Primer has saved the face of many a cosmetic user. A couple of sprays in the morning and you have a full day of long wear makeup. Unfortunately, this is not true for relationships.

Primers help set things in place, but they can’t keep them their forever; looking fresh and new, feeling youthful. At the end of the day the makeup has to come off to allow your skin to breath, to remove the soot of the day, to let the perfection go. And it’s in this moment that a relationship is tested. Are you able to refresh your perspective on how to engage your partner and the goals you’ve set? Did you even set any goals? Are there goals? Do you share them? Do you still know your partner? Have they changed? Have you noticed?

Happiness is not something someone else gives or makes…it is. Your partner can’t make you happy. They can live in such a way that the environment is conducive to receiving and giving so that happiness is experienced. When a feeling like happiness is considered something someone else is responsible for then you are not in control of it and it remains an external force. You are left waiting for happiness to arrive instead of knowing that happiness is all around, it just may be blocked by the circumstances of your life.

Happy is an elusive state of being. If we are too attached to it and where we believe it has come from, then we become dependent on that false source. To recognize the multitude of expressions one must reveal in their own life, is to understand that one person is complicated in and of themselves. We are desperately complicated. Put one and one together and you get two humans with myriad of layers and details. The problem we create is trying to sort out all of these complications into compartments so they can be dealt with instead of simply understood. Many of us skip the understanding part of knowing our partner and rest in “all you need to do is”…love me?

Love and happiness are not inextricably linked in relationships. Love does not extrapolate the needs of your partner. Happiness does not sustain love. Sustenance comes from the work one does in being a friend, building a real partnership. Much of the work will come from communication and the method one uses to do so. Many of us are not taught how to communicate or actively listen, we simply have picked up cues throughout the years. Others seek a high level of communication and are rejected by the notion that this is even necessary. After all, a relationship is not a thesis, right? Why do we have to sort out all ideas and feelings and causes and effects? Probably because if you want to be in a conscious, present, nourishing relationship you have to challenge yourself to give and receive in the same way.

It’s sad how long some of us wait within the cells of a relationship before breaking out. I have heard too many stories of couples that have been together over 11 years and it’s been nothing but drama and trauma. Have we ignored the co-dependent nature of our society? And why are we replicating this unhappiness for ourselves and our children?

At the end of the day, we take off the primer (that set the makeup that made the day). We must remove what has soiled us, what will build up and clog the places from which we breath. From the song Love and Happiness, it is only too true:

I have to say
Love and happiness (love and happiness)
Love and happiness (love and happiness)
You be good to me
I’ll be good to you
We’ll be together, yeah
We’ll see each other
Walk away with victory, yeah oh baby