When is a relationship or courtship successful? The simple answer would be to say when it leads to marriage, but that is not entirely true. A relationship could lead to marriage but what kind of marriage really. Is it one reached on compromise or one that naturally evolved from a successful relationship?

Just as we have relationships or even friendship successfully leading to marriage, it is possible to have it a different way. There are two ways to have a successful relationship; it leads to a good marriage or it leads to a successful break-up. You can break-up successfully! If the purpose of getting into a relationship is to get to know the other person, then two things are possible; the person fits in or does not. The reason why people get hurt by break-ups is because they see the relationship as an end in itself and not a process. There’s this mistake about dating having to always lead to marriage. It is only better for both parties to access the state of their relationship and admit the truth. There can only be one of two possible truths; that you are compatible and marriage will work or that you are not, so the best would be friendship.

When break-ups lead to broken bottles, bloody faces and torn shirts then you know someone is desperate to keep what does not belong to him or her. The next time your boy or girlfriend tells you he wants to leave you for another, ask him why if you must, or show him/her the door! I have come to know one thing without a doubt when it comes to this; you cannot keep for long a man or woman who would rather be with someone else.

If we all see things the right way, no one would be hurt over a break-up. Let us not always think that to date someone is to get married to the person. One of the reasons the divorce rate remains perfectly diagonal to the X and Y scale is because too many people have been forced to marry people they’d rather keep as friends. When sentiments become the final arbiter of a decision to marry your partner, then you might as well prepare for a quick divorce. If your courtship failed, how can your marriage with the same person succeed? It is logically impossible except there’s a shift in paradigm. The shift is an exception in a world where everyone sees him/herself to be the right one and all others wrong.

I’d rather a successful break-up than a forced patch-up marriage. The essence of courtship is to test drive the man or woman over a period of time. It could be ten years and it could even be as short as three months. It has nothing to do with the duration; it has it all to do with your mutual sincerity. I still don’t know why people lose their minds over what they call being jilted. It is the worst form of deprecation. It is an admittance of your inadequacy. It is to say, you’d not mind being tolerated just to be married. God forbid! I want a woman I’ll always see and cherish as a wife. A woman I’d respect at all times, a woman that’d know without a doubt that she is more than worthy to be my wife. How can someone who forced her way into marriage with me be that one? Forget the rhetoric of I’ll always love and cherish you as long as I live, that would be a lie and lies eventually compound as problems. One day, the truth would burst out of its hiding corner when blows define the truth. You can’t keep a man or woman down for a life time. If you do, you would have successfully lived through a very frustrating matrimonial life. A frustrating matrimonial life is a frustrating life. You can not have a war-like marriage and have a peaceful, blissful life. It cannot be!

It all starts with knowing when to successfully break-up. If he beats you in your relationship, he will get better when you get married. He will probably kill you. If she cheats on you in your relationship, she can only get better with time. She will have children for you but children sired by other men. It is for me the worst form of self deception, to think a bad boyfriend would translate to a good husband. In fact, if you decide to marry a beast as a husband and he knows you were well aware of his pitiable nature before you said “Yes” on the wedding day, he’d take your “Yes” as a validation of his nature and an acceptance to suffer every consequence arising from that. The same goes for a girlfriend who’d rather spread on the sheets with an older sugar daddy than spend time with you in your daddy’s house.

Some things are acceptable but to accept some other craps is to admit to being a crap man or woman. If you ever find yourself in a failing or hugely unwholesome relationship, please do the most honourable thing; Break-up successfully. To each there is a mate and when you find that one or he finds you, you’d live as a queen all your life even when he is not royalty. That is the end that must be desired in a successful relationship. If that isn’t, there is the path of success through a peaceful break-up. I guess its time to break-up successfully. When you do, your mind would tell you “You have successfully broken-up”. The time is always right because there’s never a wrong time to stop a wrong relationship. Just Do It! And then ”Put the blame on me”.