On right and wrong relations

There are so many wonderful people in this world. People who laugh, smile and speaks with a warm and caring voice. They use positive language that eventually ousts all negativity by simply reframing the world by their choice of words.

And yet that doesn’t mean that you should be in an intimate relationship with all of them. And by intimate I don’t only mean sex, but rather a partnership.

Because despite all of these wonderful qualities they have that makes you feel good about yourself and life there might still be an important puzzle piece missing.

Goals.

As I’m writing this I’ve recently come out of a three months dating experience with a person who fit all the qualities described above. I was dumped because I wasn’t present enough. The reason I wasn’t present enough was because I had a more than a full-time job, full-time evening studies, was struggling with finding long-term housing and more or less lived in two different cities. All while not even being a resident in the country.

She, on the other hand, was unemployed and lived almost for free at a huge inner city apartment that belonged to her sister and her sister’s fiancée. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life and expressed a general lack of interest towards advancing her life through work.

How she chose to set up her life, however, was not the main problem. I really liked her and I still do. What’s more is that I think she has all the qualities necessary to do really, really, well in life if she gets to trod along at her own pace. And I guess this was my problem as far as the relationship was concerned.

You see, what I wish for myself is something along the lines of a big inner city apartment, a house in the archipelago, living of the income from my own company and having a big family.

However, this is not something that I can do on my own. I need a partner for that. Or rather, I want a partner for that. A partner, to me, is someone that I trust would be able to take care of themselves if I fucked up, broke down or just lost track. And for me, to allow myself to do that, would require trust in that I wouldn’t mess up someone else’s situation.

In order for me to have faith in that I won’t mess up someone else’s situation by taking risks I need to be confident that they’re alright on their own. Confident that my input is not necessary for them to achieve a good quality of life.

This led me to keep an emotional distance while waiting for the signs that would give me that confidence. For me it would have been to see her make conscious efforts towards getting a job and arranging her own accommodation in a tough housing market.

So my problem relationship-wise was that I was not willing to just dive in and see where we would end up without some assurance that she was as industrious as I thought she could be. That she would, eventually find some goals that to which I could align mine. That we could share and support eachother in a shared narrative.

Now what has all this to do with right or wrong relations?

While I was spending time with her I had these nagging thoughts in the back of my mind that perhaps her current lack of ambition was actually not temporary. Perhaps I saw something in her that didn’t exist. Perhaps a full on relationship with her would lead me to drop my own ambitions and become comfortable and effectively rob myself of my own dreams.

I brought these negative thoughts with me to other stressful areas in my life, creating a downward spiral of negativity (fear) and stress which in turn made me less able to navigate my other life situations. For instance, I clashed with all of my three bosses and two of my colleagues. The clashes were not for bad reasons, but with my usual shrewdness I would have navigated my way through the “situations” by clever communication instead of opting for direct confrontations. But what’s even worse, and this I also found out later, was that I unconsciously communicated this negativity to her and made her feel bad about not being good enough. ME! Who have always prided myself in being good at building other people up. By putting my own fears and concerns into the head of someone else. Fucking douchebag.

Now, I don’t think it’s wrong to change your goals and dreams over time. As time passes you gain more experience and your perspective, and with that your desires, might change. What seemed interesting before might not be interesting now, and so on. Involving yourself intimately with another person might bring about such changes in perspective very fast.

But I guess my point is that if you identify these concerns and fears of not being able to reach your goals when you’re in the relationship, chances are the person you’re spending time with is not someone you should be with. And you should consider either confronting them with your fears and see whether they’re actually well founded or not. After all, you might have completely misinterpreted who they are and what goals they have or don’t have, which I later found out was the case for me.

Or, you should get out. Because living a life where you’re consumed with stresses and fears for whatever sucks, regardless of how wonderful the person bringing these emotions into your life is.