I'll tell you what I would have done

The Love and Relationship class I'm teaching at the college got off to a good start this week with an enrollment of 20 which includes Kugler pilot, flight instructor and fellow Gazette columnist Dick Trail and his wife Ann.

I look forward to the contributions a seasoned married couple can make to the class and the insights they will be able to provide our traditional students in the class who aren't yet married. There have been inquiries to the Gazette as to whether or not the class is being offered online or not and it isn't. I've written before about why I don't teach online classes and will probably write about it again. If you're going to take my classes, you have to show up in person.

One of the things we talked about on the first day was that no relationship is the same because every relationship involves two unique people. In the history of the world there have never been two people exactly alike in every way, there isn't now, and there never will be. And since none of us are the same, no relationship can be the same either. Certainly we can make general predictions and projections based on what has happened in the past but the key word here is "general." No one can predict with absolute certainty the fate of ANY relationship, regardless of how promising or dangerous it looks.

Along those same lines, I was having a conversation away from school the other day about a particular subject and the person I was talking to said to me, "If it would have been me, I'll tell you what I would have done." Most of us realize what an outrageous thing this is to say to someone but a lot of us say it anyway. The truth of the matter is that no one has any idea what they would do until they're confronted with the exact same situation, and since no situation is exactly the same, it's a conflict in terms to say it to begin with.

No one else has my personality, my temperament, my outlook on life, or my norms, values, and morals. So even if they would handle a situation I was in differently from me, it doesn't mean that their solution would have worked for me. The easiest thing in the world to do is to be a Monday morning quarterback and we've all had a lot of experience doing that. We judge and interpret everybody else's attitudes and behaviors using our own definitions of life which, for the most part, aren't very helpful to others.

I get a lot of advice about how to lead my life as I'm sure many of you do as well. Everybody else always seems to have a better idea about what we should do than we do. I'm always amazed when I talk to people about the things I hope for in my life and they tell me that "it's probably not going to happen." How would they know that? They can't get inside me and know what my true feelings are; my hopes and my dreams and my ambitions. And if those hopes, dreams, and ambitions involve someone else, they can't get inside the other person either, even if they personally know the other person and they've talked to them about the same situation.

That's because we often aren't completely honest with other people about important things in our lives. We do public posturing by pretending to go along with other people's attitudes and ideas, even when they diametrically oppose our own, because we don't want to alienate them or upset them. So we often tell them what we think they want to hear.

Consequently, regardless of what we THINK we know about other people and the life choices they have to make, most of the time we know much less than we think we do. So the next time you're tempted to tell someone what you would do if you were in their situation, it's probably best to just keep it to yourself because you DON'T know what you would do and even if you did, what you would do might not work for the other person at all.

Unfortunately, there are people in the world who are so dependent on the approval of others that they will take their advice because they believe everyone is smarter or more insightful than they are and when we do that, it very often leads us in the wrong direction instead of the right one.

There's also a big difference in giving a person advice because you're convinced this would be best for them as opposed to giving advice because you think it would be best for you in regards to the relationship you have with that person.

I remember the movie, "About Last Night," starring Robe Lowe and Demi Moore that was out several years ago. Rob Lowe's best friend was played by James Belushi and they palled around and did everything together until Lowe's character fell in love with Moore's character and they began talking marriage. Belushi's character did everything possible to sabotage the relationship and the upcoming marriage because he was going to lose his best friend. He didn't care about his friend's happiness, he only cared about his own and we see that play out every single day in our own lives when people, pretending to act in our best interest, are really, instead, acting in their own.

And if we get seduced by their perspective instead of listening to our own heart, it could cheat us out of a lifetime of joy, happiness and bliss.