There’s this thing called “compromise” and relationships are supposedly all about it.
You’re supposed to take only as much as you’re willing give in order to maintain a certain balance in those interactions. When one side gives and gives and gives with nothing being returned even once, even a 4-year-old kid could tell you something’s pretty messed up with it. Likewise, you can’t keep taking from another person and expecting there to be no repercussions or resentment developing in the long run.
You gotta be able to meet someone at the half-way point, where you find yourself wanting to hug the other person more times than you’d like to strangle them.
So when to get to the point of giving other people ultimatums, testing them, pressing and pressuring them, chances are, you’re way outside the gray area and are a heartbeat away from strangling them. My friend Lee has had a bit of an…interesting “relationship” track record. Recently, she’s started dating a nice boy, Josh, whom our entire pseudo-family makes consistent fun of since he still needs a fake ID to get into clubs. Lee isn’t one to get into relationships all willy-nilly. No, I mean it: she resists getting into committed relationships like most people avoid getting a root canal. So when she met Josh a couple of months ago and started dating him despite the age-difference, we were amused. But when she declared her love for him a little bit later, the public reaction was a hodgepodge of shock/confusion/hesistant-awkward-laughter-because-we-didn’t-realize-she-was-serious-about-it.
So Josh is the exception here. I like the kid (and not just because I have a tendency of making out with both Lee and him when I have a little too much to drink), the Sister likes the kid because he can handle all her bad jokes about his age, and even some of the guys have tried to get him into their extremely homo-esque MMA sessions. He’s polite, puts up with Lee’s crazy mother (they’re a dime a dozen in our culture), and is generally a nice kid.
The problem? He’s a bit jealous.
Well, that’s a bit of a lie; he’s really jealous. I’m still trying to figure out if he’s like this on a regular basis or only because he’s aware of Lee’s colorful history but, the point is that it gets annoying.
From the backseat of Stuart yesterday, Lee explained that he constantly questions her loyalty and who she interacts with. Even if it’s with someone that she doesn’t want anything to do with (since, again, Josh is a bit of an exception for her), Josh gets a little, well, miffed, which is understandable to a point. The point being that Lee loves him and I can’t really recall the last person that she openly and happily admitted this about.
I was in a long-distance relationship a while back with someone that I really really truly loved. After a while though, the distance took over and we found ourselves second-guessing the other one’s loyalty. I never lied or strayed though I admittedly did make out with someone in front of my boyfriend but it was the one and only time in my life that I have ever betrayed the trust he gave me. It was not a proud moment and I woke up the morning after next to my boyfriend, sheepish and ashamed and bracing myself for the breakup.
He kept me in his life and we stayed together.
…It was likely the breaking point of our relationship. From that point on, he always seemed to expect me to cheat on him while I expected him to hook up with other girls in retaliation for my drunken debacle. It wasn’t pretty, but we held on, we tried to make things work because we cared for each more than we resented each other…at the time.
After a while, though, it became insanely obvious that we were past the gray area, instead pushing each other back and forth, testing alibis and excuses and new people writing on each other’s facebook accounts. It was a barrage of suspicions and accusations that lasted longer than it should have and ended ten times worse than it could have.
I’m not saying Lee and Josh will head in the same direction. I just recognize a few of the signs and hope a different path is taken.
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