For me, "I accept you as you are" means "If i'm your friend today, I'll still be your friend tomorrow, nect year, 20 years hence, even if you
never stop being so annoying" doesn't mean i won;t try to steer friends and lovers in a positive direction. And doesn't mean they have the right to walk all over me.
If they consider that it means they have a right to walk all over me, then I'll swiftly conclude that I've made a big mistake, and wave goodbye.
But if they just carry on being the same old idiot, then what the heck. People don't change that much that fast, and we all have enormous inner hurdles to overcome . Nobody knows, not really. I've sometimes waited 20 years or more for a friends to finally change their way of thinking in critical ways that made them both happier and easier to get along with . You can tell them that they need to change, it might be totally obvious to anybody else, but people need to come to their own conclusions, usually. They need to jump a whole lot of invisibly tiny hurdles before they see the big one looming ahead and realise they have to jump over it. That can't be forced
Then you have to put up with them being really full of themselves for a while, because they came to this great big awsome conclusion, and made this great big awesome change in themselves
. And, yup, they actually do deserve a trophy for that, not a big gold cup, ofc, just a nice solid trophy that isn't made of plastic, with an inscription that reads "welcome to the human race" when you look at it closely. Don't burst that bubble. It naturally deflates over time, don't we all know it?
I mean, people do change for the better by slow degrees, at least all the people who are really worth knowing do, but it's dumb to count on it. absurd to hang on it,.
I think love is a wonderful force for change. There's notthing more motivating that to realise that you've hurt somebody you love , just by being your usual oafish self. I would hope that the people i love would always be ready to point that out to me, as savagely as they like...and then ve willing wait for however many years it might take me to figure out how to do better, given the hand i;ve been dealt . It's a lot to ask, i know, but i do try to offer something like that, in advance of the return that i might or might not get.
And that's what I call "acceptance'' . do prefer my own defintion , but that article makes some very good points, working within its own definition.
Yep, i actually
do expect a body to accept me as the dickhead that I am, given that they claim to love me; just as i accept them for the dickhead they are; but that's a
dynamic sort of acceptance, not let's sit and watch the sunset til we rot. And so I come to the exact same conclusion as the author
That means if you want better relationships, you have to earn them, too.
yup. But slowly, achingly slowly, like paying off a mortgage, then finding that you need a bigger house. I don't think we ever get to the point of
deserving anything, you just have to hope it doesn't matter. And it doesn't, because we;re
all some sort of idiot, after all, and love doesn't keep accounts.