Posts Tagged ‘relationship’

Typically, when someone is hobbling around with crutches, a leg or ankle is confided to cast.

Despite the awkwardness of taking slow, swinging steps that were once effortless, the crutches are necessary.  They help keep you balanced, propel you forward, allowing yourself to heal. Once you have overcome your injury, you can shed your crutches and return to walking tall.

But imagine if you continued to use the crutches long after your leg healed? What if you became so dependent on the crutches that you forgot how to walk without them?

Sounds silly, right? Perhaps. But there are many people who do it every day, sometimes for years.

In an effort to deal with a wounded self-image or damaged confidence, people rely on emotional crutches.

I, for one, can attest to remaining in an unhealthy relationship, believing that this relationship was propping me up. Unfortunately, I was too afraid to admit that the relationship was a crutch that actually slowed me down.

I know people who use their occupation as a crutch, not just financially, but emotionally. Too afraid to compromise their standard of living, they use their jobs as a crutch, hindering their ability to walk on a path to their dreams.

Or on the other hand, there are those whose identity is deeply enmeshed with their job title and work, this became their crutch preventing them from exploring who they truly are.

Now, I am not saying that crutches are bad. We all need crutches to support us; especially at times we have been wounded. But the key is to ensure that you nurture yourself, heal properly and return to walking tall.

“If there’s nothing at stake for the characters, then nothing can be at stake for the reader.” I love this quote made by Colson Whitehead in the Harper’s article Wow, Fiction Works!.

This same statement can also be said for life. Let’s look at it from a relationship standpoint. If two people are in a relationship, but one person felt that there was nothing at stake, then there would be nothing at stake for their partner.

If one person felt that if there was nothing to lose or gain by being in that relationship, then there is no reason for them to remain in the relationship, let alone fight for it. There is also no need to see how the love story will end because likely it will not be much of a love affair.

As with the case of literary stories, there has to be passionate characters to propel the story forward. The lack of these characters at stake is essentially a lack of commitment to the reader. Without these dynamic characters, the reader will not wait to see how the story ends.