Given a deeper understanding, relationships are about give and take, however, in healthy relationships there is an overall healthy balance of practice to give and take without having to kill yourselves getting that balance and there is certainly no need for lots of drama to achieve this.

Nicholas K Quest Quotes

Return On Investment (ROI) within relationships refers to the ratio of what you’ve gained or lost against what you invested into the relationship. This is not about financial or material gain or loss. This is about The Three Es: Emotion, Esteem, and Energy.

It’s very difficult for you to take the relationship out of negative equity – that rather uncomfortable place where your investment is now worth less than what it was when you started. You’ll effectively have to continue to pay out emotionally even though there is a deficit and this can be soul-destroying.

If the market (your relationship) continues to decline, it can be very difficult to pull yourself out of the relationship black hole because you will struggle to know who you are or what you are personally worth, particularly because if you date emotionally unavailable people, you tend to derive your worth from them and whether you deem your interactions with them as a success or a failure.

With emotion it’s all about how you feel when you’re with them. If you end up feeling negative about yourself or you generally end up expending a lot of negative emotion, you’re doing structural damage and sending the value of your investment plummeting. If your self-esteem ends up taking a knock or becoming non-existent, no matter what you do, it could take YEARS before your investment manages to break even, never mind actually to generate a return.

We all need energy for our relationships. There are a lot of people with the misguided idea that relationships ‘happen’ but you both have to work at the relationship and no matter how much energy you invest into the relationship, if they don’t want to make the investment work, it becomes like trying to ride a bike with one peddle.

Breaking even gives you the bare minimum and that just tells you that you’re both doing just enough to keep things ticking over but neither of you are excelling. Either one of you is, but the other’s input is so crap that it pulls the investment back to break even point. Positive investment bears a fruit at least for once!!