No one teaches you how to live in a relationship. You just embark in it with all your life experience and, eventually, this life experience will clash with your partner’s. Even if there were classes to learn how to live in a relationship, could they really help? It’s like with self-help books…I’ve never quite believed in them, each person and case is too unique to have a single generalised answer.

So being in a relationship equals venturing into the unknown, and this is true for every new relationship you embark upon (hopefully not TOO many).

Speaking about fantastic (or potentially disastrous) journeys, there’s a song for that obviously. The Sound of Arrows are a Swedish dreamy synthpop group – their album ‘Voyage’ isn’t news, it came out in November 2011, but is still great to listen to when you need some inspiration in life.

The Sound of Arrows - Into the Clouds

I suppose that, like with most things in life (unfortunately), it’s all about compromise, balancing the odds, finding the right measure of satisfaction and dissastisfaction to keep both parties happy. You can try to work out the differences or ignore them altogether, but they’ll always be round the corner, waiting to explode with the slightest spark.

An excellent way to bring peace back into your life is listening to trip-hop ensemble Morcheeba – even when they sing about couples fighting.

Morcheeba 

People are worried that compromising leads to a loss of one’s true self: I am a firm unbeliever in true-selves: I don’t think there is any such thing. We evolve constantly, for the better or the worse, absorb new experiences and meet new people that forge our being constantly. We are an ever-changing sum of all this and of our heritage, i.e. a sum without an undefined result. Which is definitely better than no result at all.

Hot Hot Heat - Zero Results

Written by Andrea Ratti