Curious Notions

I saw this tweet from Ryan today and it reminded me of an interaction I had with someone in my life this weekend. This prompted me to share my list of three questions to ask yourself before you ask someone a favor.

How close are you to your friend?

I use the term friend to mean whomever you are asking a favor of. Hopefully you should know better than to rely on an enemy.

If I’m asking a favor of Mary Ellen or another super close friend, I wouldn’t feel out of line if I just jumped right into it and asked for the favor. We are close enough to stay in communication routinely so I hope that she understands that her friendship is valuable to me and I do not see her as just an end to my means. If you’re not close to this friend and haven’t talked to them in a while, please approach with more care and tact. Realize that you’ve neglected this relationship for whatever reason and to not at the very least inquire about his or her life is off putting.

Did you ask for a favor the last time you talked to your friend?

There is someone in my life right now who texted me this weekend. Before even reading her text I knew she needed something and groaned. I think I even put off opening her text message. I came to this accurate prediction because she has developed a consistent pattern of only speaking to me when she needed something. I cannot remember the last time we hung out and caught up on each other’s lives that was not initiated by me. I ended up texting back an avoidance of her favor. It worked out that I was honestly busy and am working both my jobs this week. However, I doubt I’d honor her favor even if I did have the time.

There’s an analogy in Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that I think is pertinent. View your relationships with people as individual bank accounts. Have you made deposits in the relationships? Cashing in a favor is withdrawing from your bank account. Doing a favor or being a friend is equivalent to depositing. Is your relationship account balanced? Are you overdrawn? Ask yourself this before making your request.

Are you abreast more or less with your friend’s life?

Do you know what’s going on with your friend’s life? Do you know how his work/personal/extracurricular life is going? What did he do over the weekend? If you haven’t the slightest clue what he’s up to in the last 6 months, you probably have no business trying to cash in a favor. Again, if this person has no idea what’s going on with you and the first thing you do is ask if he or she can fix your router or debug your website’s php code, more than likely, you’re watering some of his resentment.

I have a hard time committing not because I want all these options and I want to play and sleep around but I’m just terrified of making that wrong choice. Once I commit to someone, I close off other doors and that’s what scares me. I don’t know if the person I chose is going to screw me over later and the good guys for me are the ones I closed the door on. There’s no way of ever knowing and that just freaks me out and I admire people who can just take that jump and say to someone, “Okay, I don’t know what’s going to happen but let’s do it.” That takes a lot of courage. It feels like a fall for me.

The past couple of boyfriends I dated briefly, I had small panic attacks where my chest would ache with anxiety wondering when, if ever would they screw me over. So I kept myself independent. I’d rather be months and months late on my oil change then let the boyfriend do it. One offered to make an easy car repair for me and I rather pay then depend on him. My thinking was, if he ever left, it would help to have the least change in what I did for myself and what he did for me. Another boyfriend told a mutual friend his biggest problem with me was that I had too many friends. I’m overly committed to everyone else and not to him. I know I do this partly to keep them at arm’s length. I know it.

I’ve skydived before. To skydive you just kind of have to have blind faith and hope your chute opens. There’s a very surreal thought process of “come what may, here I come” that occurs when you jump out of a plane 12,000 feet above ground. I’m attempting to approach dating with that same mentality. To just.. drop the shit and see what happens.

At least with relationships, I won’t die.

I hate that relationship status thing on facebook and myspace.

Last weekend I had dinner with 2 boys and a girl. We girls forced the boys into girly-slumber-party-like questions and conversation. We called it game of “Truth or Truth.” Poor boys. We asked them fun questions from last time they cried to weirdest place they had sex. The juvenile game soon morphed into a conversation about gender differences. One guy wondered why females have a tendency to go into this silent psychological warfare where they are grading their significant other silently, going through a “check list.” He likened it to a ticking bomb.

“Tick tick tick.. and all of a sudden they go off and do something drastic, like break up or start a blow out fight.”

The other girl and I nodded knowingly. We’ve done this ‘ticking bomb’ thing. We’re both sticking to our guns that the “ticking bomb” is a fantastic last resort. Often times we find ourselves voicing what we want over and over again. It’s not fun. It could be as small as “You don’t ever ask me how my day is” to something bigger such as, “I’m not going to wait for you to get your shit together another year, it’s already been 6 years.” Eventually, the asker gets tired of hearing her (or his) own voice so she (or he) stops asking.

Cue “Ticking Bomb” phase.

This is the point where they’re deciding on whether to fold and walk away with least amount of damage to themselves. I like calling it the silent tally. Silently counting how many times the party in question is falling short. No more reminders. No more gentle coaxing. No more arguments. So my hint to mainly the men out there. If your significant other has been nagging you about something for a long while and all of a sudden, she’s quiet. Contrary to what my male friend thought it was (“I thought she changed her wants”), you’re probably being silently monitored and about to approach a tipping point in the relationship. :) Beware of silence.

Why I will stand by it? People generally don’t change. Unless the pain of their not changing exceeds the pain of changing.. right? Why fix something that ain’t broke? So if someone doesn’t embody something you think you need in a relationship, the “ticking bomb” helps illustrates the futility of waiting for someone to change… Count the tally marks then fold and walk away with what you have.

To save time, don’t waste it with people who don’t deserve your attention.

Feelings fascinate me. Perhaps it’s an existential obsession. Where do they come from? How does someone, something, an idea get to you to the point of affecting your physical being? It’s been a while since I’ve had my heart broken but I can remember it being a very PHYSICAL feeling. The ache in the chest, the lack of control in your movements, the nausea. Do we invest in beliefs so that they move us into a decided direction? Would we otherwise be paralyzed with indifference? Are what we decide to believe in our tipping points? What makes us happy tells us what to strive for. What makes us sad or angry tells us what we must run from or fight.

I have no residual longing or feelings for the dude who broke my heart most substantively. I don’t miss any part of him or us. I’ve donated, burned, trashed, and given away all relationship artifacts. But I do remember how I felt about him. What amazes me is that there was nothing that warranted these strong feelings in his personality.. it was all a matter of blindly choosing to love. So what is triggering all this is my friend asked me today if I had ever imagined myself with other men while dating him. Or ever felt attracted to someone where my mind would innocently wander and play out scenarios. It hit me that I was so enthralled with this dude (dude is the nicest thing I’ve called him since we’ve broken up) that I was never compelled by any other guy to daydream. I have always found it very healthy to acknowledge that there will be people you’ll find yourself attracted to even in the most committed relationships. I embrace that idea.. but with this dude, I was so into him that I was never compelled… Never mind the countless other men in my life then (and now!) who still to this day I know would have been better for me.

I remember 2 days before we broke up I was still head over heels. Which is amazing since he didn’t treat me well AND it had been four years. But today when I had a flash back of 2 days before we broke up.. I remember randomly running into him unexpectedly and how my world got brighter.. even at the last sprint I was still so strongly affected. My mood lifted instantaneously. That night he asked me how I knew I loved him. I described the effect he had on me earlier that day. Next day as we were breaking up, he mentioned what I said and admitted, “I can’t remember the last time I felt like that with you.” That feeling.. I have a hard time remembering things about us.. objectively. I can barely remember what he looks like (several have likened him to a gorilla). But I can remember that feeling. Of being crushed. And short of breath.

That crushed feeling. The mood uplifting days before. The lack of breath. Later, the nausea, the vomiting. All the physical symptoms of our emotions.. that’s so damn fascinating to me. The function of those feelings.. brings me to my original position. Perhaps.. our body cues us in what is good or bad for us in life. Not unlike the sense of smell protecting us from rotting food, our chest aches and our warm tinglys serve as helpful arrows directing us even in our emotional life.

Follow the warm fuzzies.