This morning, I was talking to Mike about a logistic issue with blogging, and I remembered something I used to tell my students during the many years in which I taught standardized test preparation classes: don’t get married to a problem. That is, don’t get caught up in that feeling that you’ve “come this far” and “invested this much” and now you have to stick it out to the bitter end.
In the standardized testing context, of course, that’s critical. It’s timed, and throwing good time after bad means losing other points down the road when time runs out. But I think it’s just as critical in life and, in particular, in relationships.
It’s a familiar concept to all of us, isn’t it? You fix a car once and don’t think anything of it. The second time, you’re getting frustrated, but you made that first investment…and by the time the third repair rolls around you’ve thrown a lot of money you could have put toward a new car into it, and you’re hesitant to “give up now”.
But there’s an amazing irony that kicks in when this concept is applied to relationships. It doesn’t necessarily serve to keep people in long-term, committed relationships when times get bad, but it seems to keep a lot of us on the path to bad relationships. In the early days, when the red flags are flying–when we haven’t been involved long enough to have any common obligations or strong foundations or common friends or any of the things that make it truly hard to separate–we don’t want to “give up too easily”. I don’t want to name any names, but I definitely have friends who work very hard at fixing relationships that were never good in the first place (which leaves me wondering what “fix” even means in that context).
This may sound cynical, but if you’ve been dating someone for a month or six weeks and have a bunch of stuff you need to “work on” and “fix” about your relationship, mightn’t that be a sign that this isn’t really the right relationship? That maybe the person you’re dating isn’t a good match for you or this isn’t the right time in her life to enter into a relationship or she’s a Complete Nutjob?
Isn’t it a little like deciding that you want a red dress, so going out and buying a blue one figuring that you might be able to bleach it and then if that works out you could dye it red? Or, more to the point, like spending more than you can afford and fighting another shopper to get your hands on a blue dress that you might be able to bleach and then might be able to dye red? What is it that makes us work so hard to hold on to exactly what we don’t want?
I wish you would have told me this last night. This morning was the honeymoon.
I think women more than men try to hold on and fix a relationship at its early stages, even when there are red flags. Most men I’ve encountered have an easier time letting go when things are new if they see red flags and tend to have more of a bolting mechanism in place it seems. Maybe women get caught up in their feelings more and want things to turn into a relationship faster- so they ignore those bad signs.
I think a bolting mechanism can sometimes be helpful to save yourself from a future of hard one-sided work. If a woman is wise enough to see the red flags and bolt without getting entangled in her emotions- kudos to her.
[...] was talking about earlier this week when I suggested that maybe a lot of us had a tendency to give new relationships more of a chance than they deserved. The effort to make it work moves into the foreground, [...]