A friend of mine had recently decided that she either wanted a loving, supportive relationship or to be truly happy alone.  I asked her if she would be happy being by herself for the most part, but maybe having a couple people who she was “friends” with, but had some sexual chemistry & hooked-up with when she saw them & maybe even spent a couple boyfriend-girlfriendy days with when they were both in the mood. What other types of relationships could we be in?

I was getting a ride home from work today with my lovely girlfriend thinking about what to write about for S&C today when the song “Let Me Love You” by Mario came on.  I immediately — as I often do — exclaimed, “Holy shit, I just got a great idea for a S&C article.”

Mario’s song talks about how if some girl just let him love her he would never cheat on her & he would treat her right & give her everything [she] wants & needs. I think this feeling of wanting someone who is in a bad relationship presently & wondering why they are in it & why they can’t just give it up & realize they should be with someone like you who would treat them so well is pretty common Why can’t people in bad relationships just let someone treat them well?

We all have those friends who are always in relationships.  I constantly wonder why they can’t just be by themselves.  They go from relationship to relationship — most of them bad, abusive, controlled, unhappy, etc. — & never really learn anything.  See, this is the problem with serial monogamy, it’s that you never have that rest from the relationship activity you need to synthesize what you have learned.

A lot of times these people will say something like, “Well I don’t wanna leave this until I have something better.”   What’s wrong with serial monogamy?

Last week in my post about measuring levels of friendship & how that pertains to relationships, I somewhat accidentally ended with a possible definition of love.  In the end of the post I said “… a really good relationship that is built to last is one where you give everything you can, & know about yourself right now, to the other person & they give it right back to you …”  In conversations with some friends, & specifically Simon, after this post, I noted that I ended with a cutesy statement “For many people, this is called love,” but when I began to discuss the post & this ending further, I realized that it could be much more than a cutesy statement. What is love?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to know someone.  Everyone references this concept a lot.  After so long, people say they don’t even know you.  Or someone will know someone better than anyone else.  Maybe that someone knows everything about me.  It goes on for a while.

I have a hard time with the idea that someone could know everything about me or vice versa.  It is not because I don’t want to share everything I can with someone, or have them share that with me, but that’s just it, it’s everything I can share with them, not everything about me.  The reason I can’t share everything about me is because I, Cole, don’t know everything about me yet, so given that to be the case, how could someone else know more about me than I do? — Well, they can’t.

When one really thinks about what it means to be friends with someone, & furthermore what it means to grade your level of friendship, i.e. best friend, good friend, etc., a lot of it is just how comfortable you feel with that person.  For example, if you feel like you can tell someone that you have a secret fetish for eating leftovers off of your girlfriend, then this person is probably a very good friend of yours.  How does this measure of friendship relate to relationships?