Don’t Settle For A ‘Comfortable Love’ If It Isn’t Making You Happy

A comfortable relationship means that you’ve found someone who makes you feel like you can relax a little. Someone that you don’t have to put on an act to impress because they enjoy the real, authentic you. However, a comfortable relationship doesn’t automatically mean that you’re in the right relationship.

When you’re in survival mode, you don’t have the luxury of stopping and thinking about whether you’re satisfied with your situation. All you’re concerned with is making it through another week, another day, another hour without having your world crash to rubble around you. Stay alive is the only mantra running through your head. Keep going. Make it to tomorrow. You can worry about the rest later.

But when you finally have a moment to pause, to breathe in your surroundings and inspect where you’ve settled, you need to ask yourself whether you’re in a situation that brings you happiness or merely makes you feel comfortable.

Even though comfort was something you once craved, it’s not the ultimate milestone you should be striving to reach. Comfort doesn’t necessarily mean happy. It doesn’t mean satisfied. It doesn’t mean you’ve reached the location where you’re meant to make a forever home.

The only problem? It’s going to feel strange–maybe even dangerous–to consider giving up a safe, stable life when all you’ve ever wanted was to feel okay again. And you feel okay right now. Not great. Not excited or fulfilled or at peace. But okay. And that’s such an improvement over the conditions you’ve endured in the past that you don’t want to ask for more. You don’t want to get greedy. What you have now is good enough, you keep telling yourself, brainwashing yourself into believing it. Sure, there are other things you want from this world, dreams that your mind floats back to every night, but if you give up what you have right now to chase after intangible goals, there’s a chance it could backfire, and you don’t want your circumstances to grow worse. You would rather hover in this purgatory of a life than risk reverting back to where you’ve been.

But you need to remember, you’ve moved past that place. You aren’t that person anymore. You’re older and wiser. You’re capable and strong. History can’t repeat itself because you’ve grown into someone who can handle the curveballs life throws. And in case you’ve forgotten, you made it through all the other bad stuff, all the rejections and failure and late-night sob sessions. What would stop you a second time?

It’s always going to be scary to give up your safe, comfortable life, especially when you’ve been in uncomfortable situations before and know how horrible things can get, but there comes a point when you need to choose living over merely existing. When you need to choose your current dreams over the dreams that you strived for in the past. When you need to choose the hardest path, the scariest path, the path of the unknown.