~Thomas Merton
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I like to tell stories. When someone asks me “what happened?” they settle in for a good detailed and entertaining description of an event. However, one of the disadvantages of this is that I sometimes reduce entire people to a story. “Oh, I heard from Fred the other day, it's been 10 years!” “Which one is Fred?” a friend might ask. “Oh, he's the one who after finding Jesus decided that we would no longer have sex, but one day after chasing me around his office desk for an hour and insisting that he was freely choosing to break this vow of chastity...yadda, yadda, yadda, laying on his back in the middle of his office floor, arms extended straight out on either side, exclaimed that what we did was 'just like spitting in the face of Jesus as he carried the cross up Calvary.'” and my friend would exclaim, “Ohhh, him.”
Now, this story that I've told over and over about Fred is entirely true. (unfortunately) And I have similar types of crazy stories for many guys that I've dated in the past. However, dwelling on the one thing (usually negative) about a person that makes a good story, abandons all of the other aspects of my relationship with him. I've passed on how we met, when I was driving that old Jetta with low profile BBS rims that I busted on a train track, and he was working at the tire and rim store that I went to get the rim repaired (long before he had his own shop with an office that we could fool around in), he, an avid tennis player, noticed my racket in my trunk and asked whether we could play together one day. (we never did have that tennis game . . . I was taking lessons at the time and was so bad my teacher fired ME .. . said that I was wasting my money and his time . . .but that's a story for another day) How we could just sit and talk about anything for hours on end or just sit in comfortable silence together. How, after that embarrassing Jesus episode we remained friends and after I moved away I would always make time to see him when I came home and we got along as if no time had passed. And, how, on the day of my father's funeral, he held me and comforted me until I fell asleep. I had reduced this full and rewarding friendship with an overall sweet and caring person to “that Jesus guy.”
All of this to say, although it is normal to compare current relationships with past ones, when we dwell on the negative aspects of our past relationships, the comparison tends to be based on how the new person differs from the old person, in an attempt to avoid a similar type of hurt. We are working from a position of avoidance, and our approach tends to be one of mistrust. This causes us to hold back from the experience in an effort to protect ourselves.
However, if we make a point to remember the good stuff about our past relationships as well . . . what made us fall in love with them in the first place, what we liked about them as well as what hurt us, we are likely to find that there was a lot of good about the person as well. And we may be able to approach new possibilities from a positive place, placing the primary focus on what we are looking for instead of what we want to avoid. In my experience, there have usually been more positive aspects to a person than the negative “story,” so it seems like it might give me, at least, more to work with.
Homework: take some time to think about 3 past relationships, make a list of at least 5 good things about each person. Let me know how it goes.
