It’s complicated: the truth about life and love

It should be easy, right? But no, instead, it’s complicated. Find someone you love; the person loves you back, and everyone is happy forever. That’s the dream, right? But then we always wake up, and when we do, we find life is in different shades of grey, not black and white. So, sometimes, we love and we don’t get loved back. Other times we are loved but we don’t love back. We love people we can’t love, people we shouldn’t love. And those who shouldn’t love us, do.

But the real question is: what to do when it all gets complicated? There are rules of engagement but sometimes our grasp and understanding of the rules prove inadequate. So a person breaks your heart and you are unable to get over it forever. A friend’s younger sister has a crush on you but all you see is a sister. These might be simple cases, but the extent to which the complications can arise can be far reaching.

In our ideal wonderland, complications don’t exist so we wave it away but when they do in real life. The first thing to do is to define each of the relationships that exist and rearrange according to priority.

Say Mr X falls in love with his friend’s sister who is a work colleague at the bank. That’s three relationships right there! Firstly, there’s the feeling they share – let’s call this A. Secondly, there’s the work relationship – we’ll call this B. Finally, there’s the friendship between Mr X and the girl’s brother – relationship C.

They need to decide the order of priority of A, B and C so that they can know what they can afford to be and what they cannot afford to be. If the bank has a no dating/no marriage policy between colleagues then they would need to decide which is more important to them: their love, their jobs or the friendship between X and the girl’s brother.

This order will not always be easy to make. Heck, the real order might not even be the most logical ones. People have left jobs for love, people have been known to leave love for the sake of a job. But an order must be reached so as not make it is to make a mess of things. I have seen cases where one party has to leave the job for love or where the love has to chill for the job etc. Whatever the complication, the solution lies in prioritising and ordering the relationships within the relationship.