“You are a reflection of me and I of you”, I’ve heard people in relationships throw this phrase around for ages now and I guess I’ve only ever partially agreed with the notion. Well partially until recently.
So the actions of your significant other say something about you? What she posts on IG ,and what he likes on IG says something about your relationship? She’s too provocative she thotty, he likes something risqué he’s thirsty or perverted? All of this some how having some bearing on your relationship? I really don’t know what I’m trying to get at here because the more I write, the more questions I have… It’s like a circular reference error on Excel.
Okay, I think I know what the point of this should be. Do we value how the outside world perceives our relationships so much that we are willing to alter our behaviors to save face? I’ve witnessed both ends of the spectrum – people so “secure” in their relationships that they both do as they please, and others where everything has to be so calculated and considered because they just never know how the other will react to how their partners actions and how the world perceives them.
Now surely if we go by the old ullage that a relationship is between the two in it then this wouldn’t really be a thing. Clearly the more interconnected we become, the more people “involved” in our relationships. I’ve seen gents get into trouble for double tapping the wrong honey’s picture, and ladies get slated by their dudes for posting something, shall we just call revealing…
The Girl In The Hat
To this day she says she was having a bad hair day, I thought she looked amazing and although our interaction was short because, to be honest, I have no game outside of written word, an insatiable desire within me had been ignited and I knew that I needed to find her.
Call me a stalker but I trolled the Internet for hours in hopes that I would find her, I had no name all I could remember was “the girl in the hat”. The image of this angelic figure was burnt into my retina and as though not finding her would bring about the apocalypse, the search continued. Similar to only what I would equate to possession i rummaged through Facebook with intent and focus that would make me a billionaire if I applied it everyday. All jokes aside the elation that consumed me upon the discovery of her Facebook account is immeasurable, not knowing what would happen next I proceeded to wordsmith the perfect message. The words just came to me as if the script had been written before and I was simply reciting the words of another. Anxiety enveloped me as I waited for her response. It came. It came in the simplest of words and that my friends was the day I fell for “the girl in the hat”.
The Reacher & The Settler
Being in a relationship despite past evidence that they are doomed to
fail is a display of faith and optimism and since there is very little
logic to this it could be seen as what Einstein defined as insanity.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about so here it goes. We have
always heard people talking about “leagues” & “lanes” and how you need
to “play in yours” & “stick to yours” respectively, and then you get
the people who believe that there is no such thing as a girl or guy
that is out of your league and we could call them delusional but I
feel like there is some merit to that theory and the justification is
pretty simple.
Have you ever heard of the Reacher & Settler theory? I first
encountered this theory on an episode of How I Met Your Mother (and to
be perfectly honest Barney Stinson presented a multitude of valid
life/relationship theories #JustSaying). So basically what the theory
states is as follows, in every relationship you have that overly
ambitious person who landed their white whale (the reacher) and
another person who could probably do better in terms of their chosen
partner (the settler). Now initially I thought that this only applied
to physical appearances but the more I observed relationships around
me the more I noticed that there is more to it, you now also have a
person who is more emotionally invested in a relationship and that
same person is willing to go to the ends of the earth to make the
relationship work. But we’ve all seen this, or even worse experienced
it, when the one person has all but given up on the something they
clearly didn’t value and the other person desperately clambering in an
attempt to revive the final spark of a dying flame.
I find it baffling that this has become a norm. Some or other relationship adviser says that “Ten years from now,
make sure you can say that you CHOSE your life, you didn’t SETTLE for
it.” And that’s exactly how we should live, as a people’s we are spoilt with
freedom, choice and a plethora of options so mediocrity shouldn’t
never make the consideration set.
You see for me there is a fundamental difference in settling and
settling down. In settling you accept that 6/10 relationship in fear
that you will never find that 10/10 and that the 6 is better than
nothing, that is the security of mediocrity. And then there’s settling
down where you have both acknowledged each other’s compatibility,
flaws and somehow they seem to compliment each other creating that ever elusive, for lack of a better term, “oneness”. I quoted it in a previous post and I’m going to quote it again “if you don’t know what you want, you’ll never find it. And if you don’t know what you deserve, you’ll always settle for less”.
Ladies… And I guess gentlemen go out there and get what you deserve, go out there, and to be real rather be perceived as a reacher than a settler regardless of the actual goings on.
Bitch, They Ain’t Talkin Bout Me
Behavioural theories have proven time and time again that behaviour is taught through a particular action being either accepted and therefore reinforced or discouraged and therefore shunned upon. “The easiest thing for a person is to accept everything as it is and adjust with everyone in the surroundings by sacrificing or compromising originality” (Anuj Somany), this encapsulates my view on the perpetuation of the patriarchal superiority complex that young males of the 21st century have had instilled in them.
As though we operate with the underdeveloped intellect of the Neanderthal we as a society have reduced woman to objects for our viewing pleasure. We’ve seen commentary on our social media platforms on accounts like @PostBadBitches @CutieCentral_ZA and my personal favourite @DJZeeti, where woman chasing twelebdom are paraded to the masses in search of affirmation and acceptance. What interests me the most with all of this is the development of, what I guess can only be described as a female misogyny. In urban culture we call it “hating” and it is abundant among woman, “bitch ain’t even that pretty”, this in particular strikes me as a very male centric response but this is how our women are talking about each other. And as the female masses watch on their reaction, very similar to that of woman regarding the reference of “bad bitches” in hip hop, is that they aren’t talking about me and because of that I shouldn’t be offended.
I said it before and I am going to say it again, behaviour is taught! “It’s only twitter” they say but as long as woman make the degradation of their own a norm we as men will never stop referring to women as “whores”, “hoes” and “bitches”. It’s not only the responsibility of the woman being portrayed and paraded but the gender as a whole, a simple example is this (based on something Suli Breaks said): if all woman encourage the belittling of the their own, then all men will believe it is acceptable; if some woman encourage the belittling of the their own, then some men will believe it is acceptable; if no woman encourage the belittling of the their own, then no men will believe it is acceptable.
At the end of the day the ability to change the worlds perception of one’s self starts with ones actions to alter this.
A Happy Ending: The Race Against Time
Why is it that we view relationship completely differently from how we view our careers? Hear me out. Would you ever stay along a career path where you are completely miserable? So why would you do that in a relationship?
We have developed a goal driven culture and now it seems that marriage has become the end goal! Comfort and routine have become the order of the day, more and more I see people having adopted this “better the devil I know than that I don’t” mentality which advocates monotony and in essence settling.
I cannot remember where I read this or who even said it but the words stuck with me, “if you don’t know what you want, you’ll never find it. And if you don’t know what you deserve, you’ll always settle for less” and this for more is the point, we all want the same thing, a happy ending but we give very little thought to what our happy ending actually is. I scroll through my twitter feed and realize how many of us have been brainwashed into believing a preconceived idea of the perfect relationship is.
Until we can sit and complete a deep introspection I feel that we will continue to settle because 9 times out of 10 the security right now entraps us in an infinite state of yearning, a yearning that cannot be satisfied until we free ourselves of the fear of loneliness, embrace the fact that we are individuals, accept that you will never get it right the first time and most importantly never, never ever settle for less than you KNOW you deserve.
Be selfish because no one deserves happiness more than you!
An Affair With The Darkness
The darkness is my refuge, the place where nothing seems to matter. The place where because the world cannot see so it seems easier to hide.
It’s the dark void where emotion matters very little, if at all. Sorrow, despair and disappointment assimilate into the black hole and culminate in nothing.
I have an affair with the darkness, but it’s a one way relationship based only on the comfort I find in her embrace. She will never judge nor will she listen, she needs no explanation but offers no solution. You see the beauty in the darkness is that you wallow so much in the misery she has convinced you to be true that by the morn you escape with enough sanity to fake it through the day and you take solace in her imminent return.
No Point Really
This is more of a thought more than anything else, but a lot of people look at my life and because it seems to have gone to plan I have been told that I am “favoured” but a series of recent disappointment would suggest otherwise.
So were always told “if you work hard you will be rewarded in due course” but then we were also told “if it’s meant to be it will be”. So what I’m pondering right now is the role of hard work and the role, on the opposite side, of “fate” and favour.
We live in a society that drives a high performance culture where the best of the best excel but then there are those anomalies, those people who as if by some divine intervention just get ahead. An old friend of always says to me “we all need someone to take a chance on us”. I guess in the same way a Richard Branson took a chance on the Virgin brand, we need someone to believe in us too.
However my previous point represents favour and if you like, “fate”, and understandably we need those breaks but the more I think about it the more I don’t see a place where hard work is appreciated in the same way it was previously. How often does it happen that you’ve been to an interview where you know that not only did your credentials meet the requirements but exceed them, where you know you impressed the panel but by some dumb luck you aren’t appointed simply because even before this interview process began someone had been earmarked (favoured) for the role, and the interviews were just a tick box, just them following due process.
I have no point really, it’s just a thought.
The C3PO Theory
So many people have said so much about this recently but let me have my say because it seems, the more we progress the more we recess and the more emotionally detached we become. These are the glory days for the digital age and it is only the beginning.
The working class of yesteryear read newspapers on the bus, this was their 20 minutes of solitude in a day and therefore not necessarily anti-social.
We are the generation where the average person spends almost 90 minutes of their day on a social network and this doesn’t take into account the other 22.5 hours we spend on iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber, Mxit (yes, MXIT), BBM, I think you get the picture.
We are now a generation of people who can say “I miss you” but not really mean it but we say anyway only because it’s polite, we can say “I love you” and never have to prove it and we can say “I’m sorry” with the utmost sincerity (smiley face, smiley face, rose, rose, kiss) but only have said it to move past it.
The generation of people who believe a text is good enough. When you’re dating someone and they can come out and tell you with a straight face that “I prefer texts to phone calls”, I’m guilty of it myself and I know why. I can think and rethink, I can wordsmith my texts to illicit the desired response but the beauty in conversation lies in how candid and impulsive our responses are, the glitter in her eye when you humorously offend her and the side eye and smirk she gives you for that perfectly delivered sarcasm.
There are probably merits to social media in a relationship, 100 moments for our 100 days together and such, but at this rate we will breed a world of Sheldon Cooper’s, social retards who can never truly appreciate or value our human interactions.
The Self Destructive Individual
Isn’t it interesting how so often we feel we don’t deserve happiness? Our approach to life then warped because a good thing cannot last forever and rather than see it through we want to rush to the unhappy ending.
A case in point, the unfaithful partner. The healthy human being seeks companionship and a confidant, and these usually present themselves in the form of a member of the opposite sex. But yet we find that more and more we can no longer be satisfied with just one, we joke about main chicks and side chicks but the reality is that we can do that because our societal culture has deteriorated to a point where even though you know better, you just don’t do better.
You find your Miss. Right/ Mr. Right and it fast progresses into something real, something that could be forever, but as the self destructive individuals we are, we will find ways to chip away at that beautiful thing we’ve built. It’s the great escape from Alcatraz. It’s not only the wondering eye but our genetic predisposition to expect the worst, in this vain I guess Joyce Oates said it best “Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.” and we now live these words.
Furthermore what I’m fascinated by is how we are no longer on the hunt for that quintessential fairy tale ending that we, now seemingly, foolishly believed in growing up. I’ve seen it myself and to be honest I’ve done it myself, fully aware of what my actions will result in, I will continue to push her away and by a twisted form of self denial I will only stop when she can no longer bare it because I am a self destructive individual.
My Thoughts In A Bucket 