How our conditioning affects our relationships

“When our partner does something that doesn’t comply with our conditioning, we feel unhappy because we want our conditioning complied with. We think that our partner doesn’t love us or isn’t a good person for not complying with our conditioning. But the reason most people don’t comply with our conditioning is that they have conditioning that’s different from ours. When our loved ones don’t comply with our conditioning, we may feel unhappy, angry, sad, resentful, and even afraid. Did that person make us unhappy? Or did we make ourselves unhappy by assuming that person should comply with our conditioning? Who says someone should comply with our conditioning? Our conditioning says so.

The truth is that no one is going to comply with our conditioning all of the time because everyone has different conditioning. Not a single person on this planet has conditioning exactly like yours, so it’s too much to expect that others be like us or that they behave the way we would like them to. They behave the way they do because of their conditioning. When we can accept that others behave the way they do and not demand that they behave some other way to please us, much conflict can be avoided. Most disagreements are about conditioning–trying to get someone to do something the way you want, when the other person doesn’t want to.

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People in relationships that last have learned to surrender their desires, preferences, expectations, beliefs about how things should be done, and other conditioning to love. They have learned to choose to be loving and accepting rather than try to change their partner. They have learned to not take their own conditioning so seriously. The truth is that conditioning is just a thought, and how important are thoughts? Are they more important than love, more important than relationship? Our desires to have things be a certain way and our ideas about how someone should be are not more important than love, and if you make them more important than love, you are likely to lose love.” — Gina Lake