Relationships.

First, thank you for the responses! My formspring account has four questions in queue right now, and the blog has had over 40 visitors since I reformed it last week. I'm hoping and praying that the questions continue to roll in and you continue to allow me to help you with the things that crop up in your life. I received this question last week, and have been mulling it over in my mind. I wrote down some tentative answers yesterday, and I'm going to expand on them today.

What is the key to a good relationship?

Trust. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. Wisdom. Courage. Time. Honesty. Authenticity. Respect. All of these work together in a relationship to make it sustainable. Pulling one of these out, puts more strain on the others. Think of them as pillars, holding a relationship above the chaos and misery of dysfunction. Removing one does not upend the relationship into dysfunction, but it puts more weight on to the others. Remove another and the burden increases. Eventually the pillars crumble under the weight of holding up the relationship on just a few of the keys, and you descend into full blown madness. Let me tell you a little about each of the keys to a good relationship.

Trust.
You have to trust the people you are in relationships with, you absolutely have to. Without trust you will second guess everything they say to you. You will doubt any expression of friendship or affection. You'll constantly assume they are up to something, and that they are trying to manipulate you into something. Without trust, you have paranoia.

Forgiveness.
You must be willing to forgive the people you are in relationship with. People will always hurt you, not always on purpose, but just because we are flawed creations, and everyone has moments where they say something mean or cruel. If you hold on to those moments and focus on them, it will poison your relationship and ruin it. An unforgiving attitude destroys more relationships than anything else. The inability to forgive and let go will prevent you from ever having a lasting healthy relationship.


Sacrifice.
Love is sacrifice. Being a sacrificial person, willing to go out of your way to help a friend, will speak volumes of their importance in your life. The people that matter to you, you will sacrifice for them. You will go and pick them up at 2am in the morning when they are drunk. You will go pick them up when their car breaks down. You'll hand them a five spot to help out when money is tight. You'll go with them to the hospital if they are getting an operation or an ER visit.


Wisdom.
Wisdom plays an important part in all relationships. Without wisdom, you will choose the wrong people to sacrifice for, and those people will use you. Without wisdom you will forgive and forgive and forgive and the person will keep on hurting you. Without wisdom you will trust someone who doesn't deserve your trust. Wisdom is critical to making the right decisions in who you allow into your inner circle of friends, and wisdom is critical in who you choose to befriend and be in a relationship with. You must have wisdom in order to be sure when to let the person you are in a relationship with know your secrets or how far to trust them.


Courage.
Relationships take courage. It takes courage to admit you are wrong and apologize to someone you have upset. It takes courage to be open and vulnerable with someone, and tell them things about yourself. It takes courage to trust people. Courage is bravely advancing into situations that are tense or tricky, and being open and willing to addressing them, no matter how hard they are, or how tough they become.


Time.
The best relationships form over time. You don't see someone and become ultimate best friends immediately. Relationships take time to form, and time to forge those bonds. It takes time to understand a person's character, and the measure of who they are. People who rush into friendships and relationships without knowing the other person first usually get burned really hard in the end.

Honesty.
You have to be honest with each other. You have to be candid. You have to be up front and real with the other person you are in a relationship with. If you aren't, you are setting the stage for huge blowups and Real World style drama that will destroy whatever you've built.


Authenticity.
You have to be authentic. You have to be who you really are, because if you are posing, or hiding behind an identity or some form of facade, the real you will come out at the wrong time and the person you are in a relationship with will wonder where this other person came from. Being someone you're not will only hurt your relationships because you won't be able to fully express who you are, and you will drive yourself crazy playing a role you've created for yourself.


Respect.
If you don't respect the person you are in a relationship with, you will drive them away. No one likes to be disrespected, and no one likes to be treated wrongly. Respecting the other person is essential to the well being of your relationship. If the other person in a relationship has a habit of disrespecting you, get out. It will only get worse. This is not to say that incidents of disrespect won't happen, but if they have a habit of happening, there's something seriously wrong in the relationship, and you should use wisdom to evaluate the state of things.

These things are good for all friendships and relationships, but I have left out one important key that makes many good relationships sweeter.

Love.
If you tell someone you love them, you are telling them you are committed to being their friend, or their significant other, no matter what. Love is an unconditional decision, to care for and serve the other person. A commitment to respect, serve, and forgive the other person without conditions or terms. Love is a word that is used flippantly and wrongly today, without any regard as to what it actually is. This is why so many relationships are in trouble today, because of an inadequate understanding of love. Love is not sex. Love is not being free to do whatever you want to the other person. Love is being willing, able, and ready to sacrifice for them, and to hold to that commitment day in and day out, no matter the cost.

All these things work together well to make good relationships. If your relationship is lacking one of these keys, take the necessary steps to put it into play in your relationship. You won't regret it.

With sincerest regards
- theDangerparty

Love.

The questions have come trickling in. I received the next question yesterday morning, and spent much of the day thinking about it.

Why do fools fall in love?

This one has two answers, one lighthearted, one serious. The lighthearted answer is when you read this that two people who are in love are acting foolish about the other person, in the sense that they say gooey things to each other, and are generally nauseating in public. So the question reads like this, Why do two people who are in love act foolishly?

The answer is simple. When you are with the one you love, all the things that make up our worries tend to take a big step back. Time seems to fly by and stand still, and all of a sudden you don't care about that paper that's due in two days, or the early morning shift you have to work. You make personal sacrifices to be with the one you love, sometimes sacrifices you shouldn't make, because you pay for them in the morning. Love is a many splendored, powerful thing that is worth the sacrifices, worth not getting a full night's sleep, worth turning in a paper a day later.

The serious answer is when you read the question like this, Why do foolish people always seem to be in love with the next person that comes along immediately?

This answer is not so simple.

The kind of people that always seem to be falling in love with the next person to come along , we all know them. Everyone has a friend that's always falling for the next person to come along in their life. Everyone has a friend who's always going from one ugly messy ending to the next whirlwind beginning to the next coming soon attraction of a relationship train wreck. They don't ever seem to be single for very long, and the people they "fall in love" with, or "fall so hard" for, or "he/she's the only man/woman for me, and thank God they finally came along", always seem to be shady, questionable, or even a little dangerous. This constant succession of drama, abuse, and emotional turmoil makes you wonder why they put up with it, and what keeps them going. The answer is that people are hurting. The people who go from one relationship to the next are in pain.

For the men like this, they are trying to validate who they are as a man by their relational successes, but when the relationship fails, they don't have anything to validate themselves so they quickly look for the next relationship available, often dating emotionally unstable women, immature women who are significantly younger than them, or women who are significantly older than them with their own emotional baggage. This creates another flawed and troubled relationship, doomed to failure, recreating the cycle of self-validation and emotional pain.

For the women like this, they are looking for someone to love them. Simply put, they desire love to feel lovely, to be loved, and they seek it out constantly. We call them attention whores, sluts, and a wide range of other misnomers, but at the end of the day they are women who have been hurt by some terrible event or person in their past, and they want to feel lovely to overcome that great pain, or cover it up. The pain in their lives is self-replicating, almost like cold fusion. They are hurt so they seek love, they find it, that "love" uses them for it's own selfish gain(self-validation), the woman is hurt more and she goes looking for another "love", finds it, it hurts them, etc, etc. The cycle repeats itself, and they are constantly hurt, hurting, or about to get hurt.

Now, what I am saying is hardly anything new, and in some cases the men and women stuck in the cycles like the two I have described even know they are in them. What can they do? What can you do as their friend?

There is good news. These cycles are capable of being broken. For the men, it starts with stopping. Stop looking to women to validate yourself as a man. Seek the company of men to validate yourself. Look for other men to affirm you and build you up. Emulate older, wiser men, stop acting like a little kid, and start acting like a grown man. Read the book Wild At Heart by John Eldredge to get started. Read the website Art of Manliness. Those two will get you started on how to heal your hurt. If they get you going, but there's still that intense struggle of will about how to validate yourself, seek counseling. A good counselor will help you identify your wound that's keeping you from progressing into manhood.

For the women, it also starts with stopping. Stay single for a bit. Get past that intense fear that you are not lovely because some man is not telling you that. You are lovely. God makes the world, He makes woman last. God creates Eve out of Adam's rib, looks at her, sees in her every woman who will spring from her(including you), and God says "It is very good. " After you've been single for a bit, if there's still that intense emotional distress, seek counseling. There's a hard pain in your past that you aren't addressing and a good counselor can help you figure that out. Being whole will be the first step to actually finding the real love we all desire.

If you are the friend of a person like the ones I've described above, love them, unconditionally. Be there for them when they are hurt, and listen to them while they are on this journey toward wholeness. Intervene if they are pursuing a fail cycle, and hold them accountable to getting better.

With sincerest regard,
theDangerparty

A New Direction

I need an outlet to really help people, and my sporadic schedule with work really limits my ability to plan a regular time to interact with people. Solution: The Internet. With a combination of my formspring account and this blog I am going to begin an advice column and do my best to help people with the everyday and heavyday problems that crop up and bother people. Being a bit of a hellraiser and a natural dissembler, with a natural talent for experiencing life without flinching, I think my own life has given me enough experience to help with a wide variety of situations in my life. And by the grace of God, if I can't come up with an answer, I hang out with a pack of older, wiser, and more grey men than myself.

I put up a blurb about my formspring and already got a bite with the first question for the advice column.

i love your beard.. i just want to get lost inside of it!

Thanks! I eat a lot of chicken and produce a lot of testosterone so it comes in real thick when I grow it. If you want to grow a beard like mine, you start with eating more meat or taking protein supplements, follow that up with some strenuous exercise and you've got a recipe for a testosterone overload that will only lead to more beard.

With the sincerest regards,
- theDangerparty