Q&A: The Forever People

I suggest going at it from a different direction. Decide which people will be in your life forever. And build relationships based on that. Is the husband in question a forever husband or a temporary companion? It’s your decision. The power lies with you. I promise that the moment you decide that you found your forever husband, you’ll have an entirely different relationship with him than with any temporary companion.

Once you got your forever husband (wife, relative, friend, etc), you will relate to them in a way that’s on a different planet from how you relate to the disposable and interchangeable people in your life.

The approach I propose is better because it’s not reactive. You don’t sit there, waiting for something to happen that will prompt you to end the relationship. There’s nothing that can end the relationship like there’s nothing that dan end your relationship with your forever head or your forever left shoulder. The forever head can have a massive headache and the forever shoulder can get annoyingly arthritic. But they are there for good. You can similarly have people in your life who are there for good. These will be very, very few. Isn’t it great, though, to have people like that?

As an exercise, I suggest sitting down right now and making a list of your forever people, the people who will witness your life from today and until one of you dies. The feeling of freedom and peace once you know for sure who’s there till the final point is like nothing else.

None of this, of course, works in the one exceptional case of parents. You will be in a relationship with your parents—whether they are living or dead—irrespective of whether you want it or not. You can decide never to see your mom again, yet you’ll continue suffering from the anxiety she seeded in you when you were an infant. So that’s one thing that was decided for us. All the rest of the forever people are up to us.