Welcome back to Social Mathematics here at Help! I’m Post-Grad! Today is part one in a multi-part study on boyfriends. I have at least three sub-topics so far, but I could probably prattle on and on about boyfriends… So, I’m calling it a “multi-part” study, even though it won’t have too many parts at the moment.
Today’s section is:
How Boyfriends Encourage Growth
Otherwise known as What I’ve Learned from My Ex-Boyfriends that Has Made Me a Better Person, Or Not.
Here is a Venn diagram about boyfriends:
Boyfriends give off both a positive influence and a negative influence, the point where they intersect is the change you experience as a person (this could probably be said of girlfriends too). Every person anyone interacts with causes a change in their person, so obviously the people closest to us produce the most change. I guess I could also call this post “What I’ve learned from my friends that has made me a better person, or not” too….
But this isn’t only about me, this is about boyfriends in general.
The ideal relationship goes something like this. Girl meets boy, boy and girl fall in love and become a partnership. Both girl and boy are able to coexist in positivity. They take the base of their personality and build upon the best elements.
In contrast, an unideal relationship is the same, except there may or may not be a partnership. Girl and boy may or may not coexist in positivity. They might not build upon the best elements, instead, a majority of growth is on the worst elements. Things probably do, or should, end in shambles.
But usually, things are neither ideal or unideal; they just are. So people equally build upon their best, worst, and mid-spectrum personality elements.
Let’s look at a few boyfriend examples.
We’ll start with Evan.
I’ve said many times that Evan is the biggest sarcastic ass I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. The funny thing about that statement is that it’s self-proclaimed. People tended to meet him and think as much, but they were always caught off guard in his sincerity about it.
To survive dating Evan, you must have a thick skin and be able to dish out what you take. Evan prepared me to deal with all the sarcastic people I would meet in my life. In fact, I even perfected my sarcasm to my own person.
I wouldn’t say this is an ideal quality necessarily, but it illustrates my point. I never became a “sarcastic ass,” but I took his sarcasm and incorporated it into my own demeanor. I like to think of it as “anti shit” armor. Which is definitely something I would consider a good thing. I take no “shit,” can dole out anything given to me in kind, and it comes with that handy BS meter I mentioned once.
So even though this isn’t necessarily a positive thing, though it can be, I would consider it positive growth because it is growth without compromise of self.
Let’s look at another example.
I talk about old Brody sometimes on here. He doesn’t have a tag, but he probably should… I might retroactively add one. Anyway, old Brody ended our relationship with the classic “ignore you away” technique.
That’s not what’s important though, what is important is the result from it that I experienced: increased paranoia.
I’ll give you a visual representation:
What I forgot to include was my paranoia levels now, but I think they’re back around my normal… Not a normal person’s normal by any means, but at least my normal.
So, in this case, this is an example of negative growth. See? It’s fascinating, I know.
The last case I want to mention is Larissa. It’s complicated at best, but she will change and regress based on her boyfriends. I call it the “Boyfriend, No Boyfriend” paradox. Sometimes people lose themselves in relationships and never get back to who they were, or who they want to be. Thus, they end up in a continual loop where they change and unchange and change in a completely new way over and over again. It kind of looks like this:
I think this is probably the worst case scenario to get in when discussing boyfriends and growth. Because yes, you should grow together, but you really can’t be part of a relationship unless you really know who you are.
Anyway, this is a sort of serious look at this subject with a kind of weary ending… Next time, let’s discuss the number of potential boyfriends one has in relation to the number of actual boyfriends one has. Funny stuff there.
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