| | Jennifer,
I certainly agree with you about big-ticket items and what you say (in your own words) about prioritizing values in a relationship. If you don't keep your own values straight, then who will? There are oodles of aspirants for that role (including, relationship-wise, more control freaks than anything else out there), but not one of them will be in you shoes during the precious moments of your life that should be lived in happiness, or even at the dying time - and dying frustrated for not having gone for the big brass ring is not My Way (like in the song).
But some of these prioritizing values issues are extremely complex and the priorities are not always so clear cut - even to the person professing them. That makes putting them on a balance sheet not only difficult, I would even say irresponsible to the person himself/herself.
I know that whenever I have tried to make light of something serious to a significant other, I have made light of that also in my own soul. Sometimes the results have been disastrous.
Here is an example from my past. You mentioned jealous rages. I no longer tolerate them myself. Well, one of my exes was a former Playboy Bunny and she was gorgeous. But she was extremely jealous of me (of all things!!! - but there it is...). The jealousy was not the whole story, though - nor was the conceit thing of watching all the men perk up every time we went somewhere (and the women too, as they think that a guy like me must have had a "special something" to have a gal like that - and all kinds of bullshit - but I will not deny that this was one of my payoffs back then). There was a very human, kind and warm side to her that I found extremely attractive, and a little girl kind of fragility that really appealed to the male protectiveness side of me.
I do not feel jealousy in my heart too often and it was almost a rush back then to have such a stunning looking woman be jealous of me. I got off on it more than I should have. That is until she figured out where I was at.
Once it became a competition thing, I was in way over my head. Good Playboy Bunnies know things about how to manipulate the male psyche that other women just don't know. When this one finished with me, I didn't recognize myself anymore - I was a complete nervous wreck, insanely jealous of her every move and thought and on a wild roller coaster of emotional highs and lows that I, as a classical musician in my ivory tower, had never even dreamed about before. I did a lot of stupid things back then.
Ultimately, unlike Bob, I was the one who put a stop to it. My overriding concern was not her and her behavior, or even her value to me - it was me. I could not go on like that and I had no idea why I had lost control of myself. I had to get away from the good, the bad and the ugly, all of it, take a deep breath and start trying to figure out what went wrong - not with our relationship but with everything. Once I decided to separate from her, the execution was pretty objective and even brutal in its finality - but even then, the days afterward were filled with anxiety going-back-and-forth, and once we almost even gave it another whirl. We were both terribly hurt by the whole affair (but also we sure had our moments).
In the light of the current issue we are discussing, this is very complicated. The tendency I see in the Objectivists I have talked to and read is to oversimplify, like with the balance sheet metaphor. I wonder if that is why in Objectivism, I hear more about failed relationships than about successful ones (this comment is not meant personally, it is merely part of the idea I am discussing - anyway from my history, I am certainly not one to talk). It is so easy to make a huge mistake in life from oversimplifying.
For instance, nowadays, I do not permit jealousy to reign in my heart, but I know that I am very much capable of it. I have been there. The path for me is not to repress those feelings (by putting them on a "balance sheet"), but to deal with them and the situations that cause them with a great deal of care and brutal self-honesty. I am an Objectivist who looks into my own soul and tries to see everything, including the ugly, and to deal with it. That even makes the striving for the highest more valuable to my self-esteem. But it is not easy to look inside and say that I can be petty at times and even like it, for example. But there it is and there is a lot more. Only by doing this can I correct myself. I think this kind of thinking needs to be used in relationships, not just one-size-fits-all metaphors and homilies (didn't Ayn Rand call them bromides?).
My parents, unlike me, have a marriage that is 53 years old and it is a wonderful thing to see. A good deal of keeping that together was the persistence and accepting each other that I mentioned, in addition to their priority values. I remember some pretty Homeric fights when I was growing up. But the reward for sticking it out is right in front of me today. It is something I want for myself.
And, to look at Joe's message from the other end, when a conflict arises in a relationship that is so severe that breaking up seems to be the "hard way" but the correct solution, that is instead of taking the "easy way" and putting it off, breaking up just might be the "easy way" - too much so.
I know that to achieve what my parents have is the result of taking a very hard way and sticking to it.
Michael
Edit - Hong, our posts crossed. Que graçinha! I love your self honesty.
(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 5/21, 8:06am)
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