I always thought that relationships are just that, a relation between two persons.

Often I though that they ought to be directly linked. If I did something good I hoped that something good would eventually come.
If I did harm, I expected to harm that relationship.

In some ways it went like that. I harmed (emotionally) people, and I took care of them in other times.

Yet I didn’t realize that the whole concept of “Our relationship is bidirectional” is wrong.
Any kind of relation between two persons has different ages.

Mental age, the two people have different ages, they _think_ differently. Their goals in life are different, they might be slower or faster to realize things, to understand them.

Emotional age: We understand emotions on different levels, we empathize in different ways, we seek connections at different times.

And last, but not least: Relationship age.
Beware, this is not the age of the relationship itself, it’s how you live it. It could be a friendship that it’s 3 months old, but for you it’s like knowing her since college.
On the other hand she might feel like she knows you since 3 months.

Thing is: We expect things to happen.
We expect that if we’re harmed we’ll get some extra attention, some more love.
We expect to be seen when we feel alone, but it might not happen.
It might not happen because we live the relationship on different ages.
Where we stand now, it’s not where they are standing now.
Even though we’re together, we might be apart.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t value relationships, quite the opposite instead.

We should nurture them, we should cultivate them, because like a seed, we can plant what we value, but depending on the age we might not see the results when _we_ want.

Saying that a relationship is an investment makes it sound like something you do for benefit, or something that’s not emotional, but it shares some similarities.

You put something in, hoping it grows and becomes something better than the one you put.
It doesn’t always goes this way, but when it does, well… it’s quite amazing.