It’s my fourth year of high school and trust me I’ve witnessed too much drama. I’ve never been in a relationship, but my friends have, and witnessing this drama has been funny, but it also has taught me that people are different when it comes to interacting with their crush. How is it that you can do horseplay with your friends and then your crush shows up and you start talking badly about how immature your friends are? HYPOCRITES! People act differently because they fear being rejected when their crush sees their true selves but why live a lie? If it’s the right person, he or she will accept you for who you are.
While I was lost in my thoughts about how even in literature characters are in fact hypocrites to please others, I came to a realization that all of this leads to failure. Literature is the art of different ways of expressing themes through understanding what perpetuates misunderstandings among characters. Expressing complaints can be tough, yet it is the lack of honesty and communication from the beginning that leads to not truly knowing your partner once living with them, leading to a dysfunctional relationship filled with false dreams and illusions.
It is said that the first few years of marriage are the hardest. This is because you don’t exactly know a person until you start living with them. While people are dating and disagreements are first encountered, they try to show their best faces without saying what they want to say, making their true personalities a “shock” when marriage is set. This is shown in Middlemarch when Lydgate is “unkind” to Rosamond- his wife- because he doesn’t want to ask her father for money. This creates a conflict between the two of them that leads the author to use words such as “evil expectations”, “quiet”, “tears” and “disobedience”, to describe the resentment Rosamond felt when seeing a different side of her husband. In addition, Lydgage says, “I ought to have seen that I could not afford to live this way”, showing how before marrying his wife he was showing a false version of himself giving his wife false dreams and hopes. This illustrates how not being honest from the beginning can lead to misunderstandings in communication that can impact a relationship. Lydgate even admits that he's been a hypocrite when he says, “It is I who have been at fault” showing how he knew that he was showing a mask of his fake true personality and a false reality where he pretended to have enough money to afford his wife’s expenses.
Being a hypocrite creates lies that lead to believing in a future life full of illusions and lies. This just makes things worse because the more you wait to take your fake mask off the more conflicts you’ll encounter until the relationship is broken. When people finally take off their masks it leads to huge regrets of being in a relationship with a hypocrite. For example, when Lydgage reveals his true personality filled with accumulated lies, Rosamond thinks “that if she had known how Lydgage would behave, she would never have married him”. In this case, Lydgage was not honest with both his harsh character and the way he lived-didn't have enough money for Rosamond’s standards. It is important to always tell the truth. Many times, one might say, “I’m fine!” when he or she isn’t. People do this to avoid conflicts, yet conflicts are necessary to see if the relationship is worth it. If the truth comes out and there are disagreements, then communicating and talking about the problem is the route to take. There are 3 possible situations:
1) If an agreement is made about the problem, then yay, it’s a green flag!
2)If an agreement still hasn’t been made even after talking about the problem, then it’s a red flag. Sorry buddy, this person is not for you, unless you can live with that fact about them-at least you know the truth.
3) If no talking is done, then more problems will accumulate, and fake illusions and dreams will continue.
Being honest from the beginning is the best way to find a real lovable relationship because without honesty, the real bases of a relationship are not functional which can end up destroying and unveiling the harsh realities of people. It's like trying to make a cake without flour, it won't taste good! Just how a relationship won’t be functional if honesty is not there. At the end of the day, the truth hurts. However, we can’t just live in a world where there are only flowers and rainbows.
Most people try to be someone they aren’t just to impress their crush, yet when they can no longer fake this, they end up creating a personality shock with their partner. This begins to raise questions like why didn’t he tell me? If he had told me, I wouldn’t have been mad. Why is he acting like this? All of these contribute to factors of living a life trying to please someone who loves you for being someone else, not yourself.
In “Cat in the Rain”, as the wife complains about her hair she says, “I get so tired of it… I get so tired of looking like a boy” which shows how in reality she’s simply tired of not having the marriage of her dreams, she’s tired of her husband not paying attention to her that she begins to look up to the padrone who acted like the gentlemen of her dreams. The wife always dreamed of having a fun marriage filled with life adventures yet, it’s the lack of communication that doesn’t let her husband know what she exactly wants. The wife complains by saying a repetition of “I want” yet, never directly telling her husband the real problem of what she expects from their matrimony filling her with false hopes. This lack of communication leads to misunderstanding among each other, as the husband simply thinks she wants a cat when in reality all she wants is his attention. The wife is not frantic enough nor honest to say what she wants so her husband responds by saying, “‘Oh shut up and get something to read...’ George was not listening”. Her husband simply can’t understand what she wants of him and simply thinks she’s talking nonsense which leads to him ignoring her, thus staying stuck in a dysfunctional relationship. Sometimes, married couples expect to read each other’s minds by sugar-coding their complaints, but little do they realize that this makes things worse because problems can be misunderstood. Being frantic about expressing complaints about the same person you are complaining to is very stressful. What will he think of me? Will he still love me if I tell him that I want X to be fixed? Why does he keep doing that? For a relationship to work, honesty is needed in the most blunt and clear conversations.
It is important it truly shows your true character to your boyfriend or girlfriend before getting married. Keep reality over appearances. I know it can be tough to accept the reality of someone but for your good just try not to sugar code because this will create miscommunications that will be misleading into a view filled with fake illusions of what you or your partner want from each other. Remember: Lack of honesty and communication will lead you to be stuck in a toxic and dysfunctional relationship. So, be bold and be yourself!
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