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I went to the dentist.
I got back in time to meet E. for lunch at the senior center. Nominally $6, E. had decided to pay for me since she invited me to join her (along with the rest of her FB friends, who are numerous), but in the end, the man running the kitchen knew her and we couldn’t convince him to take any money. Also, very accommodative of my allergies! I got a chicken wrap with a cucumber salad and some watermelon for dessert. Very yummy! It was nice to see E. again. We met a year ago March for the CPR class. I’m going to take the Narcan class she told me about that is coming up in September.
I had a belated, long, and multi-part phone convo with J. I’m going to try to get some thoughts down here, because I had a really big realization that is in retrospect utterly obvious but sure wasn’t _before_ I said it out loud. The basic idea is that a lot of relationships end because each person in the relationship just cannot see/feel/understand how the relationship feels to the other party or parties. Obviously, this is the annoying Big Misunderstanding plotline of endless romance novels, altho in the romance novels, they do eventually come to see things from each other’s perspective or a new shared perspective or whatever, often as a result of a conversation they are forced to have that they have both actively resisted for a variety of reasons. I don’t _like_ this kind of thing, so I prefer my romance novels to have something else being the primary driver of the plot, but I’ll absolutely tolerate it in low doses as a way to depict the Getting to Know Each Other process.
But in real life, this is so much more pervasive and has a lot fewer HEAs. Employers have a bunch of reasons to not be super up front with employees about discontent with the employee, and to instead launder it through a PIP or whatever. Employees as well — they don’t want to lose their job, so they’ll complain to everyone except the person responsible for whatever they are unhappy about. Parents dealing with recalcitrant or uncooperative or unmotivated kids are reluctant to tell the kids off, because they’ll just get even MORE recalcitrance or lack of motivation or self-destructive behavior or, possibly, worse. Kids dealing with unsympathetic parents whose values are at odds with them don’t want to be grounded, or have their phone taken away, or whatever, so they’ll conceal their sources of unhappiness out of fear of what the parent might visit upon them. And oh, boy, spouses.
There are a variety of ways to not get into this type of hole. One is to share a narrative, but you’d better _really_ share the narrative. If she married him because she’s a lesbian and she wasn’t raised to be okay with that, then as society evolves, maybe she comes to him and says, you know, I’m just so not interested in sex with men. I love you, I love our kids, but I really want to have a sexual relationship with a woman. And that’s probably not going to align with whatever narrative got them married and having kids together. Another way is to actually speak up when there is discontent and engage in negotiation. A lot of counseling is intended to help people do this, but it more or less requires all parties to _at the very least_ participate and only works really well if everyone is prepared to speak up unilaterally when discontent and pursue mutually satisfactory resolution — and not stop until reaching mutually satisfactory resolution.
Compatibility is clearly a major factor, altho I have no idea what magic goes on between people who detect and resolve each other’s discontent without having to “talk” about it. But if it works for you, that’s fantastic — if you ever figure out a way to teach it or to help people find the Others who can do it with them, boy, that’d be really nice to have available as a service.
I feel quite strongly that this belongs in Advice Book 2.
I got back in time to meet E. for lunch at the senior center. Nominally $6, E. had decided to pay for me since she invited me to join her (along with the rest of her FB friends, who are numerous), but in the end, the man running the kitchen knew her and we couldn’t convince him to take any money. Also, very accommodative of my allergies! I got a chicken wrap with a cucumber salad and some watermelon for dessert. Very yummy! It was nice to see E. again. We met a year ago March for the CPR class. I’m going to take the Narcan class she told me about that is coming up in September.
I had a belated, long, and multi-part phone convo with J. I’m going to try to get some thoughts down here, because I had a really big realization that is in retrospect utterly obvious but sure wasn’t _before_ I said it out loud. The basic idea is that a lot of relationships end because each person in the relationship just cannot see/feel/understand how the relationship feels to the other party or parties. Obviously, this is the annoying Big Misunderstanding plotline of endless romance novels, altho in the romance novels, they do eventually come to see things from each other’s perspective or a new shared perspective or whatever, often as a result of a conversation they are forced to have that they have both actively resisted for a variety of reasons. I don’t _like_ this kind of thing, so I prefer my romance novels to have something else being the primary driver of the plot, but I’ll absolutely tolerate it in low doses as a way to depict the Getting to Know Each Other process.
But in real life, this is so much more pervasive and has a lot fewer HEAs. Employers have a bunch of reasons to not be super up front with employees about discontent with the employee, and to instead launder it through a PIP or whatever. Employees as well — they don’t want to lose their job, so they’ll complain to everyone except the person responsible for whatever they are unhappy about. Parents dealing with recalcitrant or uncooperative or unmotivated kids are reluctant to tell the kids off, because they’ll just get even MORE recalcitrance or lack of motivation or self-destructive behavior or, possibly, worse. Kids dealing with unsympathetic parents whose values are at odds with them don’t want to be grounded, or have their phone taken away, or whatever, so they’ll conceal their sources of unhappiness out of fear of what the parent might visit upon them. And oh, boy, spouses.
There are a variety of ways to not get into this type of hole. One is to share a narrative, but you’d better _really_ share the narrative. If she married him because she’s a lesbian and she wasn’t raised to be okay with that, then as society evolves, maybe she comes to him and says, you know, I’m just so not interested in sex with men. I love you, I love our kids, but I really want to have a sexual relationship with a woman. And that’s probably not going to align with whatever narrative got them married and having kids together. Another way is to actually speak up when there is discontent and engage in negotiation. A lot of counseling is intended to help people do this, but it more or less requires all parties to _at the very least_ participate and only works really well if everyone is prepared to speak up unilaterally when discontent and pursue mutually satisfactory resolution — and not stop until reaching mutually satisfactory resolution.
Compatibility is clearly a major factor, altho I have no idea what magic goes on between people who detect and resolve each other’s discontent without having to “talk” about it. But if it works for you, that’s fantastic — if you ever figure out a way to teach it or to help people find the Others who can do it with them, boy, that’d be really nice to have available as a service.
I feel quite strongly that this belongs in Advice Book 2.