Feeling alone and frustrated with a 180.

[aeolianchaos]

Sometimes I think that DBing is teaching me not so much how to succeed in a relationship as how to live. You know, how to have balance, to love without making a person the center of my life, to exercise an appropriate amount of focus on myself, etc.

I think this is a really good observation.

DBing is, ultimately, an individual pursuit. Often inspired by a crisis and hope for success in a partnership, but ultimately its about you.

The same holds true for relationships in a lot of ways - we are in them with someone else but we remain separate individuals despite all the romantic notions of 'becoming one' and things like that. We are always going to be distinct individuals and if we don't take care of that truth, it is easy to get into trouble in the relationship.

In many ways, relationships can be a 'hiding place' where we avoid confronting who we are being at a given moment and look for the relationship to compensate for what we don't like. In other ways, the relationship can show us exactly who we really are and force us to consider if we really want to keep being that person.