The Why Me’s of the World

One very important article started me on my path to understand what it was that was encouraging me to pick men who were not good for me. The best place to start was, well, me. Since I had been doing the picking I had to be playing a part. But what part and what aspect of it was I doing wrong? I had no idea, so I sat there pondering; that is until one day I happened to read an article about how we develop same-sex friendships. That article was Friendships: Laws of Attraction.

How friends turn into best friends:

“Self-disclosure characterizes the moment when a pair leaves the realm of buddyhood for the rarefied zone of true friendship. … In the early stages of friendship, this tends to be a gradual, reciprocal process. One person takes the risk of disclosing personal information and then ‘tests’ whether the other reciprocates.”

First you meet someone, perhaps by a common interest. This puts you into aquiantence or buddy mode. But small self-disclosures soon turn into a friendship. But what turns a friendship into a close friendship? Intimacy. And that isn’t an easy thing to define. The article attempts to quantify it by saying :

“Hefty helpings of emotional expressiveness and unconditional support are ingredients here, followed by acceptance, loyalty, and trust. Our friends are there for us through thick and thin, but rarely cross the line: A friend with too many opinions about our wardrobe, our partner, or our taste in movies and art may not be a friend for long.”

So if common interests/circumstances leadto acquaintances, disclosure leads to friendships, and intimacy leads to closeness, what leads someone to be your best friend? Larger doses of disclosure and intimacy. In this article they quantify it as a ”beyond-the-call-of-duty” expectation. This means that if we suffer an emergency—real or imagined—and need to talk, we expect our best friend to drop everything and race to our side. But wait, there has to be more than just larger doses, why do they connect so well? Social identity. If you see yourself first as a mother, second as an artist, and third as a wife you will most likely form a best friendship with someone who is a mother as well. This is because she supports and understands how you see yourself.

So there we have it; common interests, disclosure, intimacy, and social identity. The recipe for best friendship. You may wonder how in the world this would relate to me picking those who were not right for me. I assure you that there is a strong connection.

First I started with common interests, usually the meeting of the person through friends who share common interests with me as well as the new person. Secondly I jumped right to seeking social identity with this person and that identity is …..*drum-roll please* …. SURVIVOR. This starts the attraction and the subsequent courtship. But wait a minute, what does surviving have to do with this? You see I am a survivor first and foremost, a survivor of an abusive relationship that lasted many years, and in my formative years to boot. So it is natural that I would seek those that understand and relate to being a survivor, by being one themselves. Usually they have survived much worse situations and lives than I have, and unfortunately they are still in survival mode.

It gets worse as the courtship continues. We start the self-disclosure process, only that they don’t disclose very much and I would bare it all for them. Reciprocation doesn’t ensue, but instead of walking away I would go to the final ingredient on my quest to find my friend-relation-ship… intimacy. Now the intimacy I am talking about isn’t very well explained in the above article. But, lucky for us there is a wonderful blogger out there that just wrote a fantastic short about intimacy: Let’s Get Intimate. Ruby said it best:

“Intimacy is not about agreeing on everything or spilling your guts. But it is about being a friend that can be trusted, a person worth sharing with, an person with you in both the storms of life and the sunshine.

An intimate thought does not need to bare your soul. My very favourite ones are more about the revelation of every day life- a loved one’s favourite pastimes or the thoughts on a topic of interest.”

Again I fostered intimacy with loyalty, trust, and acceptance but I chose to ignore the simple fact they were not intimate back. Without this awareness I would be sure to pick Mr. Still-in-survival-mode again.

I wrote this story 1) because Ruby reminded me of that journey and 2) because I know there are many of you out there that pick the wrong guys and you cry “why me” as a complaint. But, you really need to take this question seriously… Why you?

Seriously…

Why you?