Posts tagged with "Aaron"

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I told Aaron a few months ago that I held his morals and atti­tudes towards rela­tion­ships as a per­son­al goal. Knowing him for a while and being through a few odd rela­tion­ships issues with him has made me real­ize that he has a very healthy mind­set. I’m not say­ing that there are bad or wrong ways of view­ing rela­tion­ships, I sim­ply found that his ideas fit with my over­all life goals very well. Even though I haven’t always stuck to these lofty stan­dards in my own rela­tion­ship expe­ri­ence, I still try to main­tain this set of ideals.

I know a few peo­ple whose main goal in life is to get mar­ried. I ques­tioned them about why they have this goal, and they would tell me that they sim­ply don’t know. I’ve been through all types of rela­tion­ship mind­sets before, all fair­ly dif­fer­ent, all from dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions of my per­son­al­i­ty. There were phas­es such as “I want to be in a rela­tion­ship”, “I don’t think I’ll ever be in a rela­tion­ship”, “I’m unsat­is­fied with this rela­tion­ship”, “I’ve giv­en up on rela­tion­ships”, “I’ll be in this rela­tion­ship for the rest of my life” (haha­ha), “I don’t want to be in a rela­tion­ship”, and it goes on and on.

Right now I’m not even sure what I want. I think a rela­tion­ship would be great but unnec­es­sary. I’ve stopped being depen­dent on some­one to com­plete me, stopped look­ing at life as a dead­line, and have recon­sid­ered almost every­thing about what I want.

Being able to do so has made me think much more clear­ly and act with more con­vic­tion.

A Gift Is Not A Comment

I bought Aaron an MD play­er today. He’s been need­ing quite a few things, like his TV fixed, an aquar­i­um, a new hard-dri­ve, etc. so I thought I’d make it eas­i­er on him since his Discman just broke too. I’m not real­ly sure what he’ll say though. I’ve learned a lot about gift giv­ing with­in the last year, and I know that some peo­ple are very sen­si­tive about it. A while ago, I nev­er could have imag­ined some­one refus­ing to accept a gift, unless there was a sin­is­ter pur­pose, such as a bribe. I always felt like it was rude if some­one refused a legit­i­mate gift.

I sup­pose it’s sim­i­lar to the idea of hos­pi­tal­i­ty. Can it ever be rude to refuse some­one’s hos­pi­tal­i­ty? Even if they spend an inor­di­nate amount of time prepar­ing for such a thing? I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that it would­n’t be rude to decline an offer of hos­pi­tal­i­ty. After all, it is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the host to make sure that the guest is com­fort­able. If the guest refus­es hos­pi­tal­i­ty for what­ev­er rea­son, then that should be fine. The host should be hap­py with what­ev­er the guest is hap­py with.

It’s only with this exam­ple that I’ve come to under­stand the gift-giv­ing idea as well. If some­one refus­es to accept a gift from me, I would be fine with that. I sim­ply want to make the per­son hap­py.

Which is why I’m not wor­ried to give Aaron such a gift. I won’t be offend­ed in any way, no mat­ter what his reac­tion is.

I can’t wait.

The Rules

Aaron told me that he did­n’t think I was spoiled today. I was a bit sur­prised, since even I think I’m spoiled to an extent. I real­ize that I take many of the priv­i­leges I have for grant­ed, but I’m always thank­ful of the finan­cial free­dom that I’ve been giv­en. We seem to be able to talk for hours on end, and it’s worth get­ting in trou­ble at work for it.

One thing that we dis­cussed was the rules about accept­able dat­ing habits. The rules that he fol­lows are dif­fi­cult for me to under­stand. One seem­ing­ly uni­ver­sal rule is that you can nev­er date a friend’s sis­ter. It’s hard for me to under­stand some­thing like this, because I’ve nev­er had sib­lings of any kind. I think that the prob­lem would lie in whether a break-up would hap­pen; where would one’s loy­al­ty lie, since you’re so close to both peo­ple? I believe that if both par­ties are mature enough, they will be able to remain friends after some­thing like that should hap­pen. I real­ize that it may not always work out that way, but I believe that the deci­sion of the risk would be up to the friend and the sis­ter.

He also told me that he would nev­er date any of his friends’ ex-girl­friends, and that it was an unspo­ken rule among his friends as well. I guess the rule seems very rigid to me, as I’m sure there should be excep­tions, such as who was at fault, and why they broke up.

There just seem to be so many rules that peo­ple fol­low, good or bad. I know some girls who won’t date guys short­er than them. I can’t even begin to com­pre­hend this; it just seems so amaz­ing­ly shal­low, or per­haps I’m just over­sen­si­tive about my lack of height. I also know Chinese girls who won’t date Chinese guys. The only expla­na­tion I can find for this is that a girl may not like the Chinese cul­ture, so they asso­ciate Chinese guys with this. Yet how can every Chinese guy be com­plete­ly set in the Chinese cul­ture? The expla­na­tion just does­n’t seem to work.

One of my Caucasian ex’s said that she would nev­er date a white guy, because they always seem so shal­low. I was offend­ed because I would­n’t be dat­ing her, had I sim­ply inhab­it­ed pale skin. She real­ized that she was wrong to sim­ply asso­ciate white guys with being shal­low, based on her past expe­ri­ences.

It’s still some­thing that’s hard for me to grasp. Perhaps Chinese girls don’t find the “look” of Chinese guys to be attrac­tive, which is some­thing I could under­stand more. I still believe that one can be attract­ed to any­one though, as long as one keeps an open mind.

An inter­est­ing point that I once dis­cussed with Aaron was whether Caucasian girls found Asian guys attrac­tive the way Caucasian guys find Asian girls attrac­tive. We came to the con­clu­sion that, no, they do not. It lies in the fact that the mon­goloid race has a gen­er­al­ly slim­mer build, some­thing which guys find attrac­tive in girls, but some­thing which girls sure as hell don’t find attrac­tive in guys.

It’s a good thing that I’ve giv­en up for now.