Book Day 6: Everybody's an Expert and Nobody is Chill
Everybody wants to maintain their self-concept as a good person, who is doing a lot of things right. Nobody wants to read book about how to improve themselves or their interactions.
There can be a thing around not wanting to be somebody who *needs* help in certain areas, like sex, or communication, or self-identity, or self-love.
It is easier to say that if there is a problem, that the problem is your partner is not *chill* enough with what is going on.
But have you noticed that there are people who are much better at making people feel more chill around them than others? People who are a boss at a cafe who make everybody relaxed, play music, perform competently, customers are happy, money is coming in and is counted accurately, and then people who are the complete opposite? No music, micromanagement, overextended hours, sadness.
If you can believe that there are people who are better bosses in cafes than others, then you can believe that this trait of “getting people to be chill with things” is an actual trait and an actual skill that can be developed.
And so if your partner is not “chill” with something you can blame them. So many people in forums write stuff like, “I am reading all the books, listening to all the podcasts, working on myself, and it is not seeming like it makes any difference.” Probably the partner is an asshole and is not actually doing things to make the situation nice.
Look, if you are throwing a party, you are going to do things to make it nice for people. You will have a place for people to take off their shoes, so everything does not get dirty. You will have drinks to offer to people, so that they are not thirsty and can be their best selves. You will have entertainment. If they have to vent about their day, they get to do that for a bit.
I suspect that people are much better at doing this stuff for strangers, and for casual partners, than for their nesting partners or more serious partners.
There is an expectation that because the relationship is deeper, things can “just flow.” And if they aren’t “just flowing” something terrible and unfair is happening, rather than, the structures aren’t being put up for the flow to get released.
And then one or both parties get mad that “they are doing too much work” as they put effort into feeling more rather than building structures for the feelings to come out. And then they are sad that all of their feelings aren’t creating the results they are looking for.
It becomes a mess. I think if one of the parties isn’t into “doing the actual work to make things work,” what ends up happening is that the situation gets a lot harder, and a lot more work becomes necessary. Perhaps from the party willing to do the work, or other partners, or other friends, or family. But the situation is that it just ends up being a lot messier and a lot *more work* if one of the parties just has a philosophy that “more work == bad.”
And a lot of people have this philosophy. They believe that more work means they are flawed, that something unfair is about to happen to them, that they will be asked to do even more work at a random time, that the rewards for the work will never come.
The vice here is avarice.
Avarice, not jealousy, I believe tanks more relationships.
Here’s another example.
You have a fight about something.
Are you sad for 20 minutes, 2 hours, 4 hours, 10 hours, or 2 weeks?
Because that makes an enormous difference.
You can be two different couples, having the same quantity of fights about the exact same things, but the *time* you spend unhappy from the fight matters for how much those fights take over your life.
What matters from the fights is the resulting change, and how much it affects the things in your life.
There are some fights that *should* be longer, but *insisting* that there should be brooding fights because *conflict is good* is as bad as avoiding all fights because *conflict is bad.* There should be some amount of fighting because people should be expressing themselves, but then if you are somebody who starts fights, you should also be somebody who bothers to learn how to end fights, or how to make the fights take a good arc.
You shouldn’t start fights, and expect your partner to “make the fight good.” That is an unreasonable distribution of burdens.
Here are some images:
This one is a person in relationship to all the world’s knowledge. Notice that this person is confident in their own body of knowledge. It is a solid ball. But it is not letting much of the world’s knowledge *in.* There isn’t much of a permeable layer between their knowledge base and the world. Even though you can be an expert and know way more than other people, you still have much less knowledge inside of yourself compared to the entirety of the world’s knowledge.
Here, there is all moving clouds. There is updating, transformation, moving of information, but “what is outside and what is inside” is not clear. Where is the person? Some people in this mode can feel very expansive. Some people in this mode can feel very small, like they are invisible. It can be difficult to communicate with people.
Here, there is more movement between the outside world and the middle, but you can see that there is a defined body of knowledge in the middle, but it is sparkly and allows itself to get updated.
One aspect of “being good at fighting” is knowing what you might want. Another is knowing which fights you want to be having.
For example, one failure mode is being mad at one person, and taking it out on another. Or being mad at one person and recruiting another person to “help you” win that fight. That is, you are using one person’s energy, pulling it through yourself, and then through to another person. That can get pretty messy pretty quickly!