Making a relationship work

I am probably the worst person to write about this, I've had many failed relationships and the reality is that I am one of those human beings who is just too damn scared of entering a romantic relationship but I guess I feel that because of all the failed relationships I've had I've learned with each of them what made them fail and I guess if you know what can make something fail then you can sort of figure out what can make it work.
Most people enter into a relationship pretty much hiding themselves behind an image they think will get others to like them, they make the other person believe all this greatness about them and then struggle to keep the facade as time goes on.
Other people do that same thing but they do it just because they think that the idea of having a relationship means that their job is to make every effort to make the other person happy, they don't understand that happiness is an inside job and therefore as time goes by they realize that they have wasted time and effort on an impossible task, it was not their job to make the other person happy.
Which is what brings me to the first thing that makes a relationship work: honesty. Yes, yes, I know, no duh! hello! you all did not need to read all of that in order to know that honesty is one of the things that make a relationship work. But I am talking about being honest from the very beginning of it, from the first conversation, why waste your time trying to impress someone else by not being who you really are, if at the end of the day if  they don't fall in love with who you really are or you make them believe you are someone else then eventually it will all go to hell, eventually either they will find out the little things you do that they can't live with or eventually you will get too tired of pretending and that will be it.... Then you both realize that you were with someone you really did not know and then how do you know you love them if you don't really know them?
I wish people would actually take heart to that first advice, but I know they won't. Everyone will say I will do this, this makes sense but in the end fear will take over and it won't happen.
That brings me to my next advice... As humans we are always thinking about tomorrow, I've said this millions of times, we are so worried about what will happen tomorrow that we forget to live in the right now, we make plans for many months to come and we forget that life can change in a heartbeat. Because of our need to plan out our future, fear tends to take over us, we are always afraid our plans will not come to fruition, we are afraid that we will fail even though we have not tried yet. And so it comes that we fear that the relationships we enter into will fail, we keep thinking that the other person is too good to be true, we keep thinking they are lying to us all the time, we think they don't love us enough, we worry that it will end tragically when it has just began, the wheel of fortune tells us that our fortune can change at any time but life shows us that when that wheel is going in our favor the best thing to do is actually take full advantage of it and enjoy it.
I, myself, am one of those that will think of the worst, in the end I like to be pleasantly surprised than to be sadly disappointed, my soul, my heart, my intuition, all of it has always had a way of guiding me but when it comes to other people I have sometimes led myself be guided by logic and really that has not helped me at all, lately I've been learning to just follow that intuition and "hunches" that "gut feeling" when it comes to other people and it has not steered me wrong, even this past time when at the end I lost someone I love very much, but that thought logically (just like I once did) about life. And even though I was hurt that everything just sort of ended and I tried to make all these rationalizations as to why it would have never worked out either, even though for some reason I felt like if we just kept going day by day neither of us would have ever regretted it. We were just friends and that's where it was left. I know I followed my intuition and my heart and I know that my mind had played a lot of tricks on me before and I know that I used to be one of those people that would listen to everyone else and not myself, trying to make life rational and logical when it is neither.
And the mind this time continues to do so, it is the way it wants to protect me from being even more hurt. Constant battle I would say, that's how I know I was correct, because my mind is trying to make some illogical logical... Which is what brings me to my next advice:
Don't try to rationalize love, don't try to have an insane amount of set rules for a relationship you want, life has shown me that a good relationship flourishes in the most illogical ways, it is when you start to try and rationalize it that you will end up failing at it because love is not logical, it is a force you just feel and that's it! You can't explain it, no one can, you just feel it and it's magnetic, always magnetic. If everything else is working and you have one or two things you think that will just completely ruin everything, think about it again... Do you and this person have good communication? And in saying good communication I mean, can you two talk about things without getting into huge arguments, or if you ever get into arguments can you guys settle them promptly and calmly? Can you talk about what bothers you without the other person getting offended?
If the answer is yes, then it does not matter what things you think will make the relationship not work, you can talk about those things and I believe you will be pleasantly surprised at how things end up working out.
That brings me to the most important thing of all... Communication! Communication is the key to every successful relationship, whether the relationship is just a friendship or a romantic relationship or even a relationship with your kids, if you are not able to communicate with another person you will never have a chance of the relationship working out. Communication is the base of every single relationship, it is what allows trust and respect to grow and that trust and respect are the base for love. As the picture shows, it is not love that we start with, is communication... A long time ago, I had a great relationship, I was 18 years old and this guy and I, we were able to tell each other almost everything, I learned that the more we talked the more we trusted each other, the more we respected each other, 2 years later we forgot this is what made the relationship so great, we never argued, I think in the two years we only had 2 big arguments, and while for some people that might be boring, it was our ability to talk to each other honestly from the very beginning that made all the difference. The last argument we had was what ended up causing the breakup, as stated we had forgotten to talk to each other and he started to mix in that fear of failure and because of lack of communication he started to not trust me, and in turn that ended up making me not trust him, so he started to think logically and decided the best thing was to plan his life out without me and without me knowing, by the time we actually sat down and talked and realized we loved each other very much, it was too late, we had lost (or at least I did) that trust and it was only a matter of time before respect went away with it, and of course the communication between the two of us had already been damaged, so we had two choices we could try again or we could go our separate ways, after a month or so we decided we needed to go our separate ways, mostly because I was just not in it anymore, I could not get over that he couldn't talk to me about the fears he was having, even though I was always open and never judging and that was an even bigger betrayal than if he had gone out and cheated on me. (yes I know that is weird but it's true)
Just like that relationship failed because of lack of communication, so did all my other relationships. Some were never going to go anywhere because the people involved could not ever talk truthfully to each other, or when they did the other wouldn't listen and would just try to make themselves believe something different.  That's what happened with my ex-husband, he was great at talking but everything he said was a lie, I never followed my intuition and so I decided to just go with the logical approach, it turned out that my intuition was right, and the reason I could never seem to trust him was because he was not telling me everything, sure there are things and secrets people should keep to themselves but not the ones that will affect the other person, when you are in a relationship you are a team and if you can't trust the other person with all the things you feel, fear and the things you do that might not be socially accepted then your relationship is doom to fail! If you don't have the courage and strength to show your true self to the other person then you have nothing. And if you have the courage and strength to show yourself to the other person and that other person decides that they will judge you for it then it won't work either.

So, if you find someone who is truthful to you, someone you are able to see all of their flaws and weaknesses, someone that makes you fill up with joy only because they are so happy, because seriously no one can make you happy but yourself but if there is someone who lights up when you light up or you light up because they light up in joy that's it! Someone with whom you can communicate in the best ways possible, someone that somehow makes you want to be better, that pulls out the best of you and sometimes the worst in you but you know that pulling the worst out of you means that they give you the chance to better yourself without judging you, and they give you the time to either accept yourself the way you are or change it if you want to and in the end they accept whatever decision you make, someone that something inside you just tells you that they are not lying, that you should just give it a shot, even though this person might not be what you thought you wanted in life, then take a leap of faith and jump right in, you will be amazingly surprised at how great things will end. Listen to your inner voice and don't be scared of it, don't give into fear and run away, I know it's hard to do and takes lots of practice, I, myself, continue to struggle with it but I have faith that slowly but surely I will come to just follow my gut feeling and nothing else, because every time I follow it, it never steers me wrong.