Marry Me or Else!

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assertiveness, direction, discussion, DTR, love, marriage, relationships

There’s a scene in the movie Demolition Man where the cops encounter Simon Phoenix (the escaped criminal from the violent 90s) for the first time. One of the cops asks his trusty computer guide what he should do. She tells him to say in a firm voice “Lie down with your hands behind your back.” After he gets a derorogatory response, the computer tells him to add the words “or else.” Simon Phoenix turns around with an angry look on his face, and proceeds to kill people.

I can’t say I’m surprised by that response. We all know how ultimatums go down with people. But I have talked about the Un-Timatum here (and here). You have to let it be known what you want without “putting undo pressure” on the other person to respond in a way that’s untrue to how they feel. As I’ve said before, I know people who have stated how they feel and been ready to follow through with varying results of “success,” if one can call it that. But being placed in this unique position myself brings this discussion up for me again.

There comes a time when you must make a decision. As my 7 Habits for Teens said in one of its nuggets of wisdom, even not making a decision is a decision. If I captain can’t decide whether to go to the right or the left, the ship is still moving forward (no smart alec quips on stopping, please. Thank you :D). More accurately, time marches on…or flies, depending on who you are.

So, in my life plan, extended relationships at my age just don’t fit. I feel that a certain length of time is more than enough to decide yes or no to making a commitment, and anything beyond that is either biding time until something better comes along or a level of comfort with the situation that doesn’t inspire a desire for deeper commitment. At some point, either you do or don’t, will or won’t. Point blank period, as a friend is fond of saying.

Long story short, I had to have the “where is this ultimately going?” conversation with Mr. Perfect and state my timeline for how I would like to see us progress. There was no “neck rolling” or finger wagging; it was a discussion. He said some things and I said some things and we both came to understand the other’s position a bit better…and my timeline didn’t change.

I realize some people would see setting a time line for an answer on whether or not you are moving to the next stage of a relationship as arm twisting, guilting someone into it, or all manner of ultimatums, but as my friends say “closed mouths don’t get fed” sometimes. Besides, I know the type of person Mr. Perfect is; he won’t be swayed by pressure or forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. The purpose of the conversation was to bring our full attention to bear on exactly what it is we are doing here, in this relationship.

I’ll let you all in on a secret: there are things I want to do I can’t do until I’m married. This is just me, but I can’t move in together, sleep together, have children together without that commitment. There’s no “testing the waters” here. I am not interested in playing happy families; it is what it is. I would like to build a home with a husband, pull out the Fredrick’s, split some costs of living, travel the world, have breakfast in bed together, read our Bibles and pray together…all of that romantic postcard stuff. Call me old fashioned, too Christian, or “obsolete,” but I kinda want forever, even though forever includes so not so picture perfect stuff.

The 2blu that has grown from this relationship and the difficult years of life has become able to articulate what she wants out of life without fear of inconveniencing anyone (mostly). I am not threatening anyone, either. I’m just acknowledging where I am in life, putting my blinker on. I’m indicating that I am turning a corner in life, and if you wanted to come, too, you would be welcome to do so.

How have you handled the “define the relationship” moments? Do you wish you had handled it differently? Do you think I’m coming into my own or going out of my mind? Am I forcing it or what? You can respond in the comments section or email me at 2blu2btru4u@gmail.com.

XOXO

2blu2btru

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Follow the Blog on Twitter!

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blog twitter feed, discussion, expanding, group therapy, sharing, twitter, twitter feed

I know how much you lovelies love reading this blog, so follow this blog on twitter to stay up to date with topics, changes, new pages, and my random thoughts throughout the day. It’s a wonderful opportunity to ask me anything! If you can’t find a blog to post your comment on, send it to me on twitter.

My twitter username: @2blu2btru, listed by the name Indigo Moods Blog. If you are a blogger with a twitter feed, leave your blog name and username in the comments so I can follow you, too!

Hopefully we will have an even fuller relationship (and better group therapy) with this new twitter feed. As soon as I figure out where to put it, I will put up the twitter feed here as well (junky blog). Tell your friends about the blog and twitter feed (especially male friends…I don’t get enough male voices in these discussions).

That’s it for now. Leave your twitter usernames, suggestions, tips, gripes, complaints, or congrats after the beep.

*BEEP*

Sincere Communication

Tags

communication, discussion, effective communication, feelings, interpretation, partnership, relationships

Sometimes we think we are communicating with people when we are not. The other person is hearing things we think we didn’t say. We think we are giving them feedback they think they aren’t getting. We aren’t listening; rather, we are preparing our next point in the argument. We don’t feel it’s necessary to speak any certain way; we just have to  make our  point.

Effective communication, in any arena, is hard. It’s harder when feelings are involved, when each person is starving to be heard and have their feelings validated, if not necessarily agreed with. Effective communication is draining sometimes. Sometimes you don’t feel like going through all of that to make yourself understood; the other person should just know.

Re-establishing the lines of communication isn’t usually the problem; it’s that the communication hasn’t really been established in the first place. The best example of this I can come up with is the relationship I have/had with my father. For the longest time, he wasn’t involved in my life. I hadn’t seen him since I was two, or eight, or ten. We would never get to establish a method of communication before he was gone again. Once he got himself together and started going to church, we finally began to try to have a relationship, but the tools weren’t there to build on an existing communication relationship. He had no idea how to talk to me, and I had no idea how to talk to him, so most of our conversations were about movies we had seen and what we thought of them, or descriptions of the people we worked with or saw on a daily basis. We retreated to our stories. It’s easier. We are both great with words, but when you analyze all the conversations, we weren’t really saying anything.

My dad sent me a letter in November of 2008 that made me really mad, but it was also one of the first honest communications I had ever gotten from him. It made me mad because of the tone and the ultimatum quality of it, but I understood a few things about him for the first time ever. It made me angry to think he had been feeling the way he had for such a long time before he said anything (which, I find, is where most ultimatums spring from–holding back and biting your tongue for so long you can’t take it anymore), but I began to see my father as an actual person, with thoughts and feelings like I had, not a moviefone, a restaurant critic, a half-listening ear on the other end of a cell phone, a complaintant about my cell phone usuage. He had hurt me a lot, but apparently, so had I.

Anyway, here are a few of my effective communication rules/regulations; feel free to try them.

1. Listen to the other person, then begin phrasing your response. Make sure you hear all of what they are saying and process it before you decide how you should respond.
2. Don’t interrupt unless for clarity. It’s important to let the other person know you care about what they are saying and want to understand where they are coming from and what they mean. No one likes to be interrupted and put on the defensive, especially when they haven’t even made their position clear yet.
3. Ask questions, but let the person finish saying what they are trying to say before you attempt to respond. If you really don’t understand what they are talking about, ask them. Let them finish before taking issue with something they’ve said; if you wait to hear the whole thing, it might not be what you thought, and will save a lot of time trying to defend themselves and being angry over something you took out of context.
4. Briefly rephrase what they have said as you heard it to allow them to further explain if necessary. The way we interpret something someone said isn’t necessarily what they meant to convey when they said it. We speak the same language, but we also speak different ones. Discourse is more important than the language the discourse is in. Words, especially ones that describe feelings, have our personal experiences attached to them. We have to make sure we attach the other person’s meaning and not our feelings/experiences/pains to the conversation. 
5. Be clear. Don’t make your comments a matter of interpretation. As John Mayer says, say what you need to say, but say what you mean to say as well.
6. Meet them where they are in terms of how they communicate. If they use/need examples, if they need logic like a computer, if they need to see things visually, make sure that your communication style is adapted to that when you speak to them. You can be speaking a foreign language to them and not know it.
7. No one wins; it’s not a competition. Winning is when you both understand each other, not necessarily when you have beaten the other person down so much they will agree to anything to stop talking.
8. If this relationship is really important to you, how long it takes to communicate will not bother you. Even if you have to table a discussion for a later time, be willing to put in the effort. It gets easier the more you do it, but not always faster. My minister tells us his sermons aren’t long, we are just not focused and want to be somewhere else. We aren’t interested in what God has to say and just came to be there, so we fidget and wonder when he’ll sit down. There is some truth to that. When you don’t want to do something, it takes forever to do and you wish yourself anywhere else, but when you love it and want to understand it, time just seems to fly by.
9. Sometimes, you have to walk away and think about things. Communicate that you have things to think about and don’t feel you can constructively talk about it further  at that point instead of just walking away. No one is a mind reader. You going to clear your head can be taken as you don’t care about the conversation (or the relationship) or that you are walking away from the person altogether.
10. In personal relationships, you choose whether to be present and entertain discussions. If talking to the other person is not worth it, if the relationship is not important enough to salvage, you can leave.

I’m not the expert on communication, even though I talk A LOT! If you have any tips you want to add, or any points you want to disagree with discuss, feel free.

2blu2btru