The Recognition of Habits
Have you ever been in a relationship with someone for so long that they claim that they recognize your habits even before you do? And over time you’ve found, much to your annoyance, that what they said was true?
“So I have to change my habits so that he/she doesn’t think they know all about me,” is often the thinking that goes on afterward. There are many folks that feel angry whenever someone close to them assumes that they know everything about them. I know I get pissed off whenever my partner of eleven years says he knows all about me. He doesn’t. There are plenty of surprises in me that he doesn’t know. Yet he thinks he knows me so well that nothing I could say or do would surprise him.
I tested this theory of his recently once I recognized this thought of his. The last time that we were out to dinner at a steak house, I ordered fish. His eyes widened and I saw the surprise run across his face. “So there,” was my non-verbal response to his assumption of what I would eat. It’s only a small thing, I know, but it made me feel better.
When you live with someone, you do become aware of how they respond to things. You listen to what they say and then you watch what they do about what they say. When the same behavior repeats itself, yes, it is easy to assume that behavior will keep going on. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t want someone to believe in you; to motivate you towards doing other things in other ways. It doesn’t mean that you want your partner to think: “Well, that’s all there is to her/him,” then. It makes sense on a lot of levels.
Except…
It’s not for our partner to guess that we might want to be doing different things or some of the same things differently. I resent hearing: “Oh, you’re not going to stick with that,” whenever I start something new. What I really want him to do is support me and help me break my patterns of non-finishing so that I can finish something to completion. But when he tells me I get annoyed at being told. It’s a no-win, really.
In the end, I have had to face the fact that there are some patterns and habits that are deeply ingrained in me and that even though I might not like them, they are a part of me as the sky is blue. I may want to change them but that doesn’t mean that I will. To get angry at people around me who recognize these stops and starts is not fair to them, I know. It’s like trying to lose weight, you know? You try and try and don’t give up on trying even though you’re not succeeding. But still, the next time I try something, I don’t want to hear the words: “Why are you even bothering?”