The Role Humility Could Play in Your Relationships

In the past few months, I've seen several friends go through some serious challenges in their romantics lives. I myself wrestled with the end of my own relationship back in April and have since tried to reflect on what went wrong in my previous attempt at long-term love. I wanted to dig deep into myself to understand all of the many lessons that experience could possibly offer, and having turned 25 since, I've also thrown myself into a constant state of reflecting on who I am and who I want to be. I was thinking about several relationships this past weekend, not just relationships with romantic partners, but also friends, colleagues, and family members. In asking myself some of the tougher questions I've probably ignored in the past, I discovered that many of the problems I've experienced in my own relationships have a common root cause, the absence of humility.

Several of my friends who have experienced troubles in their own love lives over the past year point to communication, intimacy, and unequal care and attention in their relationships as some of the primary causes of turmoil. But when I ask them questions that force them to reflect on their own actions and mindsets, I've noticed this overwhelming presence of arrogance in how they see their role in their relationships.

In one conversation, a friend of mine shared that her partner doesn't "share the same level of affection." I asked her to explain further and she said, "I'm very romantic, affectionate and I feel like I'm the one always expressing that and he likes it but won't do the same in return." It was also disclosed that her partner in general has a difficult time expressing his feelings. Although this was a problem for my friend's lover, her ego told her that she was  "worth the effort" and that he needed to just "change" for her.

She is beautiful, brilliant and possesses many of the attributes that any single man with his head screwed on properly would desire, but the truth is if our lovers enter relationships with barriers that they've never been respectfully pushed to address and given the time and space to do so intentionally, we would be incredibly arrogant to assume that they'd just change overnight for us.

What was even more of an issue here is that my dear friend never bothered to really tell her lover how she truly felt about how the relationship was progressing on the basis that "he should just know..." Should he? A part of me wanted to ask my friend, who in the hell she thought she was to believe that someone should just know how to meet and cater to her needs when she had not explicitly shared those needs or disclosed where her heart and mind were with respect to the relationship.

It's not her fault though and it also isn't her fault that her partner's arrogance hinders him from seeing that while he also brings many great things to the table that his own work in making my friend both happy and satisfied is far from being done. In addition, he's arrogant to assume that just because he has some difficulty meeting my friend's emotional needs that she was just going to have to compromise while continuing to meet his needs. Both of them, like many of us, were lacking the kind of humility that could really take their relationship to greater heights.

When I think about this concept of humility, I think about the shear arrogance and ego that I see consistently interrupting the trajectory of our most sacred and meaningful bonds.  If I really think about the root cause of problems I've seen in many forms of relationships, often it's our inability to set our ego aside or arrogance that leads us to believe someone should change for us, that we should only be TRUE lovers and friends when WE are in the mood, or others should just know how we truly feel without being told explicitly.

I also think of the arrogance that forces us to believe others should give us more than what they are capable of giving and how deeply humility could inspire us to fully accept our realities in relationships, stopping us from thinking we could bend reality to fit our own needs and desires.

I want to be more humble in my relationships. I want to recognize, own and display my weaknesses, my fears, my concerns and set my ego aside to open up my mouth and be able to allow the words that rest at the deepest parts of my heart to flow honestly and freely. I want to love, and care, and listen, and walk in humility next to those with whom I am in relationships, acknowledging my small place in this world and the potential humility has in making a massive difference in the lives of others.