"Can you imagine all that a hotel bed has been through?" - @Cammama (on twitter...Ms. Mace if you're nasty 0_o)
And I thought....what says the range of experience better than this?
Not a damn thing really. We've been fucked, We've fucked.....Then what? We change the sheets of course. Thats our life, the hotel bed. The linen our traits..ever changing, wrinkle...unwrinkle...but the bed..strong, soft..firm....or flightly...our core.
Experience that. Make yourself essential even as those come passing through.
“Hello, Mellow, I know it’s hard to love an ordinary fellow, especially when he’s yellow, but we gel like jello, bass and treble” – Blu from ‘Melo’
A caterpillar and a butterfly share one similarity outside of being the same animal, the complexity of their colors. I’m a butterfly, an understatement in a past that was severely dependent on social status as value. As with most situations I’ve lived through or descriptions I’ve found myself abiding to, I learned something important about operating life. In this instance I learned as Harville Hendrix, author of “Getting the Love You Want” quotes Walt Whitman in the acknowledgments of his book as saying that “I contain multitudes.” Stealthily I’ve learned this myself in the last few months I’ve embarked on my relationship with my girlfriend. It’s been three months plus since the word love began floating around
Connection, a basic C term in comparison to the five C’s of Marital Success (Communication, Commitment, Caring, Compliments, and Creativity) learned in lecture conducted by Lynn is the initial C term that made this relationship official. If we’re happy we’re happy no? We share a term 90, representative of the 90 percent of similarities we share (and discover on happenstance, never in search). I think this natural (chemical? spiritual?) connection is the basis of the bones in our relationship. Bones though, are not muscles. Our muscles provide strength and we use strength to move. As I write this, I was reminded that one late night I said the 10 percent makes us what we are. Our opposites are our strengths, not many, one’s that bind not strain. One strength of mine is I’m extremely patient, she can be impatient when a clear understanding doesn’t await upon entry of the situation. I have the flaw of being free-spirited (the best description of this is the main character in my favorite book “The Verificationist”by Donald Antrim who tends to lift and float forming his perception of life) to a fault leading to more than a few occasions when I’ve dug a hole where only such a responsible hand as hers can help me up. According to the ‘Becoming Aware’ text book accepting a person is a major factor in developing a close relationship. Our differences are accepted, as differences different than flaws, and this sparks my personal definition of commitment (by far the most difficult of Robert Sternberg’s definition of Consummate Love [the ideal form of love in his Triangular Model of Love] for both of us to achieve). Commitment is not only accepting yourself and your partner, but the willingness to be a part of their differences as loyally as you are when dealing with their similarities. The text book describes commitment as a point between the two when “a couple agrees to depend on each other for the satisfaction of important needs.” In our relationship, I have learned you must also remember the reflection of this which is to be independent enough of self to allow your partner to supply satisfaction to those needs. Both the text book and “Getting The Love You Want” as well as class lectures identify the philosophy that we choose our mates based on their ability to strengthen our offspring. This would also be an important reason to embrace our differences within one another.
I’m not a believer that hardship makes people stronger, but I do think that too much of certain things can make them weaker. Strong people can be distracted by things that come too easy. Maintaining a career nowadays is extraordinarily complicated, even if you’re just doing your work and showing up for required occasions. You can waste an amazing amount of energy, time and goodwill by chasing after stuff that’s not worth chasing after. Really wise artists know how to make dramatic appearances and how to make dramatic disappearances. – Robert Storr
Listening is part of communication, but I never really understood the difference between listening and hearing until a few years ago. To hear is simply to receive the sound, to listen requires attention. Both of us being psych majors, passionate about the field, listening has been one of the more effortless of tasks in our relationship. “Getting the Love You Want” strongly suggests an activity called ‘The Couple’s Dialogue,’ the goal of this being to to “listen actively” and “understand and validate the point” of your partner’s views. This being natural between the two of us has solved every conflict of importance in the past (as well as compromise, a sign of maturity in a relationship). The text book describes listening fully with the word “attentive” bonding with what I learned before but also (documented as its highest form of listening) with the word “empathetic,” a strength we both share as well. Of course, there are times when listening and communication seems short. She avoids certain topics to keep joyous moods intact and I prefer to hold things in. These are gender differences in communication. I become avoidant, and in my personal situations seek to solve them as quickly as possible (one positive is that unlike most males I do not aim for solutions immediately when a woman wants me to listen, something I learned from being raised by women) where as she takes emotion into consideration before and during speech. The text book describes listening as the most important part of communication. Listening is the key to reality and dreams within our relationship.
“H. W. – So, what is it to really love?
J.-A. M. – To really love someone is to believe that by loving them you’ll get to a truth about yourself. We love the one that
harbours the response, or a response, to our question: ‘Who am I?’ “- Hanna Waar and Jacques-Alain Miller discussing love
Reality (reality in love) is the stage that you transform into once a relationship develops past initial infatuation. At the beginning of most relationships there is a time where the two partners in the couple feel a heightened sense of relativity to one another. In class Lynn discussed this phenomenon as being “OCD on cocaine” via the “chemistry of love.” I find that we enjoy the comfort of reality more. Just being comfortable with ourselves and one another is an ever growing process. According to the text book you grow into love. Dr. Hendrix states that the mate you choose has been shaping since you were born. Your “imago” is represented by those who shaped you, people who had a major influence on your being, conforming your search to a combination of someone who somewhat matches the traits of those influences as well as traits of repressed feelings and events. Our mates are most likely based on those who took the best care of us or those who we believed should’ve taken care of us to recreate that connection in ourselves. Our reality is that there will be continual conflict. Conflict leads to something more, as with other things in life (such as justice or equality) overcoming the conflict not the conflict itself is the source of strength.
Love is much like citrus. It’s sweet and strong and seasons life well but stings in open wounds. My girlfriend has had a troubled relationship with her father, one that has led to ‘relationship patterns’ in past relationships. She’s done a wonderful job not only being aware of the situation but communicating it to me and continually doing grief work dealing with that subject. Those are all steps suggested in class from Julie Bowden for breaking patterns in relationship. I have a sexual pattern in which my parents were extremely open sexually, and I’ve repeated it in every relationship (including my current one) I’ve ever been in. This has proved to not be a problem. Luckily there are no relationship patterns that cause a major rift in the relationship.
“‘If I love you, it’s because you’re loveable. I’m the one that loves, but you’re also mixed up in this, because there’s something in you that makes me love you. It’s reciprocal because there’s a to and fro: the love I have for you is the return effect of the cause of love that you are for me. So, you’re implicated. My love for you isn’t just my affair, it’s yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don’t know.’ This doesn’t guarantee in the least that the love of one will be responded to by the love of the other: when that happens it’s always of the order of a miracle, it’s not calculable in advance. “- Jacques-Alain Miller
Being open and accepting on love is a 180 from being open and accepting of self. This involves letting someone into even the deepest parts of you. To be able to be this open you need emotional intelligence. The text book describes emotional intelligence as the ability to acknowledge, control, and express your emotions. Also included in emotional intelligence is the aforementioned ability to understand and accurately handle others emotions as well as how you act in both cases. The times where we keep something in, or refrain from open expression when something comes up, is exactly when tension begins to build in our relationship. As soon as we discuss the issue we are met with the feeling of relief and the ability to move forth in the relationship. There are ways to avoid having to repress emotions in current relationships, a red flag that the relationship may not be worth pursuing (this makes sense being that many of our relationships are formed through fulfilling some need in the past that we feel we’re missing). Learning to control your own feelings is key in keeping your partner happy, do not expect them to always have a solution to your problem because that puts an unnatural pressure on anyway. A successful relationship only exists when both partners’ levels of maturity and emotional intelligence are close enough to equal to not tip a scale.
Something new that has developed in this relationship is the willingness to accept the other’s efforts of creativity in terms of rewarding the other partner as well as taking a genuine interest in the passions of the partner (regardless of prior experience on the subject). The text book goes into detail about how once you enter the reality stage of your relationship then you start to be impacted by troubles that arise such as money or jealousy. A great way to help get minds off of stress activators and help keep the love strong is to embrace these techniques that soak in our creative depths. In “Getting the Love You Want,” Dr. Hendrix mentions two exercises that magnify creativity as a source of joy in a relationship. The Surprise list finds ways to plan unplanned fun, come up with creative ways to have fun with your partner without letting them know in advance. This is a time where you can showcase your knowledge of your partner by coming up with activities you know they’ll enjoy without them having to suggest the activities themselves. The Fun List takes both partners making a list, and regardless of what’s on either list, tryout each item weekly. I think both ways are excellent options to discover new activities to enjoy together.
Being in a relationship has helped me progress into another level of thinking, one less selfish and in a way more selfish. In economics, a risk has to have positives that outweigh the negatives in order to be considered worth taking. When entering a relationship you take a risk, think about your happiness. My happiness by far surpasses any problem we’ve ever encountered. Think of the ways to increase happiness as told on pg. 70 of the Psych workbook: Don’t run after it (if you’re going to be happy, you won’t have to chase it), Positive attitude, let go of the past, and gratitude are the ones that stuck out most to me. I find that all of the suggestions seem simple, like old news in this relationship, that’s something that personally increases my happiness. No one can make a relationship perfect or perfect a relationship, but she makes me feel like I’ve accomplished both.
Sources:
1.Blu, Quote, ‘Melo’, from the album HerFavColo(u)r
Take flight from me? Which....by all means, is vastly different from...take flight With me. Today was interesting.....learned a lot...was hoping to laze and share it elsewhere ...next time I guess. Even when learning was wilderness in my night, action was active...I laughed at the word peehole a few hours ago (everything is Not a Freudian slip...I really did mean peephole...), had an intellectual discussion outside that led to taco beds and Philadelphia...(Reference, Call back...nvm...y'all wouldnt get that joke lol), found out el homito The Werd will be abducting minds all 09-2010, made a couple promises...which I dont do, my ex has a new boyfriend...lol, he's interesting to my knowledge, figured out this magazine business, owe a few people a few serious talks....the city my dad's in is flooding and I cant get in touch with him?....working like a slave yo....nothing new there lol......Huntsville International aint come out unfortunately, anyway...new post are coming I swear. Bare with.
Experience that. 
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