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On dating the wrong person, and the right one.

Big thanks to my friend and fellow blogger Edmund Mitchell for sharing the below vid with me today via Twitter. It’s a poetic performance by poet Janette-icks, and if you’re single, ever dated somebody who wasn’t the one, worry you’re growing too old to meet the one (or have friends or family who do that for you), this is for you.

Excerpts:

On dating the wrong person:

“He had a form of godliness, but not much. But hey, I can change him, I mean he’s close… enough.”

“…arteries so clogged with my will it blocked His will from flowing through me.”

“…he didn’t even sound or shine like your Son.”

On waiting for the right one: 

“I will no longer date socialize or communicate with carbon copies of you to quench my thirst and desire for attention and short lived compliments from sorta kindas. You know, he’s sorta kind right, but sorta kinda wrong… his first name Luke, his last name Warm…”

“I will no longer get weighted down from so called friend and family talks about their concern for my biological clock when I serve the Author of Time…”

Watch below!

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“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”

A version of this post originally appeared on the blog in 2010.

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Have you ever been on an “I’m not sure if this is a” date?

We are probably usually far more sure than we say we are. But we deny we are sure so if we learn one of us doesn’t want to date the other, it doesn’t sting.

Imagine you’re a college kid. You show up first, slip into Starbucks, and slink into a big, black velvet chair. You (usually pretend to) read (who can focus at a time like this?). You try not to look at the door. And you think.

Do I buy my drink?

Do I wait to let him pay?

Does he want to pay?

Is this a date?

If only he’d been explicit.

“Can I take you out on Friday?” instead of “Want to grab coffee on Friday?” Is that so hard?

He shows up. You smile. He’s nervous.

So it is a date.

You walk to the counter. You ask for tea. He asks for coffee.

“Together, or separate?”

He looks at you.

Brother, this ball was made for your court. But he has assumed the choice is yours. Shoot! You panic.

“Separate!” you say. Did you really have any other viable option? If you had said “together,” he’d think you think you’re on a date. And that’s the last thing you want him to think you’re thinking if you don’t know whether he’s thinking it, too.

You both pull out your wallets. So it’s not a date. He smiles. Did he smile because he’s relieved? Is he offended and the smile was fake? You assume he’s happy to be out with a friend.

You assume.

And “assumptions are the termites of relationships.” (Henry Winkler)

But it doesn’t just happen among college kids on awkward first dates. This is at work and at church and in grad school. It’s in public places and on the road and at parties. It’s in marriages and families and circles of friends.

Imagine a world where we could be bolder.

Where we could communicate when we once were too afraid to do it.

To ask what someone’s intentions are (instead of guessing). To share our true feelings (instead of stifling them). To reject ambiguity (instead of using it as a preemptive defense against rejection). To explicitly identify our needs (instead of waiting for the people who can meet them to read our minds).

We assume and we act on that (which is code for “we do what presents the smallest risk.”).

But our avoidance of risk is what makes taking risks unbearable.

Our caution in effort to avoid the sting of rejection enables us not to try.

Perhaps we are too cautious.

Perhaps what we fear only stings so much because we’ve been too cautious for too long.

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Is attraction enough?

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Once, I sipped a water in a cruise ship bar and made eyes with a cruise ship drummer.

A good looking cruise ship drummer.

Who wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

Whose eyes’ contact with mine resulted in warm and fuzzy feelings.

This, I think, is the coveted “love” at first sight (which, to clarify, isn’t actually love).

It is instantaneous, inexplicable attraction. It is why when I met the cruise ship drummer after his set, I didn’t care that he hardly could speak English. It is why I wasn’t embarrassed by my embarrassing opener: “I don’t speak Spanish.” Not much matters except for attraction when we think the existence of attraction is enough.

But attraction alone doesn’t matter much. It is neither warm feelings nor fuzzy ones that deem the pursuit of a relationship necessarily advisable. Which is why I am mildly alarmed by the frequency with which relationships are pursued based solely on warm and fuzzy feelings.

This is when we are self-focused daters. When we want what we want because it feels good, not because it is good. When we date someone because we are attracted to him or her.

This is not to say we should date people to whom we are not attracted. (Awkward!) It is to say that attraction is not enough (especially if it’s inexplicable).

It is never enough.

The outcomes of self-focused dating vary. Maybe you get lucky and wind up with somebody good. Maybe you fight to sustain or revive an irrational relationship. Maybe you marry a person who, outside the attraction, you don’t even like.

But I can’t even tell you how much this hurts my heart.

My hunch is, in a culture as distracted as ours, most of us are satisfied when looking at, being near, talking to, or sleeping with him or her feels good.

Which is why few people probably stop to consider the magnitude of the self-focused pursuit and maintenance of relationships; to consider what it means that we are more concerned with how good somebody makes us feel than with whether he or she is mature enough to be a spouse.

Than with whether we become better or worse people by being with each other.

Than with whether he or she would be a good parent.

Than with whether we are being fair to our future kids when our future kids will grow up and turn into one of us.

My attraction to you and yours to me doesn’t render us prepared to be spouses or parents. My attraction to you and yours to me is necessary but insufficient for a functional relationship.

“But it feels good.”

But “it feels good” isn’t enough.

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[Repost] “It’s not me, it’s you.”

This post originally appeared in Sept., 2010.

On my way to school last night, I got annoyed at a few other drivers.

When don’t I?

But last night, while I headed to school for a test in psychopathology, a couple cars ahead drove too slowly. A couple other cars hit the brakes too hard in front of me. All the way through the hour-long drive, I tried not to let it bother me. Instead, I tried to think about all the things that might be on my test.

In the class, we’re studying the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. So, personality disorders and anxiety disorders and psychotic disorders. (And I could actually go on for awhile — it’s a long list.) Here and there, we also get into theories, like attachment theory — the styles of connection between an infant and his or her mother and how they affect the grown up person the baby becomes, and attribution theory — whoa.

While I drove, attribution pushed me into a little more self awareness.* Simply, the theory says a person attributes his or her own behavior to his or her circumstances and a person attributes other people’s behavior to other people’s personalities.

In other words, “It’s not me. It’s you.”

It’s why when I drive slowly, it’s not my fault but when you are a driver in front of me and you drive slowly, it’s because you are inept.

Clearly, that belief is false (most of the time) (don’t lie — some people can’t drive.). But how few among us don’t think it all the time? If I forget something, it’s because other people are pulling me in too many different directions. You forget something, and I ask, “What is wrong with you?”

What’s wrong with all of us? We want to believe that when I drop the ball, it’s your fault and when you drop the ball, it’s your fault.

And I must say. When “you” drop the ball that much, it’s really hard to love you. But it takes the blame off the one around whom the world revolves (Ha! We humans. So funny.).

How different a day would be if only we’d admit that sometimes, it’s actually not you. What if I choose to believe the slow drivers are slow because of their circumstances — they’re lost, for instance — and not because their number one goal in life is to make me late?

I can empathize with being lost; I cannot empathize with rudeness. Why assume the worse when there’s no way to know which is the case?

Going with the one that doesn’t make my blood pressure go up might make my hour-long drives more pleasant. And if we all do it, it might make the world a better place.

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*Getting a degree in mental health will do that to you. I highly recommend it.

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[“Guest” Post Series] Relationship Tips: #4 – It isn’t your job to entertain your significant other.

Today’s “guest” blogger is me. ‘Cause I ran outta guests.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand next to my bed. Happy to hear from him, I answered. But not feeling so well, I was mellow and not much in the mood for talking.

“I’m really sorry I’m so boring tonight,” I told him.

He – then the guy in my life – paused thoughtfully. When he spoke, he said something I didn’t expect:

“I didn’t know it was your job to entertain me. …I just want to talk to you.”

When he said it, I realized a meaningful relationship isn’t based on how entertained you are by the person, or how happy the person makes you. I also realized in a relationship worth your time, you won’t be judged or dumped because you’re “boring” sometimes, or because you can’t make the other person happy.

Why?

Because in a good relationship, it is not your job to entertain your significant other.

If it were, your relationship would be based on a “friendship of utility,” in which “the affection is based on the benefit or use the friends derive from the relationship.”

It is not your job to make him or her happy.

If it were, your relationship would be based on a “pleasant friendship,” in which “the basis of affection is the pleasure one gets out of the relationship.”

There is another kind of friendship on which a relationship might be based – one that is deeper. It doesn’t require your relationship to end if one of you gets boring. It doesn’t require you to be responsible for the other person’s feelings. It’s a “virtuous friendship,” in which “the two friends are united not in self-interest but in the pursuit of a common goal: the good life, moral life that is found in virtue.”

A virtuous friendship is the kind that takes the pressure off. The kind that makes a marriage.

“The problem with useful and pleasant friendships is that the emphasis is on what I get out of the relationship. However, in the virtuous friendship the two friends are committed to pursuing something outside themselves, something that goes beyond each of their own self interests. And it is this higher good that united them in friendship.”

It is this higher good for which we all ought to aim.

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Quoted material above comes from Men, Women and the Mystery of Love by Edward Sri. The three kinds of friendship come from the philosophy of Aristotle.

Relationship Tips is a series of guest posts (except for this one, lol). Click here to read all the posts in the series.