We tend to look for happiness in the wrong places. A relationship is one of the most common ones. And who could blame us? Love is the best thing that can happen to us. It’s also one of the most powerful emotions we can experience. It can fly us over the moon and back. But it can break us and crush us so badly that we forget how to fly.
We need to have happiness from within, which will make us fly even when love breaks our wings.
We just have to stop looking for happiness in all the wrong places. We have to stop looking for happiness in all the wrong people. We have to find out what happiness mean and where it comes from.
If somebody were to ask us, the first thing we would say is that happiness comes from within us. And while that is the correct answer and the only truth, we fail to manage to practice that in reality.
We often put our happiness in the hands of other people, our significant others, expecting them to make us happy. We keep putting our own job into the hands of somebody else.
And that’s where it all goes wrong.
Firstly, we put a lot of pressure on the other person. If they feel like their job is to make us happy, it gives them a sense of responsibility which nobody is ready to take. That scares them and usually makes them run for their life.
Secondly, your happiness is your own responsibility. Your job is to make yourself happy. Everything comes from within. And how we feel and what we feel determines our relationships. We can’t expect anybody to make us happy if we don’t do it for ourselves.
More often than not, people enter relationships thinking they need their other half to make them complete. In doing so they fail to understand they are already complete all by themselves or at least they should be.
Relationships are not all rainbows and butterflies; they have rough patches, they get messy and complicated. They get hard to handle. And if you are not OK with who you are, it will take so much more to get through all that.
On the other hand, there are people who believe that the only way they feel happy is when they are with someone. So they stay in bad relationships. They suffer and they put up with all the toxicity and selfishness of their partners. They long for those brief moments of joy their significant other provides, thinking that is love, thinking that’s the key to happiness, when it’s far from it.
Happiness means making yourself happy. Focus on self-love and be satisfied with your life. Nobody can do it for you.
Happiness means choosing yourself and leaving all the wrong people behind. It means leaving all the toxicity, having a healthy relationship with yourself and putting yourself as a priority. It means respecting yourself enough to walk away from anything that doesn’t help your growth.
It doesn’t mean staying with the wrong people, catching glimpses of happiness. It doesn’t mean having happiness as a distant memory and giving endless chances to somebody who puts you down, someone who only makes himself a priority, while you are always the one who comes last. Don’t be scared of loneliness, be scared of spending your life on somebody worthless.
Make yourself happy when you are all by yourself surrounded by silence and with nothing but your thoughts as company. Your thoughts create your world. Create that place inside of yourself where you feel worthy of everything, where you have nothing but love and respect for yourself. Where you are your own hero and you don’t need anybody else to save you.
Your relationship should add to your bliss, not take away from it. Don’t you ever think otherwise. Don’t confuse sacrifice and compromise. Relationships demand compromise, empathy and having someone’s best interests in your hand. Sacrifice has no place in love. You should never sacrifice your hopes, dreams, and dignity for someone. That’s no way to happiness, self-love or love toward another person.
When you are happy with who you are, you face pain more easily. You accept it as an inevitable part of life. You have a positive mindset and you know that this is just a period of time, and no matter how long it is, it has to pass. You know you are stronger than that, you know you will heal as you did so many times before. And you will come out of everything as a winner, proud of yourself that you managed to make it through.
Happiness always comes after immense sadness, just like the sun is the brightest after the worst storm.
Never think there is a person in this world who is constantly happy. That’s impossible because life isn’t like that. Don’t believe all the fake happiness people post about on social media. Instagram photos don’t show the reality, they just show a moment in time when somebody was happy (or pretended to be).
It’s all fictional and everybody shows what they want to be seen. All of those happy couples popping up in your Facebook news feed were maybe happy at that moment. They will never post pictures of when they fought or when things got bad. Nobody wants to look at somebody’s messy reality and people sometimes don’t even want to face their own.
All this social media talk here is just to show that you never know the background of every post or picture, so don’t believe everything you see. Not comparing yourself is also one of the right paths that lead to happiness.
Life only comes by once, so we should try and make it as wonderful as possible while it lasts. In order to do that, happiness is a choice. We have to wake up every day and have the main goal of being happy from within ourselves. Only when you are happy by yourself can you be happy with somebody else.
So, don’t think that your relationship status defines your happiness. You are the one who decides it. Your happiness is not something that will come to you—it’s something you have to find and work on. It’s something that starts with you and only you.