Love is a beautiful coexistence between two humans with two separate hearts that beat as one.
Blah blah blah
Reality is love takes time,work, patience, and understanding. Love goes up. Love goes down. On some days love comes easy and on others it makes no sense. Why can’t love just get along with everyone?
In a relationship a person is either a giver (+) or a taker (-). Over the next month or so we’ll cover symbiotic relationships and how they pertain to love.
First, let’s take a look at what a symbiotic relationship is. Dictionary.com defines the psychiatric aspect of symbiosis as follows:
A relationship between two people in which each person is dependent upon and receives reinforcement, whether beneficial or detrimental, from the other
Yes, relationships can have detrimental impact on us. So let’s knock that one out first. I present the competitive relationship.
A competitive relationship (-/-) provides no advantage to either member. Both side compete against themselves in opposition; not with each other as a team. This can be bad. For example, an abusive relation. In a competitive relationship both members fight for attention, resources, or the sheet . Negativity will never breed positivity. So is there a way that two competitive members can coexists? Sure there is. Look at coyotes and wolves. Both hunt the same prey, but one does it at night while the other does it in the day. Neither wolves or coyotes benefit from each other. But, they are able to coexist. By placing partitions and allotments two people can agree on what goes where and what belongs to whom. This is not a healthy environment for love to grow in.
This relationship is often found in young love. Note: I didn’t say young people. When two souls come together and want to bond, there is often some disagreement to what goes where and what needs to go to the curb. This is found in all ages. It would be easy if one side just allowed the other side to have control. However, that’s not how a healthy relationship thrives. There needs to be balance and compromise on both sides.
A competitive relationship has the potential for a great foundation for love. But like a house, once the foundation is poured and set, we don’t call it complete. Nope we have a long way to go before calling the foundation a house. Next week we’ll cover another symbiotic love and find out how important a healthy balance is to compromising towards each other.
Until then, live life, be happy, and find life’s happiness.
Steve Curtis
at1_retired@yahoo.com
Live Life, Be Happy 
I totally agree about symbiotic relationships. I have always believed that relationships are like seeing a scale where perhaps one time you are giving 125% and the other person clearly less, but then it switches and in the end result, you should have balance. Now I realize that no matter what age you are, you can have a bad relationship, but in my own case, I have found that the older I have gotten (and I am 16 years older than my significant other, Richard), that there is less drama overall, and I have had other relationships before. He was with me every step of the way when I had cancer, and through my PTSD which I still have from being assaulted and bullied by a very large group of seniors (yes, you can believe it) because I am a Criminal Justice graduate and was trying to stop drug trade in my old park. The following year, he ha had a cervical surgery that did not worked out right followed by another one this year that also did not work, and he is paralyzed partly on his right side, so now I am his caregiver/advocate.
He is a quiet man, loves animals as I do, makes gentle fun of my garden and plants everywhere, but has helped me to get them planted and to find plants that people are giving away for free. He really surprised me that he knows all the kinds of herbs I grow, and he told someone that he loves to use fresh herbs from our garden in his excellent and creative cooking. We have our desks next to each other, not by design, but by a lack of more space as we live in a small and older mobile home, but we can sit next to each other all day long and feel as though we have our own space. After I think five or six years now, one of us turns toward the other and blows a little kiss, and the other blows one back, and we speak now and then, but we still feel uncramped. He accepts things I like as I accept things he likes, and he may never know a lot about art quilting, but when he is talking to others, he calls me an artist and a published writer, and I like that. I made him a Master Chef’s certificate and he just beams when people see it and ask him where he was trained. I also tell people a lot of other really good things about him.
I will be 78 in November, but I am ageless in my mind and he is pretty much the same way. And yes, a wonderful sex life doesn’t have to stop because we are older. We don’t have to go out for entertainment all the time, but when we do, we have so much fun doing the smallest things. So a relationship is as good as you make it, and you have to be willing to realize that sometimes your significant other will be the giver and sometimes it will be you. I will never regret a single moment of ours.
Relationships are like investing money in a bank or savings institution. If you are constantly pulling your money out and starting over again, you will never get very far.
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