First let me say I have not begun offering dating advice. My hope is that you can apply this post to any type of relationship in your life: be it with your boss, your sibling, your colleague, your friend…Off we go, then.

Like so many people, I was saddened to hear of the death of Carrie Fisher this past Tuesday and I wouldn’t have been as sad if I hadn’t listened to an interview she did for Fresh Air. 

Why did I enjoy the interview so much? Because of the following exchange:

Terry Gross asked Carrie Fisher about her relationship with her father and Carrie Fisher said, yes, she had one and—essentially– it worked because she functioned as the adult while he was the child.

At this point, Terry Gross asked if she resented that dynamic, to which Carrie Fisher replied,

“No, I wanted a relationship with my father and this was the one that was available.”

The sanity of that statement blew my mind.

Why? Because so many of us long for relationships with this person and that person but when we get them we gripe and pine because they aren’t what we want them to be; we thought they would be ‘different’—we want them to be different.

But consider how much happier so many of us would be if we could say to ourselves, “Well, I wanted a relationship and I guess this is the one that is available.”

The matter-of-factness of it may not make our hearts go pitter pat, but I do think—as we close out 2016—that this idea may go a long way toward making our relationships in 2017 much, much easier to enjoy.