Sometimes, things just don’t work out. No matter how hard or how hopefully you want a relationship to grow and blossom into something mutually rewarding for both people… it doesn’t. Instead, the relationship develops hard edges and jagged corners, until there is very little you can actually do together besides walk on eggshells and wait for the next poison arrow to hit you directly between the eyes (or, God help you, in the nuts). It is at this point that we can safely say that you are no longer in a relationship, where both people are actually relating to each other. Rather, you are trapped in a situationship, where hope no longer exists for evolution, growth, or even any sort of positive emotion. The only thing to do in a situationship, once you have acknowledged it as such (because acceptance of reality is critical, here) is to save yourself by jumping out of the situationship, and into a broad, open meadow that you might at first mistake for emptiness or loneliness. But, I assure you, that wide open space that is waiting for you, just outside the barbed-wire walls of your situationship, is anything but empty or lonely. In fact, this wide open space contains everything you need to begin fashioning the kinds of relationships that are defined not by walls or poison arrows, but by a shared feeling of enjoyment when you are together… as well as by a sense of grand excitement to do it all over with that same person again, soon. ❤️‍🔥—Y.B.D.