Back on Tuesday, I came slightly early for lifeskills lesson and a little bit of time to spare before going to class. No one from my class was around, and I sat alone in the canteen.

Someone else shortly joined me. I thought it was a little unusual that she was alone.

“Hey, where’s your usual gang?” I asked.

“They decided not to come” she said.

“At least not for lifeskills lesson”.

“Oh.”

I continued sipping on my Milk Tea while reading the free MyPaper newspaper which the school provides us with on a daily basis. A title of an article caught my eye. It read: “show love before its too late”.

I pointed the article out to her.

“hahaha, maybe you should tell that to my boyfriend!” She said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“He takes me for granted sometimes.”

“You know, if you feel that way, you could always tell him that.”

The conversation lasted a little while. I can’t remember everything that she or I said, but the nail really got hit when I said the following:

“Sometimes, you show love without expecting to be loved back.”

“I mean, love’s all about giving, right? Not taking.”

“Like, sometimes, when I might really like a girl, but she doesn’t like me back?”

“That doesn’t completely mean you should stop showing love completely, right?”

“You’ll feel good at heart when you truly love the people you like, even if they don’t like you back.”

“Maybe I should tell that to my boyfriend.”

“...About how love is about giving and not taking.”

It may be overlooked all the time, but going back to the very basics of how relationships work really helps to put some things in perspective. Yes, I’m talking about the stuff we may have learnt while we were in Kindergarten.

Try recalling what we might have learnt back then. For example, back in Kindergarten, we may have been educated on the basics of how a relationship works. You show respect to a person, that person respects you back. You trust that person, that person trusts you back. You greet a person, that person greets you back. You thank a person, that person thanks you back. You smile at the person, that person smiles back at you. Simple, isn’t it?

Of course, now, as young adults, we don’t make friends as readily as compared to people of younger age. Instead, as we grow older, we tend to become more selective about the people we start mixing around with. We tend to make acquaintances first before making friends (and then eventually followed by hanging out, etc.). That’s because we’re plagued by our past experiences. Some people prefer to walk the earth alone, and some people just can’t.

Say, if we were to smile at a random person in public, that person may not necessarily smile back. That person may have had past an experience that plagues his reactions towards a harmless smile. For most people, I think the reason on why they may not smile back, is probably because people think smiling is a normal everyday thing.

What I’m trying to say, is that, what we learnt in Kindergarten, about how smiling at people as a form of showing basic respect to people, is being overlooked and taken for granted. Many of these relationship basics are being overlooked and taken for granted.

Sure, we’re young adults now. And we’ve realized that relationships are actually a ton more complicated than what we have been thought. But that doesn’t completely void some of the basics of the building blocks of relationships. A little bit of good ol’-fashioned civility everyday will go a long way.