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Quote of the day by Adele: 'You can't have your relationships if you don't have a good one with yourself'
A healthy relationship with yourself shapes how you interact with your interpersonal relationships, influencing how you comminicate and respond to conflicts.
A 16-time Grammy Award winner and an Academy Award recipient, the vocal powerhouse of the music industry, Adele, turns 38 on May 5 this year. Her songs have consistently dominated the charts, breaking records with each release. From the early 2010s hits like Rolling in the Deep and Set Fire to the Rain to mid 2010s blockblusters Hello, When We Were Young, and the Bond theme Skyfall, her music has truly defined an era. In the 2020s, she embraced a more emotionally layered sound, in her post-divorce phase, with hits like Easy on Me.
In her personal life, Adele navigated a difficult divorce from ex-husband Simon Konecki, with whom she shares a son. She has been open about this journey and often is very vocal about the lessons she learned from this phase of life. Her deep introspection also gives her latest songs a more emotional touch.
On this occasion of her birthday, let's revisit the singer's reminder of a hard-hitting truth about relationships.
What did Adele say?
Adele appeared on Q with Tom Power on November 20, 2021, where she talked about various aspects of her life, from her struggle with divorce to how she handles fame. In this interview, she shared an eye-opening insight into what it truly takes to make relationships work, drawing from her own life learnings and understanding.
“I have to have a great relationship with myself to have good relationships with other people. My friends, romantic partners, my child, my colleagues, like whatever it is like, you can't have your relationships if you don't have a good one with yourself.”
The host then asked whether one can fix their relationship with themselves by being in a relationship with someone else, to which Adele firmly replied, "No. All you do is bleed into other people, which makes someone else's life a bloody nightmare for the hurt you have experienced before from someone else- wasn't this poor bloody soul's fault either."
Why is Adele's advice important?
‘Love cannot fix you, only you can fix yourself' - the crux of her advice.
Adele is telling us that the quality of your relationship with others stems from a place of self-acceptance. When you are in a healthy intrapersonal relationship with yourself, you will be able to navigate interpersonal relationships better. This applies to all kinds: platonic, romantic and professional.
People mistakenly believe that they will heal if they make more friends or get into a relationship. In reality, these choices are detrimental and end up burdening the other person as you project your own unresolved baggage onto them.
It is almost like getting into a relationship because you are lonely, in which case, you may begin to seek constant validation and disregard boundaries just to feel secure. In the long run, this is neither healthy nor sustainable.
So it is a firm misconception to believe that past trauma, hurt, or insecurities simply disappear in a relationship because of the comfort of companionship. The quality and stability of all the interpersonal bonds begin with the intrapersonal bond first.
