Friday, October 14, 2011

Honesty

I have two personality traits that are in conflict with each other.  I am honest.  Very, very almost painfully honest.  If a cashier gives me back more change than I am due, I will bring it to her attention and return it. If you ask me what I think and you are in the group of people 1) that want to know the honest answer and 2) that I care about enough to give the honest answer, you will get the answer.

But that answer there is illustrative of the conflict and the second personality trait.  I am devious.  I am almost Lex Luthor devious.  I am not criminal.  I am not evil.  But I play a sort of mental chess with you based on how much I value you in my life, how much you seem to value the truth in communication, how emotionally you react to things, etc.

In my last relationship, my former girlfriend lamented that she wanted the relationship with me that I had with my closest male friend, in terms of intimacy, candor, and philosophical conversation.  What she did not know and I did not tell her was that she lost that chance not all that long after we started seeing each other.

If you are angry with me, I do not expect you to not show it.  But if you want to talk to me about what you are angry about, you have to be able to talk to me, not yell, scream, fight, etc.  And if you are in a place where you cannot do that, you have to possess enough adult restraint to know that, announce that, and revisit the topic when you can talk about it without throwing something at my head.

Well, early on in the relationship I "confessed" to something that I thought she would be displeased about.  She reacted very emotionally and while she said she wanted to talk about it, all talking about it in that moment did was make it worse.  She then stopped talking to me at all, the best decision of the whole skein, and then the issue was sort of glossed over and never resolved to my satisfaction.

But that is not the only way that I am devious and in (hopefully) my next post, I will enlighten you further.

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Billy Joel sings the title song today.

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