It’s Strange…

I’ve never seen the point of a diary. Though I’ve never known anybody who actually kept one, recording your thoughts in a journal that nobody is going to see other than you is wasted effort. Without other people to go over your thought process, the chances of you getting any kind of benefit out of it are slim to none. Blogs are different somehow. I like the idea that people can review my reasoning and see a part of me which is rarely exposed to anything other than a pixelated screen or very close friends. I dislike that I can’t see the number of people who’ve viewed my blog here (of course, it’s been about twelve hours since it sprang into existence, but I didn’t see it anywhere in the dashboard), but that’s something which I’ll learn to deal with or code a way around eventually. It’s not at all a pressing issue, and I like the customization options available with CSS in Blogger much better than anything I happened to see on Myspace. Yes, CSS is an utter waste for a single page. XHTML/DHTML could do the job, but then I can’t drag and drop elements (not that I envision that happening). I seem to be digressing.

The last two weeks or so have been dramatic. That’s an egregious understatement. A certain friend of mine has been desperately seeking love for the last… well, decade? Sure, he’s had a few relationships. Each of them has been “the girl he’s going to marry.” Needless to say, it hasn’t quite turned out that way. I find the entire notion of seeking love to be exuding desperation in the worst kind of way. Sure, if you happen to find it, that’s fantastic. I’ve been in love, I think. It’s a a difficult thing to define. The fairy-tale, Shakespearean ideal doesn’t mesh with reality. Love is not enough to maintain a relationship on its own. You have to be a decent human being, you have to have a modicum of compatibility, you need all the other things that make two people click. Everything which is necessary for a lasting friendship should also be there in a long-term relationship. You can’t blindly hope you’ll go the distance just because there happen to be feelings involved. Eventually, those will fade, or they won’t be enough anymore.

If I’m anything, I’m a good friend. I’ll be there for those I care about no matter what how hectic things in my life may be or how ludicrous I find their situation to be. That is what I do. The happiness of those close to me is paramount, and I don’t really understand why. It’s not particularly important. Now, I’m no paragon of wisdom in a relationship, nor of virtue. I’ve been cheated on and stayed. I’ve tried to make a long-distance relationship work against all odds (multiple times). I’ve been drunk for months at a time (when I wasn’t working). I’ve also cheated. I’ve ended long-term relationships for no real reason other than boredom, never looking back as their lives collapsed into the void I left behind. For a while, I really believed that the thrill of the chase was the best part of being in a relationship, and there was no reason to stay once that was over with. All this has, at least, made me a veritable font of advice on what not to do, and how to fix a relationship (as well as when it’s not worth it).

Be that as it may, I will work against all odds to keep them happy. Even if I think it’s a waste of time, I’ll give it a go for as long as it seems feasible. Yeah, it sometimes makes me feel like a fool. That’s the way it goes. I don’t generally get in the middle of things. I’ll give advice from the sidelines and hear them out on whatever their issues may be, but I don’t play mediator. I’m a good ear, or so people tell me. I’m easy to vent to, and I give worthwhile feedback. Sure, it may be difficult to imagine, since I have propensity for speaking, but stranger things have happened. In this case, I got involved. It’s not as if I didn’t already know that they’d been having problems for a long time, but I wasn’t ever worried until recently. Though I didn’t ever see her much, there was a bit of a rapport, so I thought I’d inquire as to the specifics of the situation.

What I heard back was shocking and slightly appalling. I’ve been an observer to a couple of his relationships. They weren’t good ones, by any means, but I had attributed that to unsavory qualities in his exes. I still would. This was different. The more I spoke with her, the clearer things became. As noted, I understand where she’s coming from. I know her situation, her priorities, his problems. However, I was oblivious to the particular circumstances of their relationship. After a short period of time in the beginning, he wanted to tell her that he loved her. I told him it was a mistake; I told him that he’d freak her out, and she’d run (with good reason given the briefness of their involvement). I was right, and he elected not to tell me. As time went on, fights over trivial things began to occur. His obstinate refusal to compromise (or take care of himself in the most basic fashion) ended things more than once. These were not the reasons he told me (in fact, he never gave me reasons). Things came to a head because he didn’t think it was reasonable to sacrifice anything in his life in order to begin one with her. Things got fixed for a little while, but soon collapsed again.

Regardless, the point of this is not to go over his mistakes and where he went wrong. He hasn’t learned anything in years. I find that those I’ve kept in touch with the longest, by in large, are quintessentially the same as they were when I met them. There’s been no rise in maturity, no progress. They have not read a book since high school (sourcebooks do not count). Even then, they did very little other than what was required of them. Their interpersonal relationships are at the level mine were at when I was 19. We have essentially the same conversations we had back then, except we’re talking about new games or movies. It’s tragic. I love those guys to death, I just wonder how much longer we can keep going like this. It says something when the people who enjoy seeing the most are those who I reconnected with in the last year, and it’s not good.