WE are much better at connecting than repairing

​If my boys one day come to me and tell me they are getting married, or entering into any sort of permanent committed relationship, I know what I will say to them.

It won't be congratulations. In fact, it won't be a statement at all. It will be a question: "how will you fix it when things go wrong?"

That's influenced, for sure, by my own relationship history. For the longest time I've said I'm not good at relationships. The reality is what I've never been good at is REPAIRING relationships.

So maybe I wish someone would have asked me that question before I got married. How will you fix it when things go wrong?

Maybe it would have helped me discover that I had a lot of experience with relationships in my life, yet almost zero experience with repairing them when they became challenging.

Relationships become challenging when feelings and emotions become challenging. Feelings and emotions become challenging when we have no idea what to do with them. Or often times even what the heck they are.

If you don't have a history of naming and working through challenging emotions with other people, if you have not witnessed it, if you have not practiced it, because relationships ARE a skill, you will end up doing one of two things.

You will run, retreat.

Or you will attack, villainize.

Most of my life I made up for my lack of relational repair skills by retreating. If not literally running from the relationship, escaping into relationships with something else to distract me from the challenging emotions of a failing relationship.

I will also own that I've done a fair amount of villainizing. When you can convince yourself that my challenging emotions are a result of someone else's choices or behaviors, villainizing really just becomes a more complex way to escape.

Often times a more hurtful one.

I will ask my boys that question before they commit because repairing relationships early in the disrepair is important. Because eventually disrepair becomes disconnected. And once the connection is gone, so with it is a lot of the longing and desire that is the heart and soul and fuel for a repair.

I believe we live in a world that is better than ever at connecting.

We are a world of mass networking.

But what we are failing miserably at is repairing broken connection. No amount of networking can heal the hurt and the damage left in the carnage of mass broken connections.

We spend an awful lot of time focused on growing our connections.

Maybe it's a good time to shift some of the focus from collecting connections to repairing the ones we have while we still have them.

Maybe there is no bigger challenge, because the reality is, "most of us aren't good at repairing relationships." My guess is the repairs start with owning just that.