“The Beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly
themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only
the reflection of ourselves we find in them. “
- Thomas
Merton
This man has put it in a beautiful way. I totally agree with
these words. There is actually more to it. This statement is true for every
kind of relationship.
We meet a stranger (In train, bus ….) and find him (her)
very helpful. So we start being friendly with them. The moment they try to do
the same, an alarm rises instantaneously. “Is he trying to be over friendly?”, “Is
she trying to exploit my resources?”,” Is he flirting?”,” Is she acting?”,” Is
she saying that just to feel included? “, “Gosh! He is different. Not what I
thought he would be? “, “Oh my god! That’s not what I expected from her. Maybe
I should step back and cool it off. “. Our Habits and the nature of meeting also play
a great influence in it. We create our
own impression of how we want that person to be. Any reaction, text, chat
response deviating from it makes us ponder over it and rethink things through.
We set our own expectations with every person we want to get to know further.
These expectations are totally based on our own characteristics. I experienced
this personally. I never share my personal
routine with “not so close” people. The
other day when a recently acquainted friend of mine shared theirs with me, I
was taken aback. I couldn’t decide if it
was for good or bad.
The indecision when things don’t happen the way we wanted it
to, shows how much we are addicted to having things our way. Society could be blamed as a root cause for
it. It has thought us a stereotypical way of how things have to be. Or rather
we have created our own versions of how we want things to be from our
learning’s from this society. We set our benchmarks and cover everything we do
around it. Differentiation between good
and bad has always been nurtured into us. We have to decide and classify every
thought, relationship and action in to the good or bad categories. It doesn’t
stop there. We need constant indications and proofs to justify our own
classification. We keep looking for things amiss to redo our
classification. We are less exposed to
the grey area – where we play the field and get to know better and then decide.
No two humans can be of equal wavelength. What one mean when
he/she say “we two are of equal wavelength and we have a great rapport” is “I
have imposed my characteristics on him/her and he/she has accustomed to it
approvingly well. Hence we have built a good rapport” or that he /she has truly
understood the meaning of the above quote and is from Utopia.
Can this be changed? I don’t think so. Its in our blood to
set expectations and to classify things. But would this change be for the
better? Definitely. If a relationship is based on what we want the other person
to be, then that relationship is never going to giving us satisfaction (Unless
the other person turns into us with all our negative characters removed. Oh Yes!
These should be both addition and removal). This greedy nature will eventually
vain out and that’s when the break happens.
To be continued!
