Not another late night post!

Yes, this would be another of those late night posts. However, I am going to be good and instead just tap out a few blog post ideas that occurred to me:

1. – True love is true character. True (deep) friendship is also true character. Sustained love/friendship comes from sustained mutual desire to pursue excellent character, to be introspective, to “do the work”, to communicate.

2. – What people who get married young know: reflecting on a few people I know who have married young: it is not that they feel that they know everything, but rather that they feel that they know enough. They feel that they have a successful handle on life, know how to manage their lives, feel confident about their lives, can assume a certain level of success when branching into marriage.

Whereas for me, I definitely did not feel that confident about life when I was younger. In a word, stability. Perhaps my confusion about marriage has actually been confusion about life. It is almost as if I have felt that I have to mentally prepare for a life of extreme chaos and choose a husband who would be suited and robust enough in terms of character for that kind of chaos.
I am not stating that these young married people or their spouses have poor character. Rather, they just did not have to insist on such relentlessly outstanding character as I have insisted on.

3. -Commitment to the marriage, rather than commitment to their spouse. I know some people who appear to be successfully married. And yet, while this might sound weird, I suspect deep down that their commitment is to their marriage itself, and to the stability of the life they have built together, rather than to their spouse per se. I am not even sure that I can articulate what that means. Perhaps it is something like this: when they were getting married, what they were looking for first and foremost was a spouse, what they wanted first and foremost was to get married. They definitely care for one another and have a certain level of affection for one another. However, if they were not married, I cannot imagine that they would be particularly close friends, listen to or take advice from one another, or make significant sacrifices for one another. It is almost like you could swap out their spouse for any other spouse who would give that same level of stability and they would just happily continue. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as they are genuinely and mutually committed to their marriages, and many successful marriages might well operate in this same way.

However, while I want to get married, I instinctively feel I want a spouse whom I can genuinely commit to for himself, and who will genuinely commit to me too, for myself. I would want to base my marriage on that true, deep commitment to one another, not just to the marriage itself. This is because in marriage what I truly want is the man himself. It is not the stability of marriage, the security, the status. Honestly, it would make me feel somewhat queasy to be with a husband I could merely tolerate primarily for the sake of marital trappings. I have worked hard, made a ton of sacrifices so that I don’t need to rely on a man for those things. That then gives me the freedom to choose a husband because I truly like and respect him, not the kind of life that he can give me.

Just thinking about it now, it occurred to me that this is one good sign of people who are genuinely committed to one another: that their eyes light up when they see one another, additionally that they can casually joke together or laugh and playfully tease one another.

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Finally, I watched this video, (while I was doing a late night dermatillomania treatment!) and this was what inspired me to write this post:

So many thoughts, I will try to briefly summarise them to possibly write out this post at greater length later:

You have to be as intentional about friendships as you are about romantic relationships. Additionally, the same characteristics that make for strong romantic relationships also make for strong friendships
How do people make friends anyway? You go through life, and you focus in on people that you get on well with. But how does liking someone or getting on well with them then mean that they will have the necessary character to be trusted, or that they can then give good advice?
– You should know what each friend is good for.
Some people might be good for “hanging out”, but you can’t necessarily bare your heart to them.
Some people might be good for a reciprocal level of niceness. You support their endeavours, they support yours. Qn: how do you plan a friendship for a reciprocal level of niceness?
– mismatched expectations have killed so many friendships. So perhaps , if you want something deeper from someone whom you would like to think of as a friend, you need to speak up, instead of assuming.