My worst relationship was actually my most valuable relationship.

When I was younger, I always did what I thought was the right thing to do and also to try and help others be happy.

Wrong move. I’ll tell you why.

Sometimes the right thing to do is actually the wrong thing to do and to try and help others to be happy (or any other feeling for that matter) is ludicrous.

A number of years ago I was in a relationship with a woman who was very insecure in our relationship. She feared that I was going to have an affair at any moment and was constantly checking where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, when I was going to be home. We also fought regularly, and by fighting, I mean screaming at each other for hours on end, using abusive language, belittling each other, swearing and occasionally throwing things. Sounds like good fun, right? It wasn’t. It was very toxic for both of us and after eight years together…

Hang on… Let’s pause there a moment and think about this. That’s eight years of fighting, screaming, stress, aggravation, name calling, manipulation, and all the rest of it. Eight years! That’s a long time…

Anyway, back to the story. After eight years of this, I decided that the only way to stop her feeling insecure and worry that I’d leave at any moment was to marry her. That works, right? You get married and live happily ever after. That’s the way it works, doesn’t it? I thought it did, and after the wedding, do you know what changed? That’s right, absolutely nothing.

Anyway, after three years of marriage, I’d had enough. I could see that nothing was going to change and my only option was to get the hell out of there. So, that’s what I did. I walked out, and spent nearly three years winding it up. All the stress, frustration and anger that I had experienced during my eleven years with her was deeply embedded in me and was hard to let go of. I had many things that I didn’t understand why they had happened. At that stage I had spent well over a decade learning all that I could about relationships, communication, psychology, parenting, mindset, all sorts of things and nothing seems to have worked. Then a wonderful thing happened not long after I had moved out.

About a year prior to my epiphany moment, I had completed a three day weekend course which gave me the opportunity to explore who I was as a person, a man and as an individual. After the course, they held weekly meetings where you could explore further what you had learnt on the course. I went regularly and slowly found out more and more about myself. During one session, I was working through an incident with my ex-wife and it was facilitated by a wonderfully astute man that I knew and as we worked through it, he picked up on a word that I had used that didn’t fit in with all the rest and my epiphany hit.

When we attract certain people into our lives, we do it because they bring with them a gift in the form of an interaction that offers us an opportunity to explore aspects of ourselves. In other words, they cause us to feel a certain way and that lets us become better people if we are brave enough to admit certain things to ourselves. I was willing to admit certain things to myself about my dealings with my ex-wife and this allowed me to become stronger, and more resilient and to stand firm on what I believe in. Because of this my relationships took a massive turn for the better. I had some further interactions with other people which allowed me to explore me further and then create two systems that I used to increase my social confidence, communicate better, talk to over 170 women in just seven weeks and meet my wife.

This woman, who was a challenge and I believed very negative things about actually turned out to be the catalyst to change myself and my relationships in a massive way and I am now very grateful that I met here. The only regret I have is taking so long to receive the lesson and to lengthen the amount of pain and struggle we went through.

I am now very happy in my relationship with my wife. I am far less stressed in my life, I now understand my emotions, my career choice gives me massive satisfaction and joy, my relationship with my two grown sons is fantastic, and I get to help others discover their authentic lives. I would have had none of this if I hadn’t had a relationship with the ‘wrong’ woman in the first place.

Don’t discard a relationship, or negate it, or minimise it as it may be the very turning point that you have been waiting for. Every interaction with someone is an opportunity to become a better version of you if you are able to look past all the extraneous details and search for the gold within. Remember that at the end of the relationship we may feel that they were wrong for us, however, at the time that we met them, they were absolutely the right person for us and who we were at that moment in time.

Hope you enjoyed the story and if you are in a similar situation, know that if I can get out of this, you can as well. I believe in you.

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