That’s the title of one of my favorite songs—and no, this isn’t going to be one of those song posts (nothing against them, but personally that’s just not my bag). But it just reminded me of how I view relationships (prepare for extended metaphor, people).
Building a relationship is like building a tower of blocks. And I’m not talking just about romantic relationships, I’m talking about all relationships. Friendship is a little bit different in structure (lower, maybe, with a wider base), but very close friendships tend to have more in common with romantic relationships than with other friendships that are not so close. Often the best friends really do make the best lovers as well. Not that there’s not a difference between the two—even as an asexual, I have to say that I see a huge difference between love for a friend and love for a significant other, mostly in intensity. But still, it’s a much blurrier line for me than it probably is for most people, simply because sexual desire (on my part anyway) isn’t part of the picture.
So with that said, yes, building a relationship is like building a tower of blocks. If you both build with care, it can become a tall, beautiful castle from which you can ground yourselves, but if one of you is not careful enough, even one careless movement could be enough to bring the pieces crashing to the ground. And then you can either choose to rebuild or walk away.
And it’s fun. It’s playing with blocks, not working. At least, to me it is. It seems a lot of people don’t see it that way—to them, I guess sex is the only fun part of a relationship, and all the rest is just work that they do because it allows them to keep on having sex. It really baffled me at first, to realize that most people who are sexually involved with one another actually don’t talk about what they’re doing, and just sort of wing it. How on earth can they stay on the same page?
I guess they’re relying on whatever relationship models they’ve built up, but what if they’re each thinking of two different models? What if one is trying to build a castle and the other just wants a shack? Obviously the resulting relationship, or tower of blocks, is going to be incredibly imbalanced. Most likely, it will eventually fall.
I’ve had to deal with a lot of these kinds of mismatches, over the course of my life. My so-called best friend (we’ll call her K) turned out to be just a friend of convenience, who ditched me as soon as she found someone to get married to. (Why is it that female friendships so often turn out that way?) And of course, M didn’t want the same thing I wanted either, though I knew that from the beginning and I didn’t care. I was satisfied with that relationship in almost every way, so preemptively walking away was a pretty hard thing to do. Still, the warning signs were there, so better to do that than to face what I went through with K again (and I’m fairly certain it would have been much worse with M).
But now I’m left feeling like not only do I not have a tower of blocks, but I don’t have any blocks either. Like even if I met someone else that I liked (in a romantic way), I couldn’t build anything with them because I left all my blocks with M. And even if I hadn’t, I doubt I’d find anyone who wants the same thing I do, anyway. At best, I might find someone willing to compromise, but that’s a delicate operation. It would take quite a bit of effort, and would it even be worth it? I don’t know anymore.
Basically, I’m just being pessimistic. I don’t usually tend to get this way, but I definitely do have my doubts every once in a while. For now, I’m just going to enjoy being alone for a while.
1 Comment
December 5, 2008 at 3:33 am
Another great analogy! I feel your pain about running out of blocks. I never date, I make friends. Sometimes I fall in love and the lines become so blurry that I honestly never know quite where we are. Since one wrong move is enough to destroy everything, I never quite ask.
Unfortunately in my case my loved ones ended up getting deported, year after year. Now I have no blocks and no strength to even think about building again. Building friendships takes much more time and dedication than dating and so it can get exhausting when things keep ending badly.