Tents or Houses?

Recently, I was told that I have a problem with establishing good relationships quickly. I wasn't surprised by this, but rather confused. Is it really possible to establish a good solid relationship quickly to begin with? You see, in my view, relationships are a bit like tents and houses. If you need shelter, either will work. But there's huge differences in the shelter they give you.

A house takes time to build up. You need solid foundations - pillars, cement slab, all those sorts of things (hey, I'm not exactly into construction). Then you build a strong frame to hold up your walls and roof. You surround the frame with bricks and mortar, carefully mixed and laid to make sure the outside is strong and the inside is protected. The roof goes on, and you've got shelter. Then you add all those finishing touches that make it a home - the inside walls, paint & carpet, fittings & fixtures, kitchens & bathrooms etc. The house is finished, but you will forever add things or change things to make it a home -it constantly evolves.

A tent goes up in half an hour (if you're good at that sort of thing - if not, it goes up well after dark) on any patch of ground that's big enough. You use a couple of flimsy pegs to keep it anchored, some bendy poles to keep it standing and a few pieces of fabric between you and the elements, and you've got shelter. You throw some old bedding in there and an esky with a bit of food in it, and huddle inside.

Either way, you've got shelter, and the tent is much quicker. But a few strong gusts of wind, or some heavy rain, and your tent is dripping, bending sideways, and you're vainly trying to hold it up while staying warm and dry. In the house, the gust of wind doesn't even move it, the rain runs off, and you are happily warm and dry watching old Grey's Anatomy episodes. You have shelter for years, use a tent on holidays, and can't wait to get back to your home when the camping trip is over. Clearly, it's the house that's better and stronger long-term.

So, what would happen if you tried to build a house in half an hour? You wouldn't have time to worry about checking foundations, making sure the frame is solid enough to bear the weight of the roof, or carefully laying the bricks. Not only that, you'd defnitely have no time to waterproof the roof, put up plasterboard walls or fit some lovely fixtures and fittings that might provide a few comforts. The floor would start cracking and shifting after a short time, the walls would crumble and deteriorate, and the roof would start leaking. A strong gust of wind would send draughts through the house leaving you shivering, and rain on the leaking roof would soak you and cause more damage to the house. You'd be too busy patching up the dodgy build to add on those extra little bits that make it more comfortable, and within a year, the house would fall apart around you, leaving you wishing that you'd spent more time building up those foundations. If you had, you might have known the soil could shift and have built the house accordingly.

Real, good, strong relationships are built up over time on foundations of mutual trust and respect, on a frame of communication, protected by truth and honesty, sheltered by love, caring and understanding and strengthened from the inside by shared experience. There's no point trying to convince ourselves that we can turn a tent into a house. Nothing is wrong with having tents of course, but you wouldn't want to live in one forever.

To the person who said that to me (even though you'll probably never read this), I'm not worried that I don't have a lot of tents or crumbling houses, because I already have a couple of strong, solid houses and I'm slowly building a couple more, and who could ask for more than several solid houses?