Failure is an option
Aug. 7th, 2013 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trickykittyThe subject of adultery, affairs, and "how easy it is for good people to fail" has come up recently. This actually relates quite a lot to the post I made about learned independence and protecting yourself.
Good people fail, but they don't fail by having sex with someone they shouldn't be having sex with, or getting emotionally involved with someone they shouldn't.
They fail by making decisions that allow them to avoid the negative things that they really need to face. They fail by settling for something less than what they truly want, whether they realize it or not. They fail by growing out of their current level of commitments, and fear looking bad or hurting someone's feelings by breaking those commitments in favor of doing what's best for themselves. They fail by lying to themselves and putting on rose-colored glasses that alter their perceptions of reality. They fail by filling a hole in their lives with the wrong things.
They fail because they are human.
I know, because I have failed in all these ways at different points in my life. It's ridiculously easy to fail in these ways, and ten times more difficult to stop failing in these ways.
How many "romance" movies are about a guy or girl in a current relationship when they find someone else with whom they fall in love? The Wedding Planner comes to mind for me. The Grand Happy Ending is that they forsake their current relationship if favor of running off to find their One True Mate. What they don't show is how that "failure" started in the first place. How did the first couple get together and decide to make a relationship out of it to begin with? How did they manage to stay in that relationship when there was obviously something missing from it? (I say 'obviously', but it really isn't made obvious, or else the idea is that they WOULD have ended the relationship, and then there wouldn't have been a movie.) The movie makers also make sure that the person left standing in the wings is somehow contented with this decision. Either they secretly love someone else, or they give full, whole-hearted well wishes for the new couple, or they were a bad guy or a womanizer that didn't deserve the heroine in the first place. The movie makers never show you a person who is completely and totally broken hearted and falling apart at the seams because their relationship just fell apart. Unless you're talking about Great Expectations, but think about it - that's the entire point of that movie: the sorrow of one man whose love interest has run off to marry another guy that he KNOWS she doesn't truly love. Yeah, okay, so sometimes people fail on purpose out of spite or something.
I mentioned in that other post that the hardest thing to really protect yourself from is the day-to-day, and I'm not talking about glaring temptations. It's not a glaring temptation to pretend things are fine when they are not. It's just the easier path. It's easier to put up with a crappy boss than to contemplate finding a better job. It's easier to think things will get better than to assume they may not and have to find a different course in life. It's easier to keep dating someone that you've already been dating and with whom you have a good rapport than to break up with them in the hopes of finding something better.
I stayed in a relationship for three and a half years that should have only lasted a month, if that. I failed, because I didn't want to see all of the glaring neon red warning signs telling me this was a bad relationship for me. Admittedly, at the time, I don't think I knew HOW to see those signs. "Oh, looky, here's some pretty, red neon. I wonder what that's all about. Oh well, I'll figure it out later."
All of the negative things that became so clear during the end of that relationship were also there at the beginning, but I was blind to them. I didn't want to see. I cared more about being in a relationship than being in the right relationship. The longer things went on, the more I put up with at the cost of my own true happiness. It was a semi-happiness. It was a comfortableness. It was an everyday habit that I became used to and took for granted so that I could lie to myself that I didn't need anything else. Much later after we broke up, I realized that there were obvious moments of happiness, but there were so many moments of what I will call non-happiness. They weren't unhappiness, per se, but definitely a lack of happiness. (Maybe I should call it a lack of peaceful joy, since "happiness" is such a convoluted term.) They were moments in which I simply existed. They were the moments I tolerated in the knowledge that there would still be moments of happiness to come, and so long as they weren't unhappy moments, I had no reason to actually discard them. They were the moments when I was waiting - waiting for something else to happen.
It's those non-happy moments that we forget about. They don't seem to hit the radar. They aren't unhappy moments, so there's no need to make them stop, but they aren't happy moments either.
Strangely enough, this whole line of thinking came up in my mind this morning because I was thinking about the house buying stuff, not because I was thinking about relationships, and affairs, and whatnot. When I had put in my 5th house offer last year, and I finally went under contract for the first time, I did something very specific and very telling. I sent my roommates an email talking about how I'm going to miss living with them. I didn't think much of it when I sent it - I was thinking it was a nice gesture. Eileen actually called me on it, and she was right. There was something about how I wrote that email that displayed my lack of true happiness. Deep down inside I was screaming. Something didn't feel right about the home buying experience for me. I didn't stop looking at houses because I was tired of looking, but because that feeling came bubbling up front and center into my view. For whatever reason I had swimming around in the back of my mind, I simply wasn't ready to buy a house, at least, not with the way I was going about doing it.
If there's one thing that's true to my nature, it's that if something is bothering me it will eat away at my soul until I figure out what the hell it is and get it to stop bothering me. I want a house. I KNOW I want a house, but at what cost? Where are my sacrifice points? It was the same with the bad boyfriend relationships. What level of happiness did I give up by choosing to settle for the so-so relationships simply for the sake of being in a relationship?
In cognitive psychology and decision-making there's an effect called the sunk-cost effect*. (That's a pretty quick, simple, and straight-forward article that I recommend reading.) We, as humans, do this ALL THE TIME. It's only one of many ways in which we lie ourselves into a decision that isn't always what's best for us. Most of those examples above involve the sunk-cost effect. "I'm already dating him, I guess I should see where this will lead, even though I'm not sure if I'm really happy with him." or "I'm already dating him and I don't want to break his heart." or "I'm already working. What if I can't find a better job elsewhere?" or "I've already been approved for a mortgage, and I've already wasted this much of my real estate agent's time, I guess I better keep on looking."
This is how we fail - one little lie to ourselves at a time. We forget to pay attention when something feels uncomfortable. We forget that we can get too comfortable in something just because it's there. Being comfortable is not the same as being happy.
I've never known someone to fail when they are truly happy. It's as though those are two mutually exclusive properties of life that will never cross paths on a Venn diagram.
Yeah, logic humor. You know I had to throw it in there somewhere.
*Edit - #2 in that article is, "I might as well keep watching this terrible movie because I’ve watched an hour of it already." Someone might point out that I just posted about watching In the Name of the King despite deciding it was bad after the first 3 minutes of watching. The difference here is that I knew it was bad before ever putting it into the DVD player. That wasn't a sunk cost effect, but a masochistic self-torture decision that I made to buy the movie and see exactly how bad it really was in the first place. I had heard that it was bad, but it had such a great cast of actors that too much piqued my interest. I really couldn't imagine all these great people making such a horrible movie, so it was sheer curiosity that got me into that Bad Decision. Curiosity will always kill this kitty much more often than all those other failure types combined.
Good people fail, but they don't fail by having sex with someone they shouldn't be having sex with, or getting emotionally involved with someone they shouldn't.
They fail by making decisions that allow them to avoid the negative things that they really need to face. They fail by settling for something less than what they truly want, whether they realize it or not. They fail by growing out of their current level of commitments, and fear looking bad or hurting someone's feelings by breaking those commitments in favor of doing what's best for themselves. They fail by lying to themselves and putting on rose-colored glasses that alter their perceptions of reality. They fail by filling a hole in their lives with the wrong things.
They fail because they are human.
I know, because I have failed in all these ways at different points in my life. It's ridiculously easy to fail in these ways, and ten times more difficult to stop failing in these ways.
How many "romance" movies are about a guy or girl in a current relationship when they find someone else with whom they fall in love? The Wedding Planner comes to mind for me. The Grand Happy Ending is that they forsake their current relationship if favor of running off to find their One True Mate. What they don't show is how that "failure" started in the first place. How did the first couple get together and decide to make a relationship out of it to begin with? How did they manage to stay in that relationship when there was obviously something missing from it? (I say 'obviously', but it really isn't made obvious, or else the idea is that they WOULD have ended the relationship, and then there wouldn't have been a movie.) The movie makers also make sure that the person left standing in the wings is somehow contented with this decision. Either they secretly love someone else, or they give full, whole-hearted well wishes for the new couple, or they were a bad guy or a womanizer that didn't deserve the heroine in the first place. The movie makers never show you a person who is completely and totally broken hearted and falling apart at the seams because their relationship just fell apart. Unless you're talking about Great Expectations, but think about it - that's the entire point of that movie: the sorrow of one man whose love interest has run off to marry another guy that he KNOWS she doesn't truly love. Yeah, okay, so sometimes people fail on purpose out of spite or something.
I mentioned in that other post that the hardest thing to really protect yourself from is the day-to-day, and I'm not talking about glaring temptations. It's not a glaring temptation to pretend things are fine when they are not. It's just the easier path. It's easier to put up with a crappy boss than to contemplate finding a better job. It's easier to think things will get better than to assume they may not and have to find a different course in life. It's easier to keep dating someone that you've already been dating and with whom you have a good rapport than to break up with them in the hopes of finding something better.
I stayed in a relationship for three and a half years that should have only lasted a month, if that. I failed, because I didn't want to see all of the glaring neon red warning signs telling me this was a bad relationship for me. Admittedly, at the time, I don't think I knew HOW to see those signs. "Oh, looky, here's some pretty, red neon. I wonder what that's all about. Oh well, I'll figure it out later."
All of the negative things that became so clear during the end of that relationship were also there at the beginning, but I was blind to them. I didn't want to see. I cared more about being in a relationship than being in the right relationship. The longer things went on, the more I put up with at the cost of my own true happiness. It was a semi-happiness. It was a comfortableness. It was an everyday habit that I became used to and took for granted so that I could lie to myself that I didn't need anything else. Much later after we broke up, I realized that there were obvious moments of happiness, but there were so many moments of what I will call non-happiness. They weren't unhappiness, per se, but definitely a lack of happiness. (Maybe I should call it a lack of peaceful joy, since "happiness" is such a convoluted term.) They were moments in which I simply existed. They were the moments I tolerated in the knowledge that there would still be moments of happiness to come, and so long as they weren't unhappy moments, I had no reason to actually discard them. They were the moments when I was waiting - waiting for something else to happen.
It's those non-happy moments that we forget about. They don't seem to hit the radar. They aren't unhappy moments, so there's no need to make them stop, but they aren't happy moments either.
Strangely enough, this whole line of thinking came up in my mind this morning because I was thinking about the house buying stuff, not because I was thinking about relationships, and affairs, and whatnot. When I had put in my 5th house offer last year, and I finally went under contract for the first time, I did something very specific and very telling. I sent my roommates an email talking about how I'm going to miss living with them. I didn't think much of it when I sent it - I was thinking it was a nice gesture. Eileen actually called me on it, and she was right. There was something about how I wrote that email that displayed my lack of true happiness. Deep down inside I was screaming. Something didn't feel right about the home buying experience for me. I didn't stop looking at houses because I was tired of looking, but because that feeling came bubbling up front and center into my view. For whatever reason I had swimming around in the back of my mind, I simply wasn't ready to buy a house, at least, not with the way I was going about doing it.
If there's one thing that's true to my nature, it's that if something is bothering me it will eat away at my soul until I figure out what the hell it is and get it to stop bothering me. I want a house. I KNOW I want a house, but at what cost? Where are my sacrifice points? It was the same with the bad boyfriend relationships. What level of happiness did I give up by choosing to settle for the so-so relationships simply for the sake of being in a relationship?
In cognitive psychology and decision-making there's an effect called the sunk-cost effect*. (That's a pretty quick, simple, and straight-forward article that I recommend reading.) We, as humans, do this ALL THE TIME. It's only one of many ways in which we lie ourselves into a decision that isn't always what's best for us. Most of those examples above involve the sunk-cost effect. "I'm already dating him, I guess I should see where this will lead, even though I'm not sure if I'm really happy with him." or "I'm already dating him and I don't want to break his heart." or "I'm already working. What if I can't find a better job elsewhere?" or "I've already been approved for a mortgage, and I've already wasted this much of my real estate agent's time, I guess I better keep on looking."
This is how we fail - one little lie to ourselves at a time. We forget to pay attention when something feels uncomfortable. We forget that we can get too comfortable in something just because it's there. Being comfortable is not the same as being happy.
I've never known someone to fail when they are truly happy. It's as though those are two mutually exclusive properties of life that will never cross paths on a Venn diagram.
Yeah, logic humor. You know I had to throw it in there somewhere.
*Edit - #2 in that article is, "I might as well keep watching this terrible movie because I’ve watched an hour of it already." Someone might point out that I just posted about watching In the Name of the King despite deciding it was bad after the first 3 minutes of watching. The difference here is that I knew it was bad before ever putting it into the DVD player. That wasn't a sunk cost effect, but a masochistic self-torture decision that I made to buy the movie and see exactly how bad it really was in the first place. I had heard that it was bad, but it had such a great cast of actors that too much piqued my interest. I really couldn't imagine all these great people making such a horrible movie, so it was sheer curiosity that got me into that Bad Decision. Curiosity will always kill this kitty much more often than all those other failure types combined.
