Relationships require a lot of work, whether you are fighting to keep them alive or simply just trying to spice them up a little with new adventures. But we often times get too caught up in our efforts to experiment in our relationships, and we begin to lose sight of some of the most important aspects of maintaining a healthy, trustworthy social atmosphere. Not only do we forget about how important these principles are, but we also find ourselves justifying our mistakes by loosely defining exactly what it means to be both faithful and loyal to our significant others. However, understanding what these two ideas are and incorporating them into your daily thoughts and beliefs can make it a lot easier to remember why you are in a relationship, and whether or not you are there for all the right reasons.
Let’s begin by discussing the word “faithful.” It’s safe to assume that most people view being faithful as not cheating on a partner, or using self-control to properly analyze and avoid certain situations that would jeopardize the trust and commitment(s) you’ve made to another person. But does faithfulness run much deeper than this?
What if faithful actually meant truly believing in the strength of your relationship, so to speak, or the idea that the level of communication you share with one another is enough to keep your heart satisfied and allow you to automatically block out any negative influences that might be attempting to disrupt these bonds of tranquility?
You can look at it in the same way you view the faith you have in terms of a religious belief system. You are not 100% sure that the belief is true, because there are specific things you will always fail to understand about it. Yet, you have “faith” in your spirituality, and you’re constantly making an effort to live by it and believe that you’ve made the right choices. Likewise, you can never be certain that a relationship will last forever, but you should still have some level of faith that it will and trust that your partner will work just as hard to keep it interesting and real.
“Well then, what’s the difference between being faithful and loyalty?”
Although faithfulness and loyalty are very similar, loyalty is more about how you behave and carry yourself as in individual in a relationship. Sure,
you can be loyal to another person or a group of people, but it begins as a character trait first. Making the choice toe a loyal person, whether you are
in a relationship or not, is the key to upholding the necessary morals and principles (as stated earlier) to, in turn, become faithful once you are given the
opportinity to display integrity and reveal your true intentions. In other words, loyalty is the decision you ultimarely make to serve as the basis for your
companionship, and being faithful is the end resiult of your ability to apply and sustain such ethics in you life.
Side Note:
No matter how faithful and loyal you try to be, it's important for you and your partner to understand that there will always be temptaions that
go against the foundation you built together. Here's for example: your boyfriend/girlfriend may have some close friends who happen to be girls/boys,
and it's completely normal for some of the to take interest in him/her, especially if he/she's an attractive. He might be hanging out at a party with his
friends, and somehow they end up alone and he/she successfully tries to kiss him/her.
This does not mean that he/she is unfaithful (at least not yet). If he/she has made a concious effort to be loyal to you and your relationship,
he/she should stop kissing her/him immediately and avoid any further intimacy. He/she should also inform you about what happened instead of keeping
it a secret if he/she's interested in being faithful as well, because the actions that follow the decision to uphold loyalty are what give rise to faithfulness.
