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[3/6] – The Loss, pt 2, Flying Solo
Current mood:  adored
Category: Life
Individualism:
As
noted by a single friend my age, when we were about 30, the gals he was
meeting all had a 'complete' life, job and house and more. No
room had been left for anyone else. I've long called this the
true negative message from Barbie – it's not about body image, it's
about lifestyle. A Barbie doll can have and be anything (as long
as you buy the right accessory kit!). 
Of course this doesn't only apply to girls and their dolls.
Working non-stop to advance yourself, to get to the next
externally-defined goal, can leave you perpetually anxious about
"making it", while never being content.
Many do get their own
nuclear family set-up, but that's it. The individual spouse
becomes the entire social, support, and romantic life. ONE PERSON
IS NOT ENOUGH to carry all your everyday emotional baggage (and adding
kids to the mix does not help!). How many people have you known
who got tight with a significant other, moved in together, and then the
both of them just disappeared?
Three of four years later, were they still together and happy?
Were any of them irrepairably estranged from their old friends?
I
pointed out once, after getting a 'just friends' speech, that a
friendship is more difficult to sustain than a romance. It's
practically a definition of a romance that one can take his or her
partner for granted to some extent. After a certain point,
there's a commitment that each person will be coming back to the
other. It's a given that those two people will be going out, or
staying in, together. Other arrangements are the exception.
But
your friends are not usually people with whom you have such a defined
relationship. Remember here that we're not talking about
soccer-mom type connections, where you might be in the same place on a
regular schedule, and chit-chat during the activity. We're
talking about people who have an old deep friendship between them,
which usually comes from many years of both trivial and substantial
interaction. These people know each other well enough to make
fair presumptions, like expecting to be included in a get-together, or
assuming it's ok to grab something from the fridge without asking.
It's
important that singles and couples have regular emotionally intimate
contact with other people. It's terribly easy to set up a routine
that does not include those other people. I say that the answer
is to make those other people routine!
You probably have a great
reserve of compassion, love, and patience. So what are you
*doing* with it? (And how do you recharge when that reserve is
tested?)
{on to part 4}
8:09 AM
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