Why can’t you get a simple thing right?

Today I truly understand the gravity and hurt that one can inflict just by making this remark –

“Why can’t you get a simple thing right?”

How did I come to this realization? It has happened to me.

Sure, the person did not say it to my face. But she insinuated it. Her very words were –

“How come there are corrections so often.

I think this year I have the most corrections compared to my past 6-7 years in XXX.”

When you hear remarks like this, you feel belittled. You feel that anything else you have ever done right had been for naught, and whatever you do wrong is so heavily scrutinised and penalised. And this is also whether or not it was even all your fault. No one cares. You screw up, you’re worthless. Are people not allowed mistakes anymore? Or perhaps people who make these comments happen to be frustrated and are simply taking it out on you? Whatever it is, it demonstrates a lack of compassion.

After today, I realized that it is very hurtful. All those time we complain about the goods and services we pay for, and we often wonder why people can’t do what their supposed to do properly; especially when it’s their core task, or perhaps even the most minute task in their list of to-dos. The answer could be very simple… the circumstances that caused it were not favourable.

Hence, I shall try to be more compassionate in future. Rather than accusing people for not 'putting their backs into it', I will endeavor to understand how the situation came about, give them the due patience to correct the problem, and refrain from making such remarks. But if I do come to realize that they are willfully committing mistakes or negligence, then I guess I’ll need to take some action, wouldn’t I? ^_^

The Honeymoon's Over?

At some point in time, all romantic relationships wind down a little, and it signifies what people call the end of the ‘honeymoon period’. The undying urge to see each other, be with each other and talk for hours has diminished. And both parties are supposed to take comfort in knowing that while all things are reduced, it does not signify a deterioration of the relationship.

But sometimes, we have an issue of onlookers and some people with ‘well-intentions’ offering you feedback. Feedback like, “Oh, the first 6 months are supposed to be the sweetest.” Or even, “You boyfriend should do this for you still. It’s too soon to wanna stop.” While they were indeed sincerely giving well-meant opinions based on their experiences, we gotta remember the key word will always be “their experiences”. When these words stir up insecurities within you, you have got to remember that, it’s all about their experiences, and nothing to do with what you are experiencing.

Each relationship has a different speed of development, whether it is due to the characters of the couple, or circumstances. Hence, never judge this relationship in relation to other relationships. Sit down and think about the way your relationship had developed, and remind yourself of all the milestones you have achieved together so far. But in any case, the best thing you can do is to discuss it.

Sometimes, this happens when either party has become burnt out, and needs to reduce efforts. Sometimes it happens because either party has gotten comfortable enough to not require so much contact to feel involved in the relationship. Whatever the reason is, it will be good to discuss the situation and assure the more active party that the relationship is not deteriorating. While contact may have been reduced, it doesn’t mean they are not being thought of or cared about. Try to come to a middle ground or even discuss how the active party can be helped to be transitioned into a ‘slow-down’ state. Once this effort is made, the situation will have a chance of calming down and the relationship can proceed in peace.

To assume, is one of human’s most common mistakes. When you assume the other person understands, or even they know you still care for or love them, it’s creating opportunity for misunderstanding to occur. I'd like to call it, 'assumption begets assumption'. If you assume they know you care, they may assume you don't really care. So some things do need to be said. For the sake of clarity and making sure all bases are covered, you need to be vocal about it so that the other party will have no chance to feel insecure by a sudden or even gradual change in your attitude.

While each person is ultimately responsible for handling their own insecurities, we should still do our best to help the person we love or care for to feel better so that they can be encouraged to overcome it. This is by no means coddling the person. Encouragement is the best thing you can give anyone feeling negative. They are seeds to help a person start growing positive thoughts.

Open, honest and willing communication can solve a lot of problems. So if we take the time to air our feelings in an honest and caring manner, we would eventually come to understand each other better, and allow the relationship to grow :)

Love is a choice

I have just completed reading Dr. Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages. I realised I should’ve bought the one for singles, but I guess I can just get to that another time. For now, I would just like to share what I have learned from the book.

One of the key ideas that I have learned is:

“Love is a choice. We can request love, but we cannot demand love.”

For most people, it is very instinctive to demand love. Even for me. I have demanded love for a very long time. Probably because I had strict and demanding parents, demanding teachers, and in general… society simply demands that we do certain things, and behave in certain ways. I’ll get into the ideas of society and family after I finish Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, but meanwhile, let’s talk about how we demand for love in our lives.

We are taught to request for favours, request for service and request for assistance. But no one in our lives has taught us that even love had to be requested. We grew up thinking that love is a natural progression. That love was a given when you were in a family, friendship or relationship. We always think, “Isn’t it natural that he/she would love me?” In a more negative state of mind, we think, “Why does he/she not love me?” or "If he/she loved me, he/she would/would not do this." If this is the state of mind we are in, we are more or less already taking love for granted.

A lot of people tell me, if a person loves you, he would know what to do to please you. That would be true, if he knew what my love language was. Because if he was speaking to me in his love language, and we happened to not share the same love language, I would not perceive whatever he was doing as an act of love. I would probably acknowledge, “Well, yes, he does these things for me.” But I may fail to appreciate that it is an expression of love from him. I’m not about to start writing about the 5 love languages for fear I would misinterpret or misrepresent the concept. So I hope those who read this will pick up the book and read it. I do believe it helps us learn how to love better.

Let’s go back to the point, ‘Love is a choice.’ I have learned that whether a person chooses to express love to you in the way that you need him/her to, it is solely his/her choice. We can give the person pointers, by requesting how we would like to be loved, but at the end of the day, it is the person’s choice to comply, or to continue going about it using their own method. But if we were to continuously demand them to change their methods for us; they may possibly begin to be resistant to our ideas because they feel we are imposing our methods on them.

This brings me to the next idea:

"Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself."

Of course this is not to say that you are selfish when you perform acts of love because you want them to love you back. Perhaps most of the time we are simply misguided by the simple ideas of cause and effect that we are so accustomed to. Of course we will still get upset and angry when we feel our efforts have been for nought because the ones we loved did not show love and appreciation or react the way we hoped they would. It is human for us to feel this way, but we can learn to better deal with our disappointments.

We need to learn what is usually deemed as ‘unconditional love’. This doesn’t mean we should allow someone to abuse, disrespect, disregard, or even belittle us just because they have the ‘upper hand’ of having us love them unconditionally. If you are in love with a person who constantly does these negative things to you, then you may need to really examine why this is happening and possibly seek help. Otherwise, what ‘unconditional love’ requires is that we seek to first love them in the way we know that they may want to be loved. Our goal is to fulfil them, and make them feel truly loved by us, simply because we want what’s best for them, and we want them to be happy. We will soon see that if they truly feel loved by us, acts of appreciation from them will soon follow. If they feel loved, they will eventually be inclined to love us back, and even make the effort to comply with our requests for love and start learning how we would like to be loved.

But we should not be disheartened if our actions did not result in swift, positive results, or even when it’s not working at all. We may be simply speaking the wrong love language to them, or perhaps they need a bit more time to come around. True love and commitment requires us to keep going, to keep trying until we succeed in making the person we love feel loved. So in the spirit of love, we should not rush things, and patiently continue to love them till the day they become willing to love us in the way we hope they would.

Lastly, it’s a lot about faith in love that keeps us going. We need to have faith that the one we love does love us in return, and perhaps they just don’t know how, or cannot be accustomed to the way we need to be loved. So have faith in their love, and have faith that they will come to love you back in the way you need to be loved, in the way that makes you happiest.

Are some things better left unsaid?

Every single day, we humans communicate to get by in our lives. Asking for directions, requesting a service, discussion at work and even greeting people we meet. But are there times, where there are things better left unsaid? If you refrain from speaking your thoughts, would it result in a breakdown in communication?

I am by nature, a communicative person. I love speaking to people, and I appreciate it greatly when people reciprocate. But there are those times where you feel that what you are about to say may:

1.       Upset the person

2.       Fall on deaf ears or be ignored

3.       Cause the opposite effect that you wish to have

Basically, the above sums up to the other person possibly not wanting to hear you out, or perhaps the words you have said did not strike a positive chord with them. But even if this is about to happen, should we forgo the communication, and just let the thought sit and fester in our minds? My answer, after my experiences, is ‘No’.

I have learned in my years that letting thoughts fester in your heart and mind is the worst way to go about things. First of all, it makes you unhappy, because the other person doesn’t know how you feel. Eventually, your unhappiness seeps out of your being, bit by bit, into your actions, you words, your expressions. You may not even mean or wish to communicate that unhappiness, but somehow it just finds a way to spread out and poison your whole being, and the result of this may probably be as bad as if you’d said it out in the first place.

Why do we hold back? Most of us are afraid of souring or damaging the relationship we have with the people around us. Hence, we keep things to ourselves because we think it would be best left unsaid. But as the process I mentioned above takes place. You will find that perhaps it would have been better to have just found a sincere and tactful way to communicate the thought to begin with, since you were going to ultimately end up souring the relationship with your sour attitude.

If someone was making you sad, hurting you or even putting you down way too often by being condescending and insensitive… you need to tell them. Everyone deserves respect, and a chance to explain their actions. If they have no good explanation, then you will know that you’d been worrying about losing something that you didn’t need to keep in the first place. Even in a professional setting, being forthright could mean making your days at the office much more bearable because you have set things right with certain people.

After all that’s being said, I think the key to effective communication is courage. Having the strength in you to believe that your loved one will understand your innermost feelings and having the courage to know when your feelings and opinions are not appreciated, which may bring you to a point where you need to reevaluate your relationships with the people you fail to communicate with.

As the above image suggests, the same applies to a professional setting too. Being suitably vocal in the workplace and for your career is important because being able to get your points across is important to ensure that you are understood, and you can perform your job well. Conquering personal barriers to become an effective communicator is a lifelong lesson. No one is born an effective communicator. We all learn by trial and error. The key is to not let the errors scare you from trying again until you find the best approach to get through to the intended party.

The final thing that we need to note when communicating any dreaded thoughts would be… to listen. Listen to what the other party has to say for themselves, about you. Why? Because at the end of the day, communication is a two-way process. When communication only happens in one direction, the other party deems it as… nagging.. imposing your opinions... :P Get your point across, and try to consider what they have to say too. If you can learn to do that effectively all the time, you will never have to hold back and keep anything to yourself ever again.

Of Disappointment & Heartaches

I'm writing this on behalf of myself and some stuff my friends are going through... and I'm thinking... we all need to read The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman.

So many of us, in so many occasions, have probably done something for someone we like, love, cherish, respect and care for... only to feel that they don't seem to feel the same about us. In return, we become depressed or upset, and we react in possibly the stupidest ways people can imagine. What does it bring us? Only humiliation, disappointment and heartache because we acted on that impulsive moment of dissatisfaction.

I can't count how many times I have done this in my entire life, with so many relationships... be they with my boyfriend, my friends or my family. When they don't react in the way I expect them to towards something I have done, I start to get depressed. I'd wonder why the person doesn't understand my intentions. I'd wonder why the person wouldn't react the way I wanted him/her to. I'd wonder why he/she is being mean to me. These feelings of depression sometimes escalate into resentment, and if I'm lucky... full-blown anger.

The worst thing a person can do is to try all means to get the expected reaction from the other party. This is where the humiliation I mentioned earlier starts to surface. You don't realise it, but you demean and humiliate yourself as you attempt again and again to get the attention and required reaction from the other party. And when you fail again after your N-th try, you may start thinking, "Oh my god... I've made such a fool of myself. The other person probably thinks I'm a psycho, nutcase, needy bitch, retard, etc." (insert any other description of a fool you prefer). Then you may start doing stuff that's supposed to 'redeem' you for your earlier bout of insanity. And the cycle continues until you regain your sanity and realise it's time to just S-T-O-P! Stop before you reach the point of no return... stop before you destroy everything you have. The silliest thing is that maybe, and you'll be damn lucky if this is true... the other person was not affected at all. They didn't even know what has happened nor do they know about the torment you've put yourself through because of them.

I just told a friend earlier "No point being disappointed in people who don't understand your true feelings and thoughts. Let them be..."

This is not to ask the person to write the other person off, but to understand that different people have different ways of expressing themselves to you. If the world actually understood that everyone has their way of expressing love, care and concern, I believe everyone would be much happier. I've been seeing a lot of writings of this topic as of late, so I'm also putting in my 2 cents worth on this issue.

It's a tough process... to understand that while your partner may not be into cuddling, it doesn't mean your partner doesn't want to be near you... to understand while a person you like always gives you full attention, it doesn't necessarily the person likes you the same way yet... to understand that while a person only checks in on you with short messages throughout the day to see if you're well, it doesn't mean the person doesn't care as much as a person who has long conversations with you all day long... to understand that while a person has sooo much to say to you, it doesn't mean that they want your attention 24/7 because they're needy. If all of us took the time to see the good things these people do for us, we may be able to downplay the things that don't seem to go right for us.

And for those 'unaffected people', it may be good to reflect on how you treat others and understand the impact you have on them. Maybe you need to try not to be too nice if you don't mean for the other person to mistake your niceness for liking? Maybe you need to be a bit more sensitive to the other person's feelings so that you don't say something callous when they need some comforting words from you? Maybe you need to speak less and speak of things that really matter so that your words will carry more weight, or so that the other person will pay more attention to what you want to convey?

I'm beginning to learn how to accept the good that people do for me, and discount and move on for the times they don't really react the way I want them to. Eventually, it's not about winning anymore, and if there is always tomorrow, there is always hope to try another day. Hehe! But... if you've managed to upgrade your mindset, you won't really care anymore if the person doesn't react exactly the way you want them to. Instead, you're just happy if they reacted at all. LOL! Some people may say this is being 'easily contented', but I will just call this 'counting your blessings', and not letting your dissatisfaction take you for a spin. You may realise much later that it was so petty, it wasn't worth the disappointment and heartache to begin with.

Good night people :)