I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mines just the other day. Usually when he stops by, he’s coming to vent about a variety of things but it can basically be summed up in three parts: his lady, his job, his home life. So when he began to talk, I just listened and started to say to myself, He really hasn’t learned anything because he’s right back in the same situation he JUST left a few months ago. But something interesting happened when the conversation then turned to my own romantic life, which I never really share with people. It’s not that I’m a super secretive person or anything like that. Hell, I’ve written about my exes on my very public blog site. I just know what I can and can’t tell people, and that becomes compartmentalize. But every now and then, I talk too much. I don’t mind it, because it gives me an opportunity to see how you handle what I’ve just given you and how you deal with it afterwards. So I begin to tell him about a guy that I’m currently dating (We’ll call him Y). He’s a sweet guy, but the way he thinks about this world we live in can be best described as “50s nuclear family inspired mixed with Black paranoia and the Baptist church.” I’m a little more progressive in my thought process (I would hope, anyway) so naturally, we clash on a lot of things. As I’m expressing to my friend the conversations that me and this guy have had, I notice a few things going on:
1. He’s becoming increasingly irritated by a guy he doesn’t know personally which has caused him to
2. Make unhealthy assumptions about both him and,
3. The type of guy that I should really be with, which he’s beginning to feel is him, which means he’s
4. Falling in love with an idea of who he thinks I am and now
5. Wants to become the ideal man for me. Even though he’s in a relationship.
I have to let him know that even though I’m not a fan of Y’s outdated ways of thinking, I do accept him exactly the way he is. Truth is, we have to accept people for who they are, not who we expect them to me. In the midst of me talking, which I now see that it could’ve come off as complaining, my friend was only fixated on showing me that not all men are like Y. In fact, he wanted to show me that with him, I could be myself and be accepted. I never once told my friend that Y didn’t like who I was, because he does. But because my friend was looking in a mirror of who he thought I was, instead of the window of who I really was, he proceeds to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening being my knight. Even though I didn’t need one. He felt it was his responsibility to make me smile, which it wasn’t. He felt he had to “go with the flow” because I’m a little more flexible and Y isn’t, which wasn’t true either. But I didn’t stop any of it because that’s just who he is; he’s a fixer. He wanted to fix my “frustration” with finding love by becoming a man I could fall in love with. He took on the role of becoming “Not That Guy” by ironically, becoming that guy. Maybe one day, we’ll have a conversation about this but for now, it’s just my observation. Just my window.
becomingtiffany 