How many relationships have started in your life? Whether they be individual or communal, there’s one thing all of them have in common. They started out with feelings of excitement and possibility.
Many end for reasons outside of our control, but should they have started in the first place?
Here we’re going to talk about another relationship red flag to look out for. It’s being in a relationship that gets boring.
Relationships have to stay interesting
Boredom is never in the plan, but it usually contributes to ending a relationship.
When relationships stop being engaging mentally and emotionally, the people in them become bored. That boredom snowballs. Once boredom sets in, it sucks the motivation from making an effort to keep things interesting.
Now of course healthy relationships aren’t all fun and games. That’s not what’s being presented here. But they have to stay interesting.
You might love another person, but if life together gets boring, it will choke the relationship. You can love each other, but you can also get to the point where you don’t really LIKE each other as much as you used to.
Boredom is probably a big part of the problem.
Keeping life interesting is an antidote for living with all the things you don’t like about each other. It’s like providing a deep breath of oxygen. Whether it’s having fun or taking on challenges together, this is a need for every relationship.
So when it comes to deciding whether or not to invest deeply in a relationship, a key is to notice the conditions that lead to boredom before they ever start.
Interesting takes work
Every relationship we start investing in comes with a level of excitement. Many call this the “romantic period.” But it doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships. Whether it’s an individual relationship or with a community of people, it has that “new car smell” and you feel the promise of a exciting journey ahead.
But these feelings are the result of not knowing each other very well yet. As relationships progress, these feelings fade and they turn into new ones. What new ones they turn into becomes more about the substance of the relationship than the newness of it.
If you don’t put the work in to keep it interesting, boredom will make it’s appearance, you’ll forget about the initial feelings of excitement, and you’ll start questioning why you made the investment in the relationship in the first place.
Sometimes life is just interesting because of things that happen outside of our control. Maybe we’re forced into a change of routine by some unforeseen circumstance. But most of the time, it takes work and creativity to keep anything from getting boring.
Basically, life gets boring because people let it.
That church has an awesome worship team and an amazing preacher. It will get boring if it’s mechanically done week after week after week. Same songs, same preacher, same outcome…people getting bored of it all if there’s no creativity, spontaneity, flexibility and seasonality to it all.
You can ride the most thrilling roller coaster in the world, but do it enough times and you lose interest at some point.
That favorite meal of yours? Eat it every day and you’ll get sick of it.
Boredom presents a choice
You need to watch out investing deeply in relationships with people who just wait for interesting things to happen. When a relationship is new, almost everything is interesting simply because it’s new. But many of those things become old and boring at some point. It always creeps in.
But the issue is not that it happens. It becomes an issue when nothing is done about it. That’s when waiting on relationships to be interesting becomes poisonous.
What really goes on is that boredom presents a choice. Are we going to do something to create interest and excitement again? It exposes how much we really value a relationship, and therefore, if we really want to work at it.
The key is noticing towards the start those that are working at it and those that aren’t.
Something that’s going on right now might be interesting, but that’s not going to last forever. When a relationship isn’t being buttressed by a common activity or challenge, what will keep it from becoming boring?
If someone’s basic attitude in life is to let life come to them instead of making life interesting themselves, that’s a red flag. There should be a mental attitude that they don’t wait for life to get interesting. They make it so.
And when all the parties in the relationship have this attitude, it constantly feeds the relationship with excitement and adventure.
It helps to be honest about this from the start. You don’t want to catch yourself having invested a lot in a relationship where the other person doesn’t contribute to keeping things interesting.
If you’re the only one making the effort, the relationship will lose its fire pretty quickly. You’ll start to feel this imbalance and start to lose motivation to keep going.
You can’t buy interesting
What exactly makes life interesting anyway? Is it the things we do, the places we go and the stuff we have? Well, those help. But you still have to contribute something that only comes from inside of you. Interesting relationships are more about the people being interesting than anything else.
You can go to an interesting ballgame and be boring company. THE PERSON has to be interesting, not THE THING you’re experiencing. It’s not something you can go to, get or buy.
Stephen Matthew, author of Rooting Out Relationship Killers says this…
Life is routine. It has monotony built in. We do the same things every single day of our lives. The only thing that changes is our attitude to those things and whether we choose to make them fun or not…you do not need to HAVE fun, you need to BE fun.
Look for this red flag
So before you invest in building important relationships in your life (whether individual or communal), it’s important to discern if this could be an issue down the road. Will this person still help keep your relationship interesting down the road, or will you be left making all the effort yourself?
You can usually see this relationship red flag before it appears if you’re looking for it. You don’t have to wait until you’ve already invested a lot in a relationship.
So be careful to consider whether you should invest in a relationship with a person that doesn’t keep life interesting, whatever that entails for you.