Relationships

Today I’m thinking about relationships.

Specifically, I’m thinking about my own relationships and how I act in them. This brings me back to the questions of motivation that I started to address in an earlier blog. It brings me back to that same central set of questions that I never seem to be able to answer because I’m still afraid to ask the questions honestly.

I think I can generally be considered a good friend. I screw up a lot. My anxiety and anti-social tendencies can disappoint. People will ask me out, and I’ll decline, and their feelings will be justifiably hurt. But I’m always there when someone really needs me. I’m sort of the opposite of a fair weather friend. I’m the rescue friend: the one who may miss your wedding, but will sit on the phone with you for hours comforting you and listening while you cry when the honeymoon stage first meets its match.

Usually this is something I’m okay with. I get a complex about it sometimes because it’s sort of like being the Grim Reaper of friends, but for the most part I find that it’s really important to me to be in those critical moments. Among other things, I’m very good at it. When someone is down, I’m good at picking them back up.
I’m not good at being steady when things are going well. I pick too much. I project anxiety. Just like in my own mind, where everything is subject to constant analytical regurgitation, the people I’m closest to tend to find themselves under direct scrutiny.

On a vacation years ago, a friend told me that she found me hard to deal with over an extended period. She admitted that she had been reading me wrong. She had thought the fact that I was constantly asking questions and trying to find flaws in the answers she’d given me had been a personal attack. Eventually she realized that there was nothing personal involved. I ask questions because I want to know the answers and I question those answers because I’m seeking truth. She had felt that I was criticizing her; of course, I felt like I was just examining abstract questions.

This is a flaw in my personality. In my inner life, it makes me constantly uneasy. The unquenchable search for truth means that no dogma is ever safe. I can never feel self-assured about anything. It isn’t just doctrines or policy I struggle with, it’s motivations. No one’s motivations are as subject to scrutiny as my own, but once we’ve reached a certain level of closeness it spills over onto my closest friends as well.

Even in writing this, I sense a lack of integrity in my own writing. I don’t know that I am more into finding truth or simply asking “why?” I don’t know if my motivation is to discover “why” or to simply protest that things are the way that they are.

I am a natural-born extremist. Despite my own laziness, I can’t stand laziness. Despite my own inability to finish anything, I can’t tolerate loose ends. My personality thus shifts between overachievement and depression. I knowingly set the bar too high for anyone to reach and then I’m crushed because the bar is unreachable.

All of this adds up to my being a particularly lonely person. I tend to choose friends who are not challenges. Most of my friends are there for entertainment value. We do things that alleviate boredom and help assuage the loneliness over short periods. I’m never happy for long. Too much exposure to these friendships burn me out because they inhibit my hyper-analytical impulse.

The friends who do challenge get burned out on me quickly. It is impossible to stay happy around me for very long because I have so many deeply seated unhappiness issues. I can’t let simple things be. Every action, every inaction, every motivation or lack thereof, have to be run through my inner gamut of purity and no one ever passes that test, including me.

I am beginning to realize these cycles in myself. I am beginning to understand how lonely I feel and how that affects my behaviors. Pushing people away and manipulating them into closeness are two sides of the same coin, not opposing personality traits.

We are called to love others. To love others, we must see people as God sees them. As long as I see people through my own filter, I can never truly love them. My love will always be skewed because of my disordered motivations. My own self-destructive psyche will always do its best to preserve its own existence, or as a last result, to call the shots on its own destruction.

It is not enough to want to love people, we must love them. It is not enough to want to love God, we must love Him. To love involves more than simple words or affections. To love is to work, sacrificially, on behalf of the person we are loving. It is to strive to support them into becoming the individuals that God has designed them to be, not necessarily into becoming the people who would fill the emotional gaps in our own lives. It is to accept God as who He is, instead of trying to manipulate Him into accepting our self-justifications.