Investment
ɪnˈvɛs(t)m(ə)nt/
noun
noun: investment; plural noun: investments
•The
action or process of investing money for profit.
• A
thing that is worth buying because it may be profitable or useful in the
future.
• An
act of devoting time, effort, or energy to a particular undertaking with the
expectation of a worthwhile result.
To most people the words ‘investment’ and ‘ka-ching!’ are
synonymous..... We think of stocks, real estate, businesses, etcetera and equate
an investment to something tangible, something we can visualise plummeting its
way up a graph and growing into endless possibilities.
My mum is a bona-fide investor and for most of my childhood
she was out of the country running her business then coming back home to invest
her hard earned money on whatever she supposed important to her. Seeing how
little of it she was spending on herself (or us), and how much of it went into
expanding her real estate portfolio or ended up just sitting in her many bank
accounts put me off financial investments for good.
Because of her I vowed to spend every single cent I work
hard for on myself and instead, invest on what my mum didn't have time to
invest in..... Relationships.
Relationships, mainly romantic aren't the easiest place to
invest, if anything they are the riskiest kind of investments mainly because
people tend to invest a great deal and it is in such kind of a relationship
that you can get burnt the most. We tie up our possessions, sacrifices are made
and we invest time, emotions, energy and money for our partners. It is in such
settings where people have put a great deal into their relationships that they
want to avoid ‘killing’ those investments; so like anyone who trades in the
stock market, they are more likely to continue enduring with their
relationships in the hope that the subsequent returns will be in their ultimate
favour.
My biggest sacrifice in a relationship was packing up and
relocating from Kenya to Edinburgh; but unlike most ‘business minded’ people, I
didn't have the patience to stick around the constant changes and heartbreaks
to find out whether my investment was worth my while..... Life is too short I
always say, some roads are better off untravelled.
Truth is, your return in any investment is always relative
to the risk you take..... Something most people tend to conveniently ignore when
it comes to relationships. They just want to take, take, take and take.
A good example of what a “fair” relationship would be is the
barter trade era; where people would assumingly spend the whole day haggling
with each other until they came to a mutual agreement as to what was deemed
fair. I would like to think that nobody would be happy to go to the market with
a cow and come back home with “magic” beans.
If the same rule of thumb would be applied to relationships
then there wouldn't be such a huge problem. The least you should expect is what
you are giving..... So when you are putting too much and getting too little, you
are investing in the wrong person.
The monarchy of relationships dictates that outstanding
rates of return can only be fully realized through taking huge, at times
terrifying, and strikingly risky leaps of faith. But how do we recover if and
when we lose an investment? Surely not by bouncing back with a third party
stimulus; but with slow and steady ‘economic’ recovery, by admitting that we
will habitually win some and lose some, and most importantly, by viewing
‘economic loss’ as capital gain.
Nobody deserves feeling “robbed”.
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