TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 59

[PJMoney]

Tobie wrote, "I was so desperate for attention, for male attention, that I
said yes to meeting him, yes, even though he had broken a promise before it
all began.  Does this make the woman a fool, or a romantic, or just mark her
for having a forgiving nature?"

I have some experience with this sort of thing. One fellow in particular
comes to mind.  I can't remember his name or where I met him so I have
nothing but admiration for Tobie's ability to recall such details.

What I do remember is waiting for him to call.  He would visit, say he'd
call in a few days and then I would wait for the call.  After a while I got
so used to the call not coming within a few days that I didn't bother even
starting to wait until at least a week had gone by.  And then when he did
finally call I'd be so pleased by even that cursory expression of interest
in me that I put up with the misery and anxiety of all the waiting.

Finally the wait for his call got to be so long that I got angry and decided
to ring him.  That's when I really considered what it meant that I didn't
have his phone number but only knew the name of the company where he worked.
(And Tobie appears to think that *she* might be guilty of foolishness!
Hah!)  

It turned out as I suspected.  His most recent failure to call had been an
example of what many men do who want a painless (for themselves) way out of
a relationship.  He was about to go overseas with his new (or maybe 'other'
is a better descriptor) girlfriend.  I said that I hoped they both had a
lovely time.  Sounding rather astonished he said, "Do you?"  That's when I
realised that in wishing them well all I was doing was being the good,
well-mannered, self-effacing girl I'd been trained to be.  And that's when I
decided to be honest.  So I told him, no.  What I really hoped was that he'd
have a truly awful time and that his girlfriend would dump him for another
fellow while they were away.

For most of my life I've been unwilling to act on my suspicions regarding
other people's perfidies even though subsequent events have almost always
proved my suspicions to be correct.  Thinking badly of another person seemed
to me like judgementalism.  If I was wrong that would mean that I'd judged
another person unfairly.  That would be bad and it would mean that I was
bad.  So what I would do is wait until I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt,
that a person was unreliable and untrustworthy before I would start
protecting my own interests by treating them as unreliable and
untrustworthy.  The result is that I have finished up with a case of
something that resembles post-traumatic stress disorder quite closely.  I
can't bear to be around most other (non-family) people for more than a
couple of hours or so.  I suspect the damage is at least semi-permanent but
I am hopeful that I may eventually be able to overcome it because of
something I realised about 2 years ago.  

After several years of trying, and failing, to improve my career
circumstances I asked God to show me in what way I was contributing to my
own problems.  What happened was that I realised that, deep down, I believed
in the utopian dream of the perfectibility of human beings.  You know the
guff; more education, a more equitable distribution of income, better access
to cheap (preferably free) help from social workers, psychologists and the
like and, hey presto, all social ills would be solved and everyone would be
nice to one another.  

What I learned I needed to believe in - both intellectually and emotionally
- is that human beings are sinners.  Given the choice between doing what is
right and doing what is best for our own interests the latter is much more
likely to win than the former.

In the past I used to worry that expecting the worst from others was to be a
pessimist with no faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings.  Now I
think that to expect the worst from others is just to be a realist.  Human
beings aren't fundamentally good.  They're fundamentally selfish.

Now if someone does the right thing I am delighted.  If it costs them to do
so then my feelings towards them are more like awe.  I hope that in a
similar situation I will be as upright.  But if someone does what advances
their own interests - too bad about anyone else - I am no longer
disappointed.  That is only to be expected.  Really knowing that, in my
soul, has helped me enormously.

Janice