R.
I won't stand between an adult and the consequences of his or her
actions. I believe that love requires compromise, but that compromise is
not the same as unilateral sacrifice. Also, I have no patience with
self-delusion since I believe it gets in the way of the process of getting to
know other people. These three things make me very unpopular.
Since I come from a family of drama queens (and kings) but have little
appetite for drama myself, I learned early that many people mess up their own
lives in order to get attention. What was less obvious was the extent to
which normal people can be drawn into codependency. There's a certain
feeling of power that comes from helping and rescuing others, but it's an
ultimately unsatisfying process because the recipients of the help never learn
to help themselves. Eventually I stopped trying to structure my life
around the needs of others, because "need" is one of those things that expands
to consume other people's available resources.
For two or more people to get along with each other, there has to be
compromise. But to many people "compromise" means selecting a few
unimportant things to give up while asking the other person to sacrifice what is
important to him or her. The result is that the person asking for
"compromise" gets nearly everything he or she wants, on his or her own terms,
while the other person puts forth all the effort required to make a relationship
work. A request for "compromise", therefore, is often a concealed
ultimatum. This state of affairs is not acceptable to me, so when a
discussion gets around to "compromise" I make sure that both sides are
sacrificing in equal proportion. As soon as I realize a friendship or
relationship has become a one-way street, I end it.
Having spent so many years getting to know myself, I have little patience
with people who insist on living in bubbles of self-delusion. Certainly
there are parts of my lifestyle I could improve (and that are scheduled to
receive more effort after my immediate priorities are taken care of), but I
don't try to lie to myself or others by pretending the issues don't exist, or
that I'm somehow struggling with them or putting serious effort into fixing
them. This means that when a person says they're "gonna" go back to
school, or take a second job, or do something to improve their lives, I expect
them to do it instead of sitting around whining about how hard it is. I
have heard nearly every "it's not my fault" excuse in the book. So I tend
to call people on lame excuses, delusions, or self-inflicted problems. You
could call this a process of assigning blame. While I am always willing to
accept responsibility, accountability, and (occasionally) blame for the things I
actually influence or control, I do not accept responsibility for things that
are outside my realistic control.
This attitude helps me to steer clear of codependent relationships.
But my lack of willingness to engage in a dysfunctional or codependent
relationship means that I often have to cut off friends or loved ones who are
more committed to their own delusion or dysfunction than they are to a
connection with me.
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