Apparently, it's Quotation Weekend

Rather than blather on about my tripe, let me give you the words of someone else who very succinctly expresses something I've tried to say many times. I came across this in a rather random way, just minutes ago:

I think the concept that there’s one person who’s gonna make you whole, this Gibran kind of thinking, is so detrimental. I don’t think it’s the other person’s responsibility to make you whole at all. It’s the other person’s responsibility to make you laugh, to give you a dance now and then, to read the newspaper and tell you about things you don’t have time to read about, to introduce you to music you don’t know, to tell you when you’re full of shit, to fight fair, to be good in bed, to say, “Come on, let’s go have an adventure” when you’ve become a little bit of a stick in the mud. But it’s not their job to make you whole, and until you are whole, I don’t think you can really enter into a relationship with somebody and have it work. The test for me of a great romantic relationship is how productive you are during the relationship.--Susan Sarandon, interviewed by Martha Frankel

I love that this quote is essentially in response to Sarandon answering "Yes" to considering herself a romantic. I had never considered one of the benchmarks of a healthy relationship being one's productivity, but I like and agree with this notion. It's another way of measuring how healthy you are---are you out there living and doing and being? 


Conversely, if your relationship (be it familial, friendly, or romantic) is the source of all your mental energy, I think that's a bad sign. You shouldn't be spending all your time doing damage control, worrying, attending to, planning for, or evening thinking about just one person. Not only is it unhealthy for you and a doom for the relationship, but it's unfair to the other person and the relationship.


Nothing can be your everything. We have this strange idea/ideal of what our relationships are supposed to encompass. I think goes something like this:

1. Completeness of the self through union
2. Union must be of a sexual/romantic nature (friends are just a by-way on the road to finding The One, and can be tossed aside when objective is achieved)
3. Union must be strictly one on one (monogamy only--which makes life a lot simpler, in many ways. But if we didn't focus so much on the sexuality of the relationship, then we could be fulfilled by many people. You know, like friends.)
4. Union fulfills all possible emotional needs (minor exceptions made for having children, which is the other glorified idea/ideal we worship as  sacred cow)

What a set up! You have to be not only my only thing, but my everything. You are responsible for meeting all my psychological, sociological, and physical desires. If you really do care for someone,  how can you place such an unachievable expectation on them and then think it will work out? They will fail you, at some point, and you will both suffer for it. 


In a related thought, and one I have trouble implementing, is this: your significant other is not your therapist. That's a tricky one, if your focus is on honesty and open communication. There's a line you have draw when it goes from talking to dumping. 


The people we bring into our lives should be both our guests and our hosts. I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't have a primary companion--but I am advocating giving serious consideration to how you go about setting that up. And I'm not trying to promote a free love/open marriage/whatever thing. That's part of my problem with the whole ideal---the fact that we focus so much on the sexual aspect makes us overlook the value of the emotion, affection and attention of everything from friends to family to pets. 


I don't talk about this type of stuff much, because there's always a responding air of "the lady doth protest too much" or "you're just a bitter betty" or "it just hasn't happened for you" or "wow, you are one cynical sumbitch."


All of which miss my intention entirely. I'm not down on the concept of love. It's one of the better things humanity has managed to cook up for itself. The best might be music, but that's a whole other kettle of crawfish. 


I think we deify love, we exalt it, we pay it lip service, but we don't do it in the way of it. We don't help it out. We don't give it much thought. We expect it to happen, and get pissed when it doesn't happen exactly like we want it to. We narrow our definitions, and worse, we try to police how other people express their sense of the emotion. 


We talk about love as a beautiful flowering plant, then when we get it, we stick it on the shelf and forget about it. Then we have the audacity to be angry when it dies. We  treat it like an acquisition that, once obtained, requires no further energy or action. 


Jeez. I should really be out buying a chair to sit in or going to work out or something. In regular fashion, I've managed to take a decent wake up time and squander it's benefits. Oy.