Regardless of your relationship status, you’ve probably heard this same phrase:

“Relationships are hard work.”

I’ve said it myself.

For the longest time, I thought I thrived in the chaos adjacent to this kind of “hard work”. Forest fires and tattered ropes were all I really ever experienced.

I thought it was the only way to live. That being at peace would simply be boring.

I thought it was normal to constantly battle against the current. To ride the waves. To get swept underneath the tide and have to swim back out.

I even thought I was the common denominator of all the toxic relationships I experienced.

I shouldn’t have thought this way. I had a very nice relationship with a future (maybe now current?) lawyer prior to the ones that didn’t work. It didn’t work with the lawyer (and then I swore off lawyers). But she showed me that relationships could exist in a constant state of positivity, and not need the negativity to fuel some kind of fictional fire.

Yet I still found myself under the false sense of insecurity that romantic relationships could only ever work if they were a battle for survival.

After all, it’s what we are always told in nearly every capacity of our lives.

Working with people will always be difficult.

Conflict is inevitable.

Relationships are hard work.

As it turns out, this is not the truth (cue VOLCANIC REACTIONS EXPLODING 🌋🌋).

As it turns out; and as you might know if you really think about it: The best relationships are easy. The best relationships I’ve ever had, from friends, to coworkers to Aislinn, have all been easy.

The best ones have always been unequivocally supportive. Or at least, relentlessly understanding when you do screw up.

The worst ones? Constant work. Constant scraping against the pavement. Never-ending battles for survival.

And actually, despite how often it seems to occur – that’s not the norm.

The norm is for things to be easy.

Relationships aren’t meant to be toxic.

If you let them be, relationships can actually be easy. Even writing this line and reading it over four times across all four edits, I’m still struggling to wrap my head around this statement I’ve made – and really, truly, believe it myself.

This must be because I can’t explain it. Two personalities completely align (which is already so rare and magical to find), and that’s all I can really explain.

_{* My previous toxic relationship told me that I put the word magical in my writing too much.}

But it’s the magical truth. Relationships can be easy.

They’ll still ride the waves and weather the storms. But they’ll ride and weather them together. That sounded so sappy that I low-key hate it.

But it’s also the magical truth.

All of my favourite friendships and working relationships have existed within this indescribable rhythm and flow. We get each other. We tease each other. We support each other.

I exist in a long-distance relationship, currently separated by five provinces.

That’s been easy for us to work through.

We’re at slightly different stages of life, pulling us in slightly opposite directions at times.

That’s been easy for us to work through.

We have a happy, supportive relationship full of dancing, laughing and silly voices.

Our greatest argument was about the fact that she thinks she’d rather be an hour early than 1 minute late to anything in life (outrageous, and I don’t believe her).

In other words – We never argue. We’ve never gotten mad at each other. We’ve never fought.

We’ve told each other – “Sorry isn’t allowed in this household!” only because we apologize to each other for the dumbest, most inconsequential things. We don’t have any reason to be sorry, because there’s almost never anything to be sorry about.

This actually can be the norm too.

It’s not the norm to fight every single day. But for the longest time, I believed that ‘fighting’ was a good and normal part of any relationship. I think it’s even expressed that way in most of my favourite television shows.

For that matter, my music tastes centre almost entirely around toxic relationships. Love me a good sad girl summer song.

But as I approach the end of this year, I now know that this sentiment is entirely false. You don’t need to fight for a relationship to grow.

It’s not the couples that go through the most that come out the strongest.

It might even be the couples that go through the least that come out the strongest. Bold statement, I know.

I don’t mean for this to sound like I’m prancing around in my own La La Land inside a false reality. Instead, I hope to question your own reality. If you know that you’re existing in an unideal relationship and you’ve been accepting it for quite some time as “normal”, know at the very least – it’s not normal. At least, it doesn’t have to be.

Sometimes it can be difficult to let those people go. From my experience, it’s always been worth it, in the pursuit of happier, healthier relationships that are actually worth your time and energy. It doesn’t mean you should entirely disassociate from toxic people. Those are actually the people that have helped to make me stronger. And sometimes, like in the working world, you need to navigate those relationships. But you must do so with caution, without just blindly accepting that it’s normal.

It’s not. Relationships aren’t meant to be forest fires and tattered ropes. They’re not meant to be constant battles for survival. They’re not meant to be toxic.

If you let them be, relationships can be easy.