn’t been discussed much, how our past experiences positively impact our future relationships.

As an Indian, I have heard so many people say they want someone who has never dated before especially with respect to the whole arranged marriage setting. I really don’t know why? Is it the thrill of being someone’s first and last love or the fact that they don’t want any comparisons to arise in the future? I would rather have my partner dated before me than wanting someone who doesn’t know what to do with another person in their life. Even if it’s just a few, I think that experience of being in a relationship is very crucial.

The more time you spend with different people is when you start to realize what you like and dislike in them and when the time comes to settle down, you have a very good idea of what sort of a person you want to end up with. Also if your partner and you have dated before, you’ll have a good idea about how much work a relationship actually takes and you both realize the amount of work it takes to sustain your relationship.

Relationships aren’t all romance and fun, and for the people who don’t experience it firsthand, they don’t have a clue of how hard it can get in the future. Another big one that I have personally experienced is that people that lack the dating experience are unaware of what to say or how to act in certain situations. They don’t know how to make sense of their feelings or yours, they tend to say the wrong things at the wrong time, they tend to freak out and withdraw when things are going well because it just seems like such an unfamiliar territory for them.

Every healthy relationship your partner has been in has only made them a better version of themselves. When you’re in a serious relationship with someone, you tend to change your habits for the better to accommodate that person in your life. You may break up with them but these positive habits tend to stay. So to think of it, if your partner hadn’t dated anyone before, they would just be a rough draft of themselves but now with all this change and experience you are in fact getting the perfected final draft for keeps. Thanks to all this experience up your sleeve, you will know for sure when you’re ready to settle down rather than being in that in between confused situation you would be in otherwise. Lastly, it’s not just the good experience you take in positively but the bad ones as well. With every bad experience, you not only realize what you don’t want in your future partner but you will tend to appreciate your future partner a lot more. It’s like people say, if it isn’t for the sadness in life, you will be unable to truly appreciate happiness that comes your way.

Of course, there will be a lot of people who would disagree with my point of view. I am not here to please anyone, but just like every coin has two sides, I am just trying to talk about the unexplored second side of having a good amount of relationship experience. Hands down, with all other factors being the same, I would pick a partner who has been in one or few relationships before, who know what it takes to be in a relationship, to know how to resolve conflicts with their partner and just to know how to treat their partner right. By no means am I implying that people who lack experience will tend to make bad partners in any way, all I am saying is it will take a lot more effort to be able to explore the dynamics of a relationship as they have never been in one themselves. Don’t be scared to date and get hurt, it will only help you know better. Always remember, sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall together.

Featured image via Shawn Fields on Unsplash