How to resolve conflicts?

I once was talking to family friends over the growing mental health issues in our country and the world over. They happened to tell me about an incident with an Indian couple abroad, where the husband stabbed his wife and when he found she did not die from that, he went to the extent of running her over with his vehicle. How terribly wrong love can go? Love turned into vengeance where nothing other than self-pride and ego. In this event, the actual culprit according to my friend was that the husband was not able to deal with failures.

Here are few points to ponder on –

• Can there always be a right and a wrong in any relation? Actually there is no pre-defined right and wrong here. After all, love is not a mathematical equation and is not always supported by logical reasoning. However there are things which are “appropriate” and “more appropriate”.
• Do we lose when we win in a relationship? It all starts with the childhood learning of winning and losing. Eventually it defines a response during a challenging situation. Any relationship based on true love will not have a question of winning or losing because there is only understanding. The “loser” in such a case actually wins the other person.
• How do our family and friends define “happy life”? If both are earning well and they are doing really well in their careers then we are covering the financial aspects only. Parents and friends will definitely be able to sense the early warning signs of misunderstandings. And then the bigger question to decide who is right. Actually this is where the problem worsens as it is not that one of partners requires support. Instead, it is the relationship that requires the support.
• No different was the situation in the above mentioned incident. The family was sensitive enough to recommend them leaving their 2 year old child with their grandparents. But, to my understanding, it was more of “whose right and whose wrong” than rebuilding the understanding between the couple
• The bystander effect: The bystander effect is a social psychological situation, where people are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present. Society, in most of these situations, passes the responsibility to “someone else” or waits for the “Messiah”.

We now know the problem but what is the solution?
The solution lies in the behavior and character development of the individual. If we look into ourselves how many of us accept failure with a smile? Have we tried to learn from that failure? Seldom do we learn when we win, but every failure teaches us something new. Failure enriches us with something we lack and where we can improve.

The most important lessons come from our childhood. My father had 11 siblings and my mother had 7. Now that was a large family. When you have large families you definitely have lesser things and more mouths to feed. I guess due to this my parents’ generation learnt to deal with times when they had less food, times when they had to share clothes, mend and wear hand-me-down clothes, sleep on not so comfortable mats. In spite of these situations and discomfort they continued living with hope. These were important lessons that they learnt as children- Sharing, Caring, Failures, Giving-up, Hope.

Maybe these were the very reasons that influenced my parents’ generation to have lesser children. That way they could provide better facilities for their children. They thought that their children would not feel the crunch which they faced through their childhood. As an effect, my generation had proper space, good food, and comfortable beds to sleep in. Except during the summer holidays, when we had relatives visiting that we felt the crunch. Even though we slept on mats or had a little less to eat. Albeit those were still lovely days spent in so much fun. Summer holidays would be spent in losing to cousins at games in which they were experts and learning those lessons which our parents had learnt day in and day out.

My generations now has one or two kids. Now the only time my children meet up with their cousins would be for a wedding or any family outing. Both of these would still be in a hotel or in a comfortable environment. So where do our children learn that it is OK to fail? At home? Not really because tight school schedule, after school activities, entertainment, online gaming et all.

Few options which we can use to correct the situation-

• Life is to be accepted with uncertainties. Best way to inculcate this is to let them fail and help them to accept the failure. Be understanding when they go wrong and tell them it is OK to be wrong by sharing your own experience when you went wrong and how you handled it.
• The only way is to teach this generation not to keep a score board for life.
• Do not expect things with mathematical precision. Obstacles will come and change life’s equations, don’t lose hope but keep trying.
• Let them learn to take instinctive decisions along with logical ones also.

We can do this by playing games (Ludo, Snakes and ladder, Tiger and goat, etc) with them. Parents should not always lose a game to make children feel happy, but also let them lose and help them to cope with the failure. After a game tell them that life will go on even after losing a game. Let our children learn to lose and learn from the loss.

Nature does not treat life with mathematical precision in every aspect, then why would one expect to lead a life with a balanced equation with its LHS equal to RHS. Leave the balancing to mathematicians. For life, love makes it unique and for love, uncertainties makes it beautiful..!