Ideas to live by

I got the following from one of those chain letters, but the words and ideas behind them really affected me, so I decided to post them here.  Hope you all get something out of them too!

ONE.  Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.  

TWO.  Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

THREE.  Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

FOUR.  When you say, ‘I love you,’ mean it.  

 

FIVE.  When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ look the person in the eye.

SIX.  Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

 

SEVEN.  Believe in love at first sight.  

 

EIGHT.  Never laugh at anyone’s dreams. People who don’t have dreams don’t have much.  

NINE.  Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it’s the only way to live life completely.  

 

TEN.  In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.  

 

ELEVEN.  Don’t judge people by their relatives.  

 

TWELVE.  Talk slowly but think quickly.  

 

THIRTEEN.   When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, smile and ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’

 

FOURTEEN.  Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

 

FIFTEEN.  Say ‘bless you’ when you hear someone sneeze.  

 

SIXTEEN.  When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.  

 

SEVENTEEN.  Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for others; and Responsibility for all your actions.

EIGHTEEN.  Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.  

 

NINETEEN.  When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

 

TWENTY.  Smile when picking up the phone.  The caller will hear it in your voice.  

 

TWENTY-  ONE.  Spend some time alone. 

More Friend Frustration

I want to comment a little more about the previous post, because maybe some of you can give me some of your insight that might be helpful.  The situation is with my friend X.  I’m going to use an initial for reasons that will become clear in a minute.  I’ve posted about X before, so this is an ongoing situation that just came to a head.

Well, X has two small children, and unfortunately last spring she and her husband needed to separate due to a situation of domestic violence.  X is now living in a women’s shelter with the girls and our contact, due to the distance that the shelter is, consists of phone calls.  X has decided that life is too tough for her being a single mom, and being a parent in general is too tough and she wants her husband (she’s not ready for a divorce) to step up to the plate and become responsible and involved in her and the girls’ lives.

It’s gotten to the point where every phone call is about her latest problem about her living situation (“they haven’t fixed the light over the kitchen table” or “one of the washing machines in the building still isn’t fixed.”)  There’s nothing that I can do about any of this, and as I point out to her, she’s very lucky in this economy to have a roof over her head, and a safe place for the her and the girls to live.  But nope, it’s one complaint after another.  And everything revolves around her and the problems in her life.  She is so self involved that she can’t even fathom that other people may have issues, or even that society in general is in a state of upheaval.

I finally reached my end point when she announced that people were “trying to control her” because they disagreed with her when she discussed going back to her husband.  I finally told her that our friendship would indeed change if she went back, because I couldn’t trust her husband.  That was my choice, but it was necessary for my safety and well being.  I emphasized that I was in no way trying to control her, but that I had to take care of myself.  She accused me of trying to control her, and after I realized her irrationality, I told her that our friendship needed some space.  She went ballistic and started yelling at me over the phone.

She doesn’t realize that her family and friends have worried and spent sleepless nights thinking about the harm that the husband caused, and that we have had to deal with those feelings, each one of us, in our own ways.  I spent many nights before she left him, worrying that someone might end up in hospital or dead, and I tried for months, along with many other people to give and get  the couple professional help, which was unsuccessful, before helping her out of the situation.  I have nothing against the husband, except for the fact that he’s done nothing but the bare minimum (read that as court ordered) to change his behavior.

Right now, I’m exhausted from worrying that if X goes back to him that someone might end up dead.  I can’t worry about that.  As one of my other friends said, at least I got her and the girls out at the critical time, so that they’ve been safe for almost a year.  I also talked with an older friend of mine, who has a lot more life experience, and she told me that sometimes we have to distance ourselves from the toxic relationships.  That I wasn’t getting anything our of the friendship, since there was never a two way conversation, it was all X’s grumblings.

So I what I have to say is that I realized the toxicity of the friendship and said I needed my space.  I can only worry about my own actions in life, I guess.