Expectations....

Someone asked me recently if it was possible to be just be friends with someone you have/had romantic feelings for. I absolutely think it's possible, but not without a LOT of torture, tears and heartache. It comes down to whether you feel that the moments of friendship that you do share are worth the moments of sadness that will accompany them. It baffles me that we put ourselves in these situations. How many friendships never came to light because we destroyed them with expectations of romance and dating and were dissapointed? How can you even truly like someone before you know them? You meet someone who kind-of might be cool and jump straight in to "potential relationship mode". It's not the qualities of the person you are attracted to, it's the idea of a relationship and hormones that are calling the shots. I'm definitely guilty of falling in love with ideas and not people. Maybe not so much ideas, but with possibility. A lot of times we fight for the concept of a relationship and not the actual person. One person tries to change the other into the ideal and that is almost always the beginning of the end. I am so sensitive to being altered. Maybe it's my innate stubborness, but as soon as I feel as though I'm not accepted for truly who I am, I bail. I'm the first to admit I suck at relationships, but the one thing I never do is try to make someone into someone they are not. People are complex. They are made up of parts that annoy you, parts that you admire, parts that you hate, parts that you couldn't live without....Relationships (for me) are about loving the sum of the parts, the bigger picture. The whole person. Unfortunately, people get to chose the parts of themselves that you get to see. The "bigger picture" is still cropped. We all have secrets we'll never tell, parts of our history that will always remain just ours. The trick is finding someone's core self, finding the pieces of them that affect everything else. When you find those elements of a person, that's when it becomes something real. Your relationship stops being about similar interests, taste in food and starts being something strong. I'm not defined by my hatred of tomatoes, my love of Ocean's 11 or my obsessive organization and I certainly don't want others to define me or pigeonhole me based on those things. You have to want to search. Getting to know me is a journey and one that many come ill equiped for. Perhaps I should give out a compass, a canteen and a weapon at the door. We're too quick to categorize people I think...to put them into sections of our heart "friend" "romantic interest" "weird guy". You'll never know what someone is meant to be to you if you don't abolish expectations from you mind and focus on getting to know who they are. I need to try harder to listen to my own advice. I see a gorgeous Asian man and immediately my mind swirls with possibility and hope. Its the hope (and the hormones LOL) that destroys the possibility in the end.