It was supposed to be a simple trip to a friend's place, to grab the dining table that my said friend was giving it away due to relocation. Grab table, say thank you and drive home with the goods. But in the end, it ended up being a three day ordeal in trying to help my friend get rid of stuff in preparation to moving out of the country. Needless to say, that this took a hit on my sleeping patterns again.
The root cause of all of this basically boiled down to issues with (pseudo)-relationships and bad planning. But mainly the former. As I got to know more of the context that I was in, in trying to help my friend pack and get rid of stuff, the clearer it became to me that this "relationship" is going to be a rather toxic one if my friend decided to go ahead with it despite our numerous serious concerns about it. We got even more frustrated as we are stressing about the number of things that we have to do for our friend before flying back to the home country for the last time and I'm sure that internally we were all going to break down crying.
While talking it over dinner, some friends of mine aptly shut down any sort of venting lest it turns into something bitter. One in particular said, "We were all in that position before. Weren't we all stupid at one stage or another in a (potential) relationship?". And that made me think, not about the situation that spanned basically the entire week, but the people around me and relationships, both good and bad. Come to think of it, the ones who were at the dinner table all have stories of stupidity in relationships that resulted in train wrecks including yours truly. All of us, have been jaded at some stage to the advice of our friends and sometimes even to our own conscience. We've all gone through train wrecks and somehow we still survived. Because the longing of the affections from another is so strong that it blinds us.
There are people who have gone through their entire lives not knowing what is it like to be part of a train wreck, only acknowledging that relationships are hard but have no real sense of what a fallout might look like. And to that, I say that it is probably good that you have been spared from such things. Then there are the people who have sat in a train wreck, watch everything collide in slow motion, get a whiplash, tumble around and getting injured. Whether you live or you die depends on what happens next. The ones who crawl out, injured and all, understanding what went wrong are the ones who come out wiser. The people at the dining table are part of that group. There is a certain club you join when you know that you have burned yourself and knowing not to do that again. The ones who don't, live to make the same mistakes and with increasing callousness. These are the people who will eventually cause the train wrecks.
Of late, the new friends that I have gotten to know of, all fall in the second group. And you know, that gave me enormous comfort. We have seen the scars and now we have all come out with elevated levels of EQ. This to me, is reality. None of that love at first sight or even first love stuff, though that sometimes happen. Love is a battlefield. I thank God for friends who are more of the S and F side of Myer-Briggs, like the guys at the table, at times like this. Helps bring a lot of order and rationale to something as complicated as relationships. We tend to say things like "I deserve better than this", like the affection of another needs to be held up against some moral standard whether it is your own or an unspoken set of rules, when in reality we are no better if you boil it down. The faster you realise this, with the help of others who have gone through train wrecks, sometimes multiple ones, the better you'd be if/when someone else walks in and suddenly disrupts your life for the better.
Everyone should know the ugliness of relationships gone sour and not shy away from it but to confront it and overcome it with a love that comes with such purity that it cannot come from our own standards. I wish more people are like that.
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People are getting married and having babies left, right and centre according to the Book of Face. And way too many pictures of that. Time to counter that with pictures of corgis of my own. Now where can I get one?
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