Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Just too damn picky
When people tell you to stop being so picky, what they are really telling you is that you have unrealistic standards. That is to say, what you're after either does not exist, or is beyond your capabilities. You will be encouraged to compromise. They will tell you that it is better to compromise and be "loved" than to hold fast and be lonely. Humanity's social norms seem to be one founded on codependence, rather than interdependence. If being with someone requires that you compromise your core values, beliefs, hopes, or aspirations, what good is being? The only real purpose of love is to uplift, support, comfort, and encourage. Love is a positive force, so anything having to do with love is inherently steeped in positivity. Anything less is not love, it is ownership. Compromising who you are to satisfy another is not sacrifice in the name of love, it is martyrdom in the name of another human's gratification.
I could not tell you how many times in my life that I have been encouraged to compromise, but I have always wondered what exactly this sacrifice would be for. What is so wrong with my standards to begin with? What do the masses know that I need to learn? My fellow humans have taught me more about what I should not be doing than how I might find my way to where I want to be. Being alone can be hard, it can be outright devastating, but it is better to be devastated alone than to be consumed. Compromise consumes us in tiny nibbles. What begins as a clear, crisp vision begins to muddy and blur as compromise scratches at the lens of our lives. Like a beach we put ourselves at risk of slowly eroding to little more than strips of sand butting up against life's storm walls. Compromise chews our bodies, minds, and spirits.
Obviously, we all compromise. Life is nearly impossible without compromise, and any relationship becomes untenable if there are no compromises being made, so the question becomes one of degrees. How much of who you are is worth surrendering to have someone there. This is question each person answers for themselves, as some are willing to relinquish nearly everything, while others will surrender almost nothing. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. This is all opinion, of course, but I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. To know love, we much know compromise, but these compromises cannot be of the fundamental variety. If someone is asking us to compromise our foundation, and that foundation is largely healthy or happy, they are not expressing their love, they are expressing their desire to change who we are. It's one thing to give up a hobby to spend more time with a significant other, but shedding the things we are passionate about is not an option.
So many times I see people sacrificing in the name of what they call love, but I know that their idea of love must be different from mine, because such sacrifices would not even be asked by people sharing what I conceive of as love. Anyone asking or demanding that we change who were are fundamentally is not interested in loving us, their primary concern is controlling and limiting us. We are possessions that should think as they would have us think, and do as they would have us do. They are not travelers sharing a journey, but passengers shouting at us from the seat of a rickshaw we find ourselves pulling.
I understand that some things must be compromised, but I also believe that some people are fundamentally ignorant of what it means to be picky. When you are talking about falling in love with someone, how can you not be picky? Rejecting someone for purely superficial reasons, like the length of their toes, the sound of their laugh, or the car that they drive is not being picky, it's being asinine. Being picky is about willfully being alone if you cannot find what it is you are looking for in another person, whatever that may be. Who we are is all we really have, in this physical world, so anyone that would ask we sacrifice who we are is not asking out of love, they are asking because they believe that who they are is greater than us and therefore worthy of our sacrifice. That is not love, as far as I am concerned.
Then again, most people would argue that I cannot know anything of love. Most people would describe me as unrealistic, assuming that they are feeling kind, but I do not believe it to be unrealistic or unfair to expect as much from others as you do yourself. In my mind, that is the essence of fairness, as asking no more than you are willing to give would seem to be the essence of love. Maybe I have it all wrong. After all, I haven't ever been in a healthy, long-term relationship. Let me rephrase that, I haven't ever been in a long-term relationship, period, so there is a real chance I have it completely wrong, in which case, the rest of the world can piss off and leave me alone! :)
Labels: life
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Your right in the sense that you shouldn't compromise on your values and/or the type of personality, integrity, etc., you're looking for in a partner. I think what most people mean and I know how I feel with anyone, not just you - is that if you only initiate conversations with women you're initially physically attracted to… they might now have the inner core you are looking for in a woman and you might have walked right past a GREAT girl. Whereas if you strike up a conversation with an ‘attractive’ girl but not your ideal “Dang she’s HOT” girl, she may have exactly what your looking for as far as her inner core and you just might find yourself wanting to compromise on the physical attraction because after all it’s not like she’s ugly and she has everything else your looking for.
As far as a girl’s ‘history’ is concerned… I think it’s great you don’t want to be with a girl who had no problem giving it up to every guy that glanced at her over the years – they are just down right dirty. However, now that we’re all in our late-20’s finding someone without a history of some degree would be hard to do. There’s a difference between a girl who happened to be in a lot of relationships and slept with her boyfriends and the girls who have all kinds of one-night stands.
What I’m getting at is you may meet a girl in her late-20’s that quite possibly has been in two relationships per year since she was 16 but just never found the right guy so that might put her in the # 24 area… probably seems a little on the high side but she was really into all those guys. Then you could meet a girl in her late-20’s, who has never been in a relationship but has had 15 one-night stands, her # might not be as high but she had no problem giving it up to a stranger.
You could opt for someone a little less than late-20’s, but that might even make the #’rs worse… it seems each generation of girls is willing to sleep with more guys than the one before them.
Anyhow, that’s my opinion on compromise – stick to your guns where it really counts but yes, sometimes compromising to some degree isn’t always so bad.
Yikes-that was longer than I intended
not that laura's points aren't legitimate, because i absolutely think they are, but there's a lot of subtle wisdom in this post. i wish somebody had helped me understand what it means to be picky a long time before i figured it out the self-destructive way.
I don't necessarily think that one has to experience true love in order to know what a healthy love is. And you definitely have a good sense on what true love should really be about. Laura always has really great advice.
You definitely don't want to compromise on your core values or who you are. I did and look where it got me... a 29 year old divorcee with 3 cats, an entire family (in-laws) that completely disowned me, the loss of a financially secure future, and feeling like a complete failure. But what I gained was my Self. So what took me 11 years to lose, go through hell for, and finally get back, you already have. Being true to your self is the most important thing in the world. But you already know that. :)
At 30, I know my odds of finding someone I have much in common with are progressively going from slim to none. What do I have in common with a woman who has been with 24 guys, even if all that sex had been with people she cared about? How could we possibly relate to each other? We have fundamentally different views. Is hers more realistic? Is mine more noble? It's all totally subjective. That's really what this all comes down to. I don't relate to most women and I am intelligent enough to know that my odds of having anything resembling the sort of relationship I hope for are growing incredibly long. And there is no denying that those odds are weighing on me.
I feel like what was once a pebble has become Atlas' weight on my shoulders, and that I may have gotten this thing incredibly wrong. When I was younger, I always thought there was plenty of time, but life is temporary and time is in increasingly short supply.