Drinking coffee, home alone, it’s time for part two.
A lot of the dating advice I find is kind of totally fucked up. I mean, you go to Cosmo magazine, and pretty much all of the advice is directed from the viewpoint of a woman. You go to the male equivalent of Cosmo (is there even one?) and the advice is pretty much gender specific to men. Now, this would seem like a normal thing to do, except for two things. Firstly, this is really bad advice from really shallow people. Secondly, these advice columns ignore a huge amount of people. Of course they would have thought they had all their bases covered. But no. They left out pretty much everybody who doesn’t fit within male-female gender roles. I’m not going to explain how gender roles and gender identity works, I’ll let Hank Green explain instead.
So, with this more functional advice, I will instead try to be as gender neutral as possible and not give advice from a male/female gender perspective. Because everybody deserves to be loved and everybody deserves my expert advice, and this post would be way too long if I was gender role specific. But I will be talking about relationships between two people, because Polyamory is just not my field, man.
Anyway, enough lead in.
Let’s get started.
Picking up where we left off in part 1, communication with the person you are in a relationship with, is beyond important. How the two of you communicate may come to change everything about the relationship. If you have something on your mind, why are you in a relationship with someone if you can’t talk to them about it? Even when the thing on your mind is about the relationship.
Don’t take your partner for granted. It’s really easy to do this, but it’s pretty much essential to the relationship that you appreciate the person you’re in a relationship with, fully. And what I’m talking about is getting out of your head, stop thinking about the relationship, and be present. A thing that a lot of people do, is think of their partner as an extension of themselves. This happens a lot in very close relationships, it’s like you know each other so well, that you almost assume that they don’t have anything to say. It’s important to remember that this person you are in a relationship with, is totally different from you. They have a completely different life story than you do. There are things that they fear, things that they love, things that you would have never guessed about them. Just because you are in a close relationship, does NOT mean that you know everything about them. Your goal is to find out those things. Take them for granted and you’ll never know.
Never separate yourself from your partner for stupid reasons. It doesn’t matter if they’re from money and you grew up in the ghetto, or if they’ve slept with a lot of people and you haven’t. It doesn’t matter. If you distinguish yourself from them in negative ways, it’ll get mixed into the relationship dynamic and fuck things up. Turbulence.
This post is getting pretty long, so this will be my last piece of advice. All of these things are important, I didn’t save the best for last, this is as important as all my other pieces of advice.
Break up if you have to. Because relationships that aren’t making you happy aren’t worth being in. There is no excuse to be in a relationship that you don’t like (aside from green card marriages ‘n shit). And while in our society, breakups are looked at as bad things, some relationships are meant to end. And you shouldn’t be scared of ending them if they don’t make you happy.
And this concludes my dating advice series. Good job on reading the whole thing. I’m actually impressed. I’m going to go look at pictures of my girlfriend and wish she wasn’t in Spain.
-A