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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Mind Reading 101 for Relationships?

It is never easy to know the "whole" story about anything. We make judgments on the smallest slices of "information." Judgments based more on who and how we are than the other person, really.

Having said that, I was just watching an excerpt from the most recent Bachelor. I really don't pay much attention to that show, but I was curious. It was a scene between him and a woman who seem to feel badly about the fact that he did not really know her/ask questions about her.

He said something about why hadn't she said something before. He also kept saying "OK," and seemed to recognize that it was coming off the wrong way to her and tried to do things differently.

When I saw it I didn't see the bad guy so many seem to want to see. I actually felt he had a couple of good points/observations. Why should we assume things about others? Why should we assume that another person should be a certain way? If the woman was interested, maybe she could have helped him to see things differently before they came to a head the way they did. Without even having made an attempt, there is no way to really know what ultimately would have been possible.

It is one thing not to communicate something and face a person's reaction or lack thereof, and another to communicate that thing and have the person either not react, or react differently than you want them to.

Having said that, it seems she wanted someone who didn't need any prompting. She wanted a "model" that came with certain features. This is not to judge either one of them, but rather to just call attention to something that I started to pay attention to after I became aware of it several years ago.

I do my best not to assume anything these days. I also don't get upset with someone for not being a way that I want them to be/for not reading my mind. I tell them what I want/how I feel, and then things go from there. If things still don't go the way I want them to, I go back to me. What am I going to do about it? Can I alter how I look at it? Am I going to walk away from it? Did I perhaps not make myself clear? How much is it worth going back to revisit and try again?

This is not to say I don't get upset. I just do my best not to get upset with someone who may not know why I am even upset in the first place. At that point I am even trying to pin down what it really is that is upsetting me, as it may not always be what it seems (actually, it often is not what it seems, and has nothing to do with the person beyond a superficial circumstance that has tentacles in something from a past hurt/pain/circumstance).

People are different.

A very simple and obvious statement, and yet we often have problems with that fact. We often want others to be the way we want them to be. I suspect that there are times that our desire for people to be the way we want them to be, along with our inability or lack of desire to communicate how we feel and what we want, is more destructive to relationships than the seeming issues themselves.


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