yobech505

The Myth of the Relationship

I know I’m going to get clobbered along side the noggin for this one.

Being in a relationship is over valuated, okay?

The world’s second greatest love poet, Rod McKuen, once rhythmically scripted, “If I’m still alone, by now it’s by design.  I only own myself, but all of me is mine.”   (Sorry Rod, but Kahlil Gibran really has to be first.)    What incredible way to say, ‘hey, I got me, I don’t need you.”

Don’t get me in an incorrect comprehension here.  Relationships are nice,  at least some of them are, some of the time.  Overall, I have to reveal my emotional honestifications.  They don’t deserve the rating they get.

Seriously.  Think on what is being perpetuated into your left/right brain here.  Do you know anybody who doesn’t complain, at some time or another, in different altitudes, and at different pressure levels, about their partner, spouse, significant other, boyfriend, girlfriend or…?

It’s constant, consistent or, at the least,  confusingly bewilderingly way too often.  How do we cope, or better yet, why do we cope.  Silliness, insanity, semi blind neurosis, emotional trauma, emotional ignorance, stupidity, are any or all of these reasons to justify being self abusive to our hearts?

On we go.  In we go.  Relationship here, relationship there, long term, short term, no term or no one is happy, or is it that just no one is as happy as they want to be and is miserable way too many times in a select spectrum of time.

As humans, it would be my innermost suspicion that we seek perfection then settle for whatever we can get when we think it is way too late.  And it ain’t perfection.  Not even along side the wall of the relationship we wanted.

Of course, often we don’t see that until we’ve committed to getting involved, dropping our hearts in front of what we believe to be the right selection. Thus, the confusion of why we are there in the second place sets itself into the space we provided for a first place right next to us.  Then we have justifications for complaints, gripes,  snippets and general  not positive statements towards the person who filled the leaking void.

Humans are not solitary creatures, so we’ve often been brainwashed into believing by social experts throughout the history of science, anthropology and human geography.  But is it true?  We gape at headlines about some guy living alone in the woods, doing his anti-social thing, then publishing and enacting books and stories on bomb making or the like. The anti social anti social person.  So, how many of them are there that no one has an inkling even exist out in the back mining hills of South Dakota?  And since when is anti social a bad thing, any more than over social is, given the social nutcakes we encounter on a daily basis?

Overrated!  There is no doubt in my mind that relationships are overrated.  Still, I would like to be in one.  A “most of the time it is pretty good and that makes it all worth it” one.  You get what I am trying to inflict into your  psyche?  A good one.

But if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay too.

Dodging Raindrops.

I’m not one for excuses even though, to keep things where I, as well as others, can view them, have to admit, have given my share.  Not an excuse,  in absolute verbage, but in honest presentation.

There are always excuses.  We all own a few and are all very good at at least one or two.  Some are even legitimate.  There are real ones, then there are the phony, nobody really believes you, type.

Both are leaning too far over the railing when it relates to a relationship.  But you have to have them because stuff comes along that we have no remote control for.  Flat tires, drivers who won’t turn right where there is no traffic for eleven miles, blizzards and mobile phones that can’t send signals past a cactus, are reality.

Doing the laundry, walking the dog, changing the air in your car tires and it is raining too hard don’t cut it though.

The dog ate my car keys?  The basement is flooded and my only clean garter is on a drying rack next to the meat freezer is also a major stretch.  You don’t have any reason to not doubt them.   And some?  Whew!   Imagination is leaps and bounds ahead of relationship so often.

I can’t come over now because it is raining??  Seriously?  What are you, some kind of snail?  Raindrops don’t fall in the same spot twice.  Go between them!  You have a perfectly good bumbershoot, use it!  And so what if, I don’t know, maybe thirty thousand or so of them should hit you between the car door and the covered porch.  All you’d be is wet.

What makes it all worth it, anyway?  Who makes it worth the effort, time and energy?  I guess we need to make that crunchy choice.  Unless, of course, we are just nice and too embarrassed or too busy shaking in our hiking boots to say what we know is gobbling up our insides.  We won’t say, “I can’t stand your poodle, even though I know you don’t have one.”  Instead, we go through the leaking heavens to see that person who is existing in our emotional balancing beam with no more than mediocre desire.

Dedication to what we think we want, versus that same devotion that we really like, are two different things and thus, render two types of excuses.  Honest ones, ones that are designed to  not hurt,  and just plain fib type, are the run of the obstacle relay we participate in.  And how far we go with it leads it into; will I screw up when I try to remember what it was I used as a reason, or what if I am not believed and it is true?

We don’t want to ignore what we like, but we don’t want to overdo what we sort of like but are not really sure what it is all worth.  And this is where we call in the excuses.

The person is nice.  A relationship is possible.  But the current interest is only limited, restricted by, maybe, other possibilities, or so distant a chance that, convenience be cursed, we don’t care enough to go there come Hades or flood.  So we come up with solutions, at least in our minds, for why the rendezvous should not take place.  Here, the creativity of the human mind is in it’s appropriate field of play, knowing where to go and quickly coming up with the right thing to say, or at least it is when we hit the icon.

The danger, of course, is remembering in the event that the coupling does take place.  We want to skip past any hurt our not coming over could cause, but if we slip and trip on this one, somebody is going to be embarrassed and someone is going to have their feelings hurt.

So, I will visit when I can, and when I feel like it.  I will stop over when the weather allows me to travel without stress.  I will be around when I don’t have laundry to fold or a dog to let out of the kennel.  This is, I will tell you all these things unless I really have the hots for you.  Then I will brave all, hurricane be damned, and find a good reason why I should be there.  After all, this is a relationship, and what are partners for?

When the reply is, ‘I’m going to bed early’, or ‘I’m not feeling well’, ‘my mother is stopping by’ or even, ‘I have a headache’, well, we were asking for it.

Setting up House.

It’s been a long time since I got unceremoniously dumped from my last relationship.  I’m way beyond it, or so my electronic brain sensors attempt to point.   But it was something my daughter said the last time we hung out that incented me to attempt to unmuddy what went down the turnpike in a direction counter to mine.  Baffling the mystery; what actually happened?

My beautiful daughter, who is quite insightful, told me she was “setting up house”.

“Just another bunch of syllables that translate to ‘rebounding’?  I inquired.

“Well, sort of”.  She explained it and I heard it, thus:

While we were grooving, her divorce was only a collection of fortnights away. The officializing papers only needed to be signed, exempting all the nit picks that didn’t have to be brought to a closed clump in our glorious original one of thirteen colony’s laws for a legal joining to end.  As soon as they were signed, like maybe somewhere on the short side of a week, our relationship was flatulence in a hurricane.  Gone.

I’m standing there, in the doorway so I don’t get squished by falling debris, saying to myself, “Self, what in the name of Krishna just happened?” while Vishnu is laughing her multi armed blue butt into squiggly wrinkles saying, “Geez.  Are your glasses really that scratched?

Somebody had to get sucked up the relationship vacuum to fill that airless spot her ex left her in.  Who could she possibly bitch to. (not at).  Mom and Dad are so ‘told you so’ people.  Best friends listen to the stories she’s told 33-1/2 times before.  But a new guy steps in?  Aha!  Ears to hear all about the sob stories (yes, they can be legitimate).  Someone to lay next to you and give you what you probably didn’t have in your marriage but remembered that, once, you did.  She gets intimacy, passion, dates to the good places, a quiet dinner, all the jovial stuff a relating to each other experience should have.

And an unseen anchor chain cranks you right in.

Things are tough.  A divorce is stuck up with moving from Cape Cod to El Paso, Texas on the stress scale.  So the temp hired with emotional payments, to help her get through it, enrolls in an essential job, making it possible for her to nest and set up house while the cracked marriage is allowed to legally be split like the samurai’s watermelon.

Those of us who dumbly fall into these divorce made holes are subject to a crash course in relationship crashing.  Not yet able to be completely alone or without another insignificant significant other in the empty slot, she somehow needs to get puttied in.  And here we are.  So, chasing the rabbit, we fall, like Dodgeson’s little blonde girl in her quest for adventure, then out we pop, male chameleon calicos, insects in pupa form and psychotic queens be cursed.  No happy endings for us on this trip.

The recipient party, of course, does not suffer the same malevolent outcome however.  The housekeeper gets the house, and the benefits of the aspects of the relationship that maintained their sanity through the struggled part.  After doing your part, the party of the second part, becomes the party of the third part, which is not a part of much of anything.

Oh, I get it.

Duh!