How Big A Role Does It Play In Your Relationship?

Sometimes a relationship is quite ruined by outside interference.

You would think that once you were grown up you would be able to make your own choices in regard to your life, or at least arrive at mutual decisions with your spouse or live-in lover.

Your Life is Not Your Own
Unfortunately, that is very far from the truth. Many people live in a frenzy of panic and stress as they desperately attempt to please all of the wretches who are willfully interfering in their lives, apparently just because they can.

Relatives are by far the worst culprits but sometimes even 'well-meaning' friends can interfere, and the worst part is, each individual expects you to do and be something completely different.

So if the people in your life constantly advise you or even have the unmitigated nerve to try and straight-out tell you what to do, you need to put a stop to it right away.

Help Has Arrived
If this is a fair description of your life, then you definitely need to take the advice of Dame Wotta Tripp, because she knows exactly what she is doing.

Take heart, help has arrived, but you will have to be brave, and so will your partner, if you have so far not stood up to the opinionated bullies in your life.

There is nothing on earth they dislike more (apart from possibly your mate) than having someone they are used to trying to tell what to do suddenly rebel and draw a new line on the ground behind which they are expected to stay.

They have come to think in terms of having some sort of right of access to your life and must now be disabused of this erroneous idea, once and for all. This will cause widespread fall-out, but it can't be helped.

And all because you were trying to be nice! But that's people for you.

Before You Change Things
Now is the time to be brutally honest with yourself. Are any of the things these pests are telling you actually true?

If you are in a liaison with a cat burglar, for instance, or somebody who is perhaps practising surgery in the operating theatre with forged qualifications, then maybe they have good reason to be a little concerned about you.

Don't Complain to Everyone
Do you complain to your friends and relatives about your life or your partner a lot? If you do then you can perhaps expect a measure of interference. If you don't want other people's opinions, then don't tell them all your woes.

Remember also that your partner might justifiably see it as a betrayal that you have discussed your relationship with other people, especially if there is no love lost between those involved.

Try Not to Borrow or Lend
Unless it's a real emergency, try not to borrow money from family members. It could be the cause of a lot of discord later on. Resentments over financial matters are quite often to be apprehended lurking behind family disagreements and grievances.

If a relative needs to borrow from you, ask yourself three things:
1. Can I (or we) afford it?
2. How much damage will it do me (or us) if I don't get it back?
3. Am I (are we) willing to let it go, permanently if necessary, for the sake of the long-term family relationship?

Real Trouble Makers
There are unfortunately rather a lot of people who actually plot and connive actively in an attempt to break up relationships that they may disapprove of, resent or even be jealous of.

It sounds like the kind of thing you would read about in a novel, but there are many troublemakers who behave in this way, and a considerable number of them get clean away with it.

Criticism
Criticism is rarely constructive. Often it's a thinly disguised passive-aggressive attack on you, your partner or your relationship.

You must put your foot down and make sure that the offender understands that you won't tolerate constant criticism, because if you don't, then it will never end.

Ask them instead to support you in your decisions and life-choices. Tell them that you don't wish to be put in a situation where you have to choose between them and your partner.

It should be made clear that if it comes down to it, you will ultimately stand with your significant other against all comers.

 

Judgement and Condemnation
Sometimes a family objects to a union on religious, social or racial grounds. It may be impossible to sway them from their bigoted stance.

 

People with such fixations are generally this way because of thorough indoctrination during childhood.

Left to their own devices, it typically requires a human being between one hundred and one hundred and fifty years to conquer such programming without help.

As people do not live splendidly long and healthy lives anymore, it's apparent that for many they will live and die with the red flag of their unreasonable and unkind ideals still flapping uselessly in the odorous gaseous emissions of their own interminable nonsense.

Never let such people break you up.

Divided You Fall
If you are to withstand the buffets that life continually delivers to your relationship you will have to present a united front to the world.

If your vastly unseemly and seemingly vast extended family see any chinks in the armour of your togetherness, then they will be all over you like hornets invading a summer barbecue.

However much you do - or don't - love them, you have chosen your partner, and under most circumstances they should try to understand and accept this, even if it burns and makes them squirm.

You have your life to live and it's your partner or spouse who is now central to that.

If you stand your ground together, everyone will come to accept the situation given time unless they are just plain unreasonable, in which case it is more their loss than yours.

Make Them Call First
Don't let people come round unannounced. This is often the chosen tactic of the interfering relative or in-law.

If you don't already have it, get caller id. That way at least you have some control over when you talk to people. Otherwise you are guaranteed that they will use their special interference sensors to call you while you are engaged in one of the following activities:
1. eating a romantic meal together
2. indulging in one of the many varieties of sexual concourse available to Earth dwellers
3. having an enormous fight
4. putting out a chip-pan fire

Don't think for one moment that they call innocently and with no prior knowledge, because at a subconscious level they know exactly what they are doing.

You will see a clear pattern to their bad behaviour if you pay special attention for a few months.

Never let other family members or friends have the key to enter your home, especially if they are prone to arriving out of the blue.

You probably don't want to be caught naked, and you certainly don't want to be discovered wearing that very strange moulded leather suit.

Put Aside Some Time for Your Extended Family
Unless you are planning to make a clean break of it and expunge certain people completely from your life, then you will have to put aside some time to see them.

Despite the fact that in-law jokes were created as a safety valve in order to release enough dormant vituperation to ensure their relative safety from acts of mayhem and violence, it is natural for you to feel a certain amount of blind rage.

Restrain yourself.

In order for everyone's lives to run a little more smoothly, you must bite the bullet previously reserved for your partner's mother and instead attempt to bring affection and tolerance into the lives of those around you.

If you agree to these harrowing visitations, it will make you a hero, even if unsung.

Try and pre-arrange these visits at more regular intervals, but for shorter amounts of time. Everyone will be happier, and they will all complain a bit less.

Take turns visiting your own and your partner's family on special occasions, such as Christmas or any of the many cultural and religious festivals that occur year round that you or your relatives might celebrate.

If you really can't stand one more festive season with your mutated relatives from the burning pit, then take a break. Book yourselves into a bed and breakfast for a romantic getaway.

Tell your family members that you are attempting to save your marriage.

If one more misbegotten family get-together might be the straw that breaks the back of the poor belaboured camel of love, then you are merely telling them all the truth.

Everybody needs to get away once in a while.