If you are old enough to remember back in the day, (I mean the 70’s and before) starting with late elementary school, junior high school and then senior high school, relationships started for most of us. Of course, they didn’t last very long, a couple months was the longest without breaking up. You could get back together again, but you would break up again in less time than the first. By the time you finished high school you could have enough experience with relationships that you could actually be “IN LOVE” and a lot of people married their high school “sweethearts”. Or, you went on to meet and marry someone you met in college. Some of those marriages are still going strong today, others were not so fortunate. If you talk to the relationships that “made it”, they would tell you that they endured. They would also tell you that life is full of obstacles that must be hurdled and hard times that must be plowed through. They probably can even laugh about a lot of it now.Today we have a different issue. We are not allowed to have known relationships at school. No holding of hands in the hallways between classes, in fact, no physical contact at all. I remember my son liking a little girl in the 5th grade. He was sent to the office for bringing her a tiny box of those little sweet tart hearts for Valentine’s Day. On top of it, the entire 5th grade was advised that “there would be no relationships allowed and if the school found out someone was trying to be boyfriend and girlfriend they would be sent to the office and written up.” I felt terrible because I was the one who bought the candy for him to give to her.He is much older now. He has friends that are older than him. None of them have relationships with girls. I notice that there are many many people who are not capable of having any kind of long term relationship. It has always made me wonder if part of this is because they could not nurture those abilities at a younger age. They lack the ability to know a crush from love, from being attracted to actually liking the qualities of someone. The learning process has been removed until much later in life.Relationships seem to be very disposable these days. People get married, but marriages seem to last a significantly less amount of time. It is my observation that when obstacles present themselves, marriages end. When hard times happen, people look for “greener grass.” The thought process today seems to be “you hurt me therefore it must be over.” I’m not opposed to the idea that sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs (that’s a rule I lived by), but, being from back in the day, I know how to make my marriage work, and it works well.The internet (I won’t mention any particular sites) seems to be a great wrecker of marriages and relationships these days. That’s sad, because there are so many easy to use programs out there that can help people have Love and Long Lasting Relationships and actually learn HOW to make their marriage work, but they are not looking for those. If they are, they don’t know which ones to pick.T.W. Jackson has the right idea with “THE MAGIC OF MAKING UP”. It’s a little unconventional, but so are relationships today which means he nails it! No relationship is hopeless. A relationship by definition is “the connections between or among persons.” So, by definition, those connections can be saved. Something at a basic level created relationships that were able to grow into love or marriage. Life happens and those basic connections are lost in the day to day struggles of life, marriage, jobs, family and people lose site of what was really important to begin with.People can turn back the hands of time and find what was important in their relationships. Men can learn to understand women and women can learn to understand men. People have been putting their relationships back together for years. The question today is their the willingness to find the right answers. The answers are out there, you just need to look for the right ones. I think the only way our children will learn how to have relationships in their future is by watching their parents, so the parents need to figure out how to make their marriage/relationships work for their children’s future success. We are going to be their only teachers for this class, so we need to get it right.