Relationships

I've been thinking about relationships of all sorts (friendships, romantic relationships, work interactions, interactions with strangers) a lot lately -- Mainly how to initiate them, and how to have better ones. I found two relationship articles that really resonated with me.

Soulful Relationships

Initiating Relationships with Honesty and Directness

Both are by Steve Pavlina, a Personal Development Guru. I disagree with Steve on a lot of things, but I think he has nailed it with both these articles.

Soulful Relationships is applicable to any relationship, even your relationship with someone you pass on the sidewalk. I think it describes an absolutely beautiful, compassionate way to see other people, and I'd like to align my thinking to these ideas.

Initiating Relationships is mainly applicable to romantic relationships, but could be modified and applied to other relationships as well. Honesty and directness could be used more liberally in most interactions. I see the principles in both these articles as goals for me to work toward -- I am certainly not there yet. I have been very non-direct in the past, and it just doesn't work well. I have very few in-person interactions with people because the indirectness of email/message boards/social networking sites is far easier and less scary. But it doesn't fulfill my need for human interaction.

To me, directness is really scary! It's actually hard for me to even say hi to co-workers without feeling awkward. I can't even imagine how terrified I'd be at applying these ideas to a romantic relationship. Steve explains that fear of being direct is actually fear of rejection, which makes perfect sense. He also explains that it's OK if you get rejected -- you feel grateful for the knowledge that it wasn't a match, and you move on. That sounds great in theory, until the person you want to talk to is looking you in the face and you have to actually speak up and be direct. I imagine myself being confident, honest, and direct in my mind, but a lot of times what I see in my mind is hard to apply in reality.

Well, I meant this to be a 2 line post with just the two links -- oops!