I’ve often said that circumstance does not define us, and I believe that. Sometimes circumstance brings us to places that we never expected, places that make us cringe, cry, laugh, shout – circumstances that come together to make a difference, to have impact in our lives for good or bad.

I am facing a particular set of circumstance that involve the loss of love and most importantly, the death of potential. I wanted a relationship that was destined to fail, and so experienced the sad fact that there was no hope for that relationship.

We are funny creatures, we humans. We want so much to have our way and when we can’t get it a whole cascade of behavior comes out of us: anger and disappointment rears its ugly head and becomes a veritable monster that screams in our ears, brings fire to our faces and elicits protestation and demand. We turn into three-year-olds that inflict a dramatic tantrum.

Unless we rise above our tantrums and look at the problem of not getting what we want as a challenge to overcome and not a cataclysmic, seismic ball of gimme what I want right now, then we’re going to suffer. As much as we want to be adults about what we can’t have or control, there’s still that little dickens inside us that rages.

Even when what we wanted is a good and noble thing we can’t just go about flailing, kicking and screaming, we want to somehow be ‘adult’ about it. Yet in trying to be ‘adults’, we often end up creating something sinister, something unrealistic and sometimes dangerous.

We create hopes.

No matter how much we want relationships to work, no matter how noble our aim, how good our intentions, when we realize that a relationship we have ‘hoped’ for isn’t ever going to materialize we can do some very childish things. We may act out internally and do our level best to make ourselves as miserable as we can imagine ourselves to be.

We spend a great deal of time generating hopes for relationships. Hope is not a very realistic thing upon which to depend. It isn’t ‘adult’ to depend on a thing like hope, and yet we do it without considering its outcome. We’re humans and it seems that hope is a driving force within us that can’t be disregarded or truly extinguished.

The very first mortal woman in Greek mythology was Pandora. She was given a jar and told not to open it. When her curiosity got the better of her she opened the jar and out came all the ills of the world. But before the jar was completely empty she quickly closed it. Of all the evils that were in the jar the only one that remained was hope.

But notice: hope was put in the jar with all the ills of the world. Hope is not a benefit to the world; rather it was as bad as other evils such as sickness and death. What does this say about hope? It’s not necessarily a good thing.

Thanks to Pandora hope remains to inflict its horrors on mankind. When it comes to relationships, hope is an emotion that we seem unable to control. When circumstances bring us to a place where all we can do is hope, it’s maddening, it’s excruciating, and if we are hoping for a relationship to bloom to love there’s little more painful than for those hopes to be dashed.

Hope is the price we pay for a possibility to love. Hope is the result of circumstance and the realization that we cannot control those circumstances, so we seek magical intervention. Hope is all that’s left in the jar. But the only hope that is truly dangerous to mankind is the unrealistic variety, and it seems there are plenty of those hopes running around.

If we are human and we can’t help but hope for love then we must do what we can to avoid the unrealistic and instead hope the best hopes that we can – the hopes that can happen. Positive outlook is a form of hope. Demanding magical results from the universe in an unrealistic manner isn’t just hope, it’s the last, most dangerous thing in the jar.