Most people out there probably know about those team building seminars some employers used to make their employees participate in. I'm referring to the type of seminar where they would make the employees perform stunts such as how one employee would catch another employee that fell over backward from a standing position. That kind of thing serves to build trust, supposedly.
I remember I went to one Halloween party at a Co-op house where the person who invited the people from the church I tried to go to baked some coconut macaroons, but in order to eat her lousy macaroons, party guests had to go to some person's room, find a place to sit, and feed the macaroons to each other. Yuck! I took a seat on the floor, and when this woman, who'd been rude to me the whole night, said that was the only way to eat that shit (I don't particularly like coconut), I just got up and walked out of the room, out of the house, got in my truck, went home, and never saw the inside of that church or her again.
I told that story to Jason, my old bass player, as we drove to practice one day, and he talked about the above-mentioned trust building exercise as an analogous thing to the imposed intimacy exercise of the macaroon feeding thing, and yeah, it's all bullshit. Trust comes better from a relationship that develops over time, and withstands the test of time. Why, this past decade, I terminated a friendship with someone I'd known for over thirty years because I figured that I couldn't trust him.
I've talked about how I'm really trying to refrain from pursuing unavailable women these days. I think I do a pretty good job of it, too. But, I've thought about those disasters of so many years ago. I used to tell myself that those women I crashed and burned on never really let me know they liked me, and that if I just had that kind of thing as my gold standard, those kind of events would not have occurred. The only thing is, that's not true at all. There were plenty of occasions where things went bad with someone where the other party did give a pretty strong indication that they liked me on some level,. My previously held belief that the bad deals went bad because I didn't hold out for that kind of affirmation stems from a desire to put everything into absolute, all or nothing, black or white categories.
It might be nice if it were that simple. Maybe it would be better, maybe not, I don't know. The thing I most recall, in reality, is that whatever little bone some woman or girl threw me, to get the ball rolling initially, became this thing for me to cling to when a better course of action for me would involve letting go of my love interest. In other words, the woman or girl might show some interest to get my attention, but I would refuse to read the writing on the wall later on down the road. So, there's another thing that's on me.
I remember I went to one Halloween party at a Co-op house where the person who invited the people from the church I tried to go to baked some coconut macaroons, but in order to eat her lousy macaroons, party guests had to go to some person's room, find a place to sit, and feed the macaroons to each other. Yuck! I took a seat on the floor, and when this woman, who'd been rude to me the whole night, said that was the only way to eat that shit (I don't particularly like coconut), I just got up and walked out of the room, out of the house, got in my truck, went home, and never saw the inside of that church or her again.
I told that story to Jason, my old bass player, as we drove to practice one day, and he talked about the above-mentioned trust building exercise as an analogous thing to the imposed intimacy exercise of the macaroon feeding thing, and yeah, it's all bullshit. Trust comes better from a relationship that develops over time, and withstands the test of time. Why, this past decade, I terminated a friendship with someone I'd known for over thirty years because I figured that I couldn't trust him.
I've talked about how I'm really trying to refrain from pursuing unavailable women these days. I think I do a pretty good job of it, too. But, I've thought about those disasters of so many years ago. I used to tell myself that those women I crashed and burned on never really let me know they liked me, and that if I just had that kind of thing as my gold standard, those kind of events would not have occurred. The only thing is, that's not true at all. There were plenty of occasions where things went bad with someone where the other party did give a pretty strong indication that they liked me on some level,. My previously held belief that the bad deals went bad because I didn't hold out for that kind of affirmation stems from a desire to put everything into absolute, all or nothing, black or white categories.
It might be nice if it were that simple. Maybe it would be better, maybe not, I don't know. The thing I most recall, in reality, is that whatever little bone some woman or girl threw me, to get the ball rolling initially, became this thing for me to cling to when a better course of action for me would involve letting go of my love interest. In other words, the woman or girl might show some interest to get my attention, but I would refuse to read the writing on the wall later on down the road. So, there's another thing that's on me.
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