Tuesday, April 27, 2010

SHOW ME YOURS AND I'LL SHOW YOU MINE

Relationships...oh the pain! The misery! The heartbreak! For serial daters, relationships can become a cycle; fun, excitement, challenge, escape, pain, misery, heartbreak. Over and over again until the heart becomes steel and the tongue could pierce armor. For those of us who are “unlucky” in love, we can get to the point where we feel that someone must “earn” our trust before we let our guard down; that we’ve got too much going on to just let some guy use up all of our good stuff and leave us with more emotional baggage than we deny we had before meeting the guy!

Once we get to a “certain age” we can sometimes emit a signal of ‘prove to me that you’re worth my time‘. We can be serious, slow to laugh, quick to accuse and very self-concerned. But when we act like this, is this really us? Are we really showing up to this fresh, clean situation fresh and clean? We fortress our hearts and in the process our soft, feeling center is encased, yet we expect for someone to respond to who we know ourselves to be; warm, loving, generous, thoughtful and interesting...huh?!?

Interaction within a relationship is just like anything else in life; you get what you give. We look for a man to show up and be a perfect representation of himself but oftentimes we aren’t even being our real selves; I mean who is this skeptical, quid pro quo, scorekeeper anyway? It’s funny because we always expect “the one” to be able to see past all of our gar-bage and see us for who we really are, yet we take everyone else we encounter at face value, ha!

When our expectation is that someone will trick us or sell us a dream, we behave in ways that are consistent with that belief. Our behavior, (not being a true reflection of who we know ourselves to be) causes the men in our lives to respond to it, not to us. When we play “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” in a relationship, we lose. If we were honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that when we take on this attitude, we wouldn’t want to date the person that we are being. Yet, we just justify our behaviors because we know who we really are.

At some point, we have to release...we have to trust that our past experiences and greater understanding will lead us to what is best for us. We have to trust ourselves and know that if things don‘t work out, we will still be ok, we will still be strong, and we will still have our dignity. If we really want to have love in our lives, we have to give ourselves the freedom to let down our guards and trust our own judgment to choose people that will honor us and act accordingly. If our behavior truly is a mirror, we should get back from our partners what we give and if not, we can choose to go elsewhere.

2 comments:

  1. You have captured it precisely. Not one word of untruth. An exceptional piece.

    I wonder though; where does this "pain" you speak of come from? Is it because of what you've had to give up or what you'll no longer be getting?

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  2. Thank you, we are glad that this piece rings true for you.

    Excellent question. I think that the pain is a combo deal; what you've had to give up in terms of the dream you may have had for the relationship, and its loss. But on a deeper level, I think the "pain" speaks more to what it says about the person experiencing it. Many times its not the pain of loss for a particular person but more so what we think that loss says about who we are. We take the loss personally, feeling that there is something wrong with us, not realizing that there is freedom in recognizing our part in a relationship failure. Once we can see ourselves more clearly from an objective standpoint, the stinging pain is gone.. there may still be a dull pain however, lol.

    So, Al tell me, how have you seen "Show Me Yours and I'll Show You Mine" play out in your life?

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