Never Walked In High Heels

It is a situation as old as politics and nearly as contrived. We see the Romans crying out first for Caesar, then Brutus, and finally Marc Antony. All are supposed to be the leaders who’ll save the day, the individual who is better at his job than his own predecessor, causing public excitement and all sorts of long-winded speeches in support for the new hero that has never served in public office. What is it about the unknown leader that allows us to view them as the all blame pin cushion? There is an ongoing myth that if the right person was elected, all of the issues surrounding the region, country, or the world would be solved and life would finally be blissful.

We really think that whoever this new leader is comes from our mindset and is able to see the world precisely how we see it. Ultimately, of course, this is a form of vanity in and of itself. Every individual on the face of the earth has this idea in the back of his or her mind that no one else can rightly see the world the same way that they does. In this way, politics is the ultimate form of vanity. We are able to project our world how we see it onto the face of someone who is running for office and then fill in a ballot assuming that this guy will agree with us and that he will be able to fix problem X, rewrite issue Y, and balance budget Z in order to solve everything. Thereby ending our need to feel guilty about those less fortunate, to make the world better ourselves, and to challenge our position in order to test what we really believe.

Of course in the forefront of our mind, we know that not everyone agrees the individual, so we accept and deny this respectively. The leaders with no track record who have done little in office except run for election allow us to have room to dream and a clean sheet whereon to project our new view. We believe in these projections and therefore are able to vote with a clear conscience, insisting that this time it will be different.

Like everything else, once the work starts it all changes. One by one that person who we handed our wish list to make the world a better place begins crossing out items we cannot afford and dropping pages that he chooses to ignore for a number of reasons. Once he begins to take action, we are then able to judge him by those actions and as always, they fall short of our expectations. He didn’t run the country the way I would do it. She didn’t help the type of people I would have helped. So we begin to look again, thinking that this time, for this election, we found the perfect guy for the job.

The race is never over. We think by stuffing a ballot in a box we have done our civic duty, but that is actually all we do, we simply pass our social responsibilities on to a person who we know full well will turn into our personal scapegoat. If we think that shaping the world by casting a vote for the ideal man is the pinnacle of fixing the world’s problems and the national equivalent of carrying in the messiah, than we are gravely mistaken on what the world truly needs. The hope of an unknown leader gives us the illusion that we are able to change the world by electing the guy who absolutely agrees with everything that we would do ourselves and seeks to enact our exact plan(s) into action. However, we brush the dirt off of our hands after casting the ballot.

Recently it was my birthday, and I started to think about what it was I wanted out of life during my tenth birthday. I don’t know why, but being a ten year old always seemed to be a special time for me, like it was the prime of childhood. All the books I read and movies I watched growing up, with characters I admired always seemed to be ten year old girls finding secret places that were especially their own. I looked back to a diary I kept during those days to see what exactly what I wanted. See, I believe that each of us are built with desires and dreams imprinted in our hearts. These imprints When we are young and unaware of the challenges set before us. This is when we are most aware of what it is we were meant to accomplish. As we get older, and things change, then our dreams becomes less simple and we substitute what we were meant to do for what the world expects us to do.

A while back I lost a friend who informed under no uncertain terms that my aims in life were “unrealistic” and “It’s time for you to grow up anyway.” And it’s true, any dream you have as a young woman with a disability today is still highly unrealistic. There is no job field I can enter at this point with no typing skills and manual labor being next to impossible, where my lifetime career would be simple, straightforward, and predictable. Add to the fact that I work in the arts and the entertainment industry is one of the most shallow industries in existence and you have a road map for someone trying to reach the moon without a rocket ship. He didn’t know it at the time I don’t think, but what my friend was asking me to do was to deny my dreams simply because the world wasn’t ready for them. Is unpreparedness ever a good reason to move on, particularly when it’s unpreparedness not on your behalf but on the behalf of the rest of the world? Would it be appropriate for an African-American fifty years ago to say that wanting to get a graduate school education at an institution like Vanderbilt was not a worthwhile dream simply because the school was located in an area that was still full of racial tension? Are we morally obligated to change our ambitions just because they might be difficult to reach or impossible given the current state of our society?

If someone has a family that is dependent on them or other obligations, certain sacrifices must be made, particularly when it comes to earning a living. But those of us who are able to get by and still repeatedly try to break down the walls we choose to demolish might not necessarily have the sociological standard course of action. After all, if no one breaks down the walls that are obstacles in our own culture, they will never come down on their own accord. Rather, they will stay as imposing obstacles waiting for someone in the next generation to tear them down. And so, walls are made until someone is determined to make an explosion and carry through with the demolition process fully.

Dreams are by nature just out of reach, and if they were easy to grasp and lasso down to the floor, would they be worthwhile dreams or just perpetuating the status quo. It is never acceptable to pass on your dreams simply because they are too difficult to accomplish. Difficulty is never a strong enough reason to quit anything.

There was a time when I was very very small, and I did not realize the limitations plastered on the wall. What I did realize was what my dreams were. At about the same age, I would go to sleep and not understand that the things I did after I went to bed and the images that came across my mind were not reality. The next morning I would ask my mom if she remembered flying over the moon with me or dancing with flowers on fairy dust patches. She would look at me and say “That didn’t happen, you dreamed it. It was a dream.” But it all felt so real to me, even after I woke up safely in my bed.

On the one hand, you don’t know which of your dreams will come true or not. None of us ever do. But often the most earth shattering dreams are the ones which most people cannot see and therefore assume to be impossible.

I didn’t really have girlfriends until college. In high school I was far too busy and in many ways, far too miserable to trust anyone with my deepest darkest secrets. So it wasn’t until I went away to get a university education that I knew the magic of staying up late with popcorn and movies, sneaking scandalously when the boys were nowhere around, and enjoying a really good margarita. A girlfriend is someone you can not only do all these things with, but also allow yourself to let your guard down and allow yourself to be as girly, silly, and even scandalous with in ways that you would never do so in public company. After college we went our separate ways and now that I am a bit older, I’m realizing that it’s difficult to find new girlfriends.

Everything about a young woman’s world tells her to turn inwards. We go from spending Saturday nights at sleepovers or with cocktails and DVD’s to dates with a single guy that no one else is invited to. If we are lucky enough to fall in love and get married, the focus shifts from keeping up with our girlfriends to setting up a home and balancing the new adventures of living together while making ends meet and maintaining a career. Then inevitably come the children or the additional workload or both. Men get to go to pubs and have time together in which they drink and throw darts, but for women what exactly is a girl’s night out? Older girls will sometimes invite each other to what they call “girl’s night in” where they paint their nails and wear pink; having slumber parties that remind you of the teenage years. Men don’t need to be reminded of their teenage years; they never lost the ability to have “guy time.” But as women we go backwards, turning into the ultimate giggly girls and watching reruns of Sex and the City in order to feel not quite so juvenile. None of this is for me, I’m afraid.

Even if you fall in love with a soul mate and marry him, he will never be a girlfriend. Girlfriends watch each other grow up and listen to each other as they share insecurities about sex, child raising, hormones, all the little details in life that you wouldn’t dare tell anyone else. The world encourages girlfriends which are unreasonable; irresponsible even, spending money on clothes and unnecessary knick knacks. Being superficial and silly all the time shrinks the value of a true girlfriend until she is replaced by the faux girlfriend who is obsessed with a combination of men and handbags while having all their conversations over cosmopolitans. For those people who only have the “faux girlfriend”; the fake girlfriend, I often wonder what they would do with the problems that broadside me on 2 a.m on a Thursday.

Truth is, all my girlfriends have sprawled out over the globe and perhaps because of the distance, we have been forced to stick close to each other. More often than not, we make accidental phone calls to one another at two o’ clock in the morning, forgetting the difference in times zones. Sometimes those middle of the night phone calls carry the most urgent news and the deepest desire for a friend; not a husband, not a mother, but a girlfriend to listen to the situation. When the 2 a.m. phone calls are by accident, we bolt out of bed anyways, excited to talk to one another at last. And when the 2 a.m.’s come with an urgent need, we are quite used to disturbing our beauty rest and having a conversation with the people we value the most. Like anything rare, when a girlfriend passes by, you can’t help but drop what you are doing to see if she needs anything on her way.

Trying Too Hard

When my grandfather entered into my room and saw me working on my biology homework for the third late night in a row, he said something that I’m pretty sure had never crossed his lips in his life, “Sweetie, maybe you are trying too hard.” Flash forward ten years later and I am in an acting class; the older woman who leads us reminds me of all the good witches in fairytales that I had read. She is looking at me and commenting on the work I have done saying, “The problem is not your effort; the problem is your work is inhibited by the fact that you are trying too hard.”

Growing up we are told to do to whatever we can to be the very best. We are taught to attempt difficult math problems and other various paths, even if it would require a special effort. We are told in short, to try hard. But at what point is attempting something with too much effort destructive? At what point does trying hard prevent an individual from learning because he is so focused on his effort rather than the subject at hand?

Acting teachers are notorious for saying, “try not to try.” This of course is misleading. As an actor, it is our job to do the homework and invest in the character to the best of our ability and then let go so allowing the muse take over and create something more powerful and true than can be achieved by “trying” in front of the bedroom mirror. There comes a point in time when a bird has to fly and it becomes practical knowledge rather than theoretical.

I have been known to try so hard that people tell me I’m wasting energy, and in some instances they are right, due to the nature of my disability people often tell me that doing X or Y will be extremely difficult and so I believe them and start straining away to make something fit. As a result, there are all sorts of extraneous movements and energies and shutters that go off which an able-bodied person would never have in his vocabulary of smooth motions. I am guilty of trying so hard to make something work, but my own muscles get in my body’s way. In short, my disability makes it impossible to weed out the superlatives of moving.

In life, unfocused energy is an absolute plague, particularly in suburban America. We literally spend all the energy we have attempting to make a round peg fit into a square hole. Relationships, class schedules, commitments that we are not quite ready for, at a certain point in our life become lost effort. You see a boy you like in class, and you end up molding everything you say and do in order to attract him. But of course, ultimately, he was never attracted to you in the first place. A complete loss of energy, for one, forced kiss.

We are, I have no doubt, meant to work hard, but that’s not the same as trying to make things more difficult than they were actually meant to be in the first place. When this happens, we ultimately force ourselves to attempt to control what may well be out of our control, or better off not being manipulated at all. It’s a risk, but sometimes letting go of things rather than ramming one’s head against the same wall over and over is the way towards a happy ending.

In that particular instance, I think my grandfather was wrong, and I think my acting teacher was correct. We are supposed to work hard in school; education and training are supposed to stretch us. He knew that and looking back, as surprising as his statement to me actually was, he would have never agreed about slacking off in science class. I often think of his words that night, when I am working hard and finding my energy quickly sapped, reminding myself that working too hard should never be confused, with trying too hard.

When my grandfather entered into my room and saw me working on my biology homework for the third late night in a row, he said something that I’m pretty sure had never crossed his lips in his life, “Sweetie, maybe you are trying too hard.” Flash forward ten years later and I am in an acting class; the older woman who leads us reminds me of all the good witches in fairytales that I had read. She is looking at me and commenting on the work I have done saying, “The problem is not your effort; the problem is your work is inhibited by the fact that you are trying too hard.”

Growing up we are told to do to whatever we can to be the very best. We are taught to attempt difficult math problems and other various paths, even if it would require a special effort. We are told in short, to try hard. But at what point is attempting something with too much effort destructive? At what point does trying hard prevent an individual from learning because he is so focused on his effort rather than the subject at hand?

Acting teachers are notorious for saying, “try not to try.” This of course is misleading. As an actor, it is our job to do the homework and invest in the character to the best of our ability and then let go so allowing the muse take over and create something more powerful and true than can be achieved by “trying” in front of the bedroom mirror. There comes a point in time when a bird has to fly and it becomes practical knowledge rather than theoretical.

I have been known to try so hard that people tell me I’m wasting energy, and in some instances they are right, due to the nature of my disability people often tell me that doing X or Y will be extremely difficult and so I believe them and start straining away to make something fit. As a result, there are all sorts of extraneous movements and energies and shutters that go off which an able-bodied person would never have in his vocabulary of smooth motions. I am guilty of trying so hard to make something work, but my own muscles get in my body’s way. In short, my disability makes it impossible to weed out the superlatives of moving.

In life, unfocused energy is an absolute plague, particularly in suburban America. We literally spend all the energy we have attempting to make a round peg fit into a square hole. Relationships, class schedules, commitments that we are not quite ready for, at a certain point in our life become lost effort. You see a boy you like in class, and you end up molding everything you say and do in order to attract him. But of course, ultimately, he was never attracted to you in the first place. A complete loss of energy, for one, forced kiss.

We are, I have no doubt, meant to work hard, but that’s not the same as trying to make things more difficult than they were actually meant to be in the first place. When this happens, we ultimately force ourselves to attempt to control what may well be out of our control, or better off not being manipulated at all. It’s a risk, but sometimes letting go of things rather than ramming one’s head against the same wall over and over is the way towards a happy ending.

In that particular instance, I think my grandfather was wrong, and I think my acting teacher was correct. We are supposed to work hard in school; education and training are supposed to stretch us. He knew that and looking back, as surprising as his statement to me actually was, he would have never agreed about slacking off in science class. I often think of his words that night, when I am working hard and finding my energy quickly sapped, reminding myself that working too hard should never be confused, with trying too hard.

I had a friend who became unexpectedly pregnant in between her junior and senior year at university. I was a year above her and had no idea of the situation until I was sent a picture of the child shortly after it was born. It was beautiful but shocking to think that a friend of mine was now able to replicate herself. She was ahead in her class credit, so took a semester off to go through the pregnancy as well as completing summer school the summer before her graduation. She graduated on time and realistically with a better plan than any of us had at the time we walked across the stage. Another friend of mine within three weeks of each other discovered that two of her sisters had also become pregnant out of wedlock. Her family is extremely conservative and were shocked as well as embarrassed by the entire situation. The amount of angst and anger which was brought on as a result of two new babies was in many ways surprising and not particularly loving.

The thing about families is it’s become a cliché; there is no such thing as a “normal” family. However to take it a step further, families in order to function (as opposed to simply being normal) are based around forgiveness. You have to forgive the people in life that you are stuck with. Normal people find it very difficult to turn the other cheek and move on. But unlike what most people would do given the chance, functional families are able to react with more love to these sort of situations and problems simply because if you are in a family together, you are stuck with each other for the rest of your lives. Run away as far as possible and they are still genetically connected to you so you might as well get used to it and recognize that their faults are probably pretty similar to your own, or at the very least, as difficult for other people to handle.

The love of families represents the type of love and commitment, as well as sacrifice, we are supposed to show to just about everyone else in the world. But by nature you are dedicated to finding the very best for your family; this is natural instinct. I’ve known families who moved into houses without furniture just so there children could attend a particularly brilliant school district. The stories abound about mothers who discover that their children are violin prodigies and then take night shifts in order to pay for lessons which cost a days wages.

There are no normal families. Ideally, we should be able to find a balance of what is good for the people that are blood related to us, whether it be stretching our boundaries of forgiveness to accept the prodigal son back one more time or simply forgetting about the fact that he didn’t take the trash out yet again. We have to learn to afford each others grace and hopefully begin to expand that talent of giving grace out into other parts of the world until other people who aren’t necessarily related to you by blood receive that type of love and sacrifice from you. A family teaches us to accept and tolerate people as they are. Whereas we would normally walk away from friends who hurt us in the same way our family does, there is no escaping the memories of growing up together and the good times.

When I told someone of my friends original plan to have the baby and then continue on with her job in the middle-east while being a single mother and waiting for the father to get out of medical school, they replied “That sounds like a stable solution, but it’s still a bizarre and improper way to start a family.” And in a way, they are right. It is bizarre and it doesn’t go by traditions, but in the end, what we accept from our loved ones is exactly that: bizarre and unexpected. One might as well acknowledge its strangeness at the start of establishing a family.

She tells me the story with a presentation so simple, it is perfectly elegant. Her father, growing up in a communist country, figured out at the age of five that he could take penny baseball cards and sell them for two pennies to his friends; thereby making a 100 percent prophet. In the Soviet Union of the 1950s, this was of course highly frowned upon. I look at her as she retells the story, explaining everything that happened and the trouble that her father and her grandfather got into as a result of profiteering. “You should write that down and do a short story,” I say. She looks at me as if ridiculous and scoffs “Why? Two lines and you’re done. Story’s over. There’s nothing particularly interesting about it.”

How many stories like this are lost by people who assume that everyday occurrences are not worth mentioning, recording, or even refining until they are something to be passed down from generation to generation? These are of course, the lost voices of human experience, silenced only by the owner.

Often times, people think that not only do they lack the talent to adequately record a story, what’s more, that themselves and their singular experiences don’t matter in the long run of human experience. However, it is the experiences of everyday people that make up a cultural zeitgeist, not the experience of celebrities or those in power.

I am reminded of the numerous nights my friends from all over. stayed up late telling stories, either by tradition or as a means to kill the time. Amongst my friends over the past year who have gotten married, just about all of them spent the rehearsal dinner telling stories about the couple; stories that make us laugh and touch us in a way that we can’t help but cry. These are the stories that we will someday tell our grandchildren until they are sick of hearing them. And when we are gone, although it might not feel like it at the time, they will long to hear us repeat that same story over again.

Long before my own grandmother died and even before her descent into Alzheimer’s, my father had the foresight to record her telling childhood stories. Like any old married couple, my grandfather can also be heard correcting her, cutting in and out, explaining “No that’s not right” and “This is how it really happened.” They are both gone now and I’ve listened to these recordings staring up at the ceiling fan above my bed and wondering if they knew when they told me these stories as a little girl what impact and beauty the stories actually held. Stories remind us again and again that we are not alone in the human experience; that we stay connected by passing down the line.

My hands were trembling as I opened the letter. It explained to me that the railroad company involved was not at fault for my complaint; rather they listed it as an “unfortunate incident.” This term unfortunate kept cropping up as I read the letter further. It was unfortunate that I felt dissatisfied; it was unfortunate that things had not turned out better. However, there is nothing to be done. It was merely an unfortunate incident that could have happened anywhere and pointed the finger at no one.

In corporate situations both in the United States and the United Kingdom there seems to be a lack of willingness to apologize. Everything is either unfortunate or a mistake, but not worthy of a true apology. We as a society have seemed to forget that words on their most basic level actually mean something or perhaps we haven’t forgotten it at all. Perhaps the unwillingness to admit fault or wrongdoing is specifically because words mean something and if one company would say “it was our fault” a precedence would be set; meaning that the company itself was fallible and able to take responsibility for it’s own actions.

An unfortunate incident means that there is no one to point the finger at. There is nobody at fault in the situation. It’s a phrase that has been no doubt concocted by corporate lawyers seeking to make their client’s companies able to run as smoothly and unobtrusively as possible. But sometimes responsibility actually needs to be taken, and here is the area where the corporate lawyers would prefer to never acknowledge it’s own existence.

Corporate avoidance is what occurs when lawyers and representatives call an error an unfortunate incident, meaning that companies and corporations are above laws which individuals are subjected to. If there is ongoing discrimination within a particular department of a corporation, particularly when dealing with the public, it is routinely ignored, stating that the event was an abnormality and however advantageous and unfavorable said occurrence may have been, it is not to be ceased or rectified. Worse still, by refusal to take any action or responsibility to ensure that the customer will never be treated the same way again means that such behavior is encouraged within a corporation or a business. If an individual discriminated against his fellow man by refusing to allow someone with a physical disability onto a train, he would be called a bigot and a corporations policy did likewise, not only would the event be named as something culpable rather than discriminatory, arrogant or wrong.

For a corporation to refuse to take responsibility for it’s own behavior means that nobody who works for that company needs to feel guilty. Every single one of the lawyers who term the error as being an unfortunate incident can sleep at night knowing that no one will end up in jail and their legal team will calmly and quietly sweep the issue under the rug without further question.

If this is a world where unfortunate incidences occur rather than mistakes or wrongdoings, we are looking at a world where there are no legal checks in our system to make sure that companies and corporations treat individuals as fairly as individuals used to treat each other. Such a world means that there is no way for an individual to even begin to challenge a corporation which is unjustly jeopardizing his home, family, or life. 

It is perhaps one of the oldest and in many ways overly used cliché stories that has ever been written, despite the fact that it is the foundation of so many peoples’ faith. But let’s take it out of context for a moment. A man; a leader whom many individuals had their heart set on becoming king and bringing in vast amounts of freedom for their oppressed people was killed on a Friday afternoon. Of course, that Sunday morning that was soon to follow, his tomb was empty and he had risen from the dead. We pass over the events of Friday and immediately go into Sunday without wondering at all what Saturday could have possibly been like. Nobody was happy come Saturday. Could you imagine the man who you thought would be your freeing king suddenly arrested and executed in the most horrific way possible. You are known to be one of his followers and so if they go looking for more trouble makers, you are the first in line. On that particular Saturday, everyone was in hiding. They met in attics, behind locked doors, secret areas where shadows lurked in hopes that they would never be found out. It was a mixture of terror, disappointment, and rejection which filled the hearts of people who lost their beloved leader on that Saturday; and they had no idea what Sunday would bring.

To say we live in a Saturday world to a modern audience sounds great. It sounds as if there is a world full of cartoons and waffles for breakfast, waking up late and mom asking what we will do to entertain ourselves for the rest of the day. A Saturday world sounds nothing short of heaven, but this is because we know that Sunday follows Saturday, as obvious as that statement may sound, and after Sunday comes the work week where everything is back to normal. But really, even in our own lives, do we have that guarantee? Do we have a promise that Sundays and Mondays will necessarily follow Saturdays and that life will continue as it ought to if we are in a particularly good place in our lives? Do we have a guarantee when we are suffering that this will be the end of our trials and if we pass the test once we will never be expected to pass it again? Just because someone was cured from cancer several years ago, should he expect not to be tested in the future by some other disease which may also risk his life? For a world that demands biological explanation and dismisses faith and assumption as grave mistakes, we are dependant on both of these characteristics to keep our world going.

If we look around and examine the world in front of us, we quickly see that nothing is as it should be. There is an ongoing outrage brought on by pain and death and destruction that reminds us, even if we aren’t religious, this world is nowhere near perfect; we are nowhere near where we yearn to be. Saturdays when I was in college, were not particularly the enjoyable morning which I had earlier in my childhood with cartoons and loved ones to play with. Saturdays were actually the loneliest days of the week. My friends had been out partying the night before only to spend their days off in bed with hangovers trying to fight their nausea and keep down food. Relief from the classes of that week finally came with the isolation in one’s room.

To live in a Saturday world means that we are forced by one form or another to be patient. There is so much about our own futures that is undiscovered and will go unknown until we are facing the edge of them. We are, as Thornton Wilder put it in his play Our Town, “Straining away to make something itself. This strain is so bad that every sixteen hours or so, all of us lay down for a rest.” As much as we may want to look to hitch a ride and look at the end of the movie to know if the hero’s struggle was completely worthwhile, we are unable to do so. So we wait on Saturdays; a day when nothing really improves and no work gets done, paralyzed in the world that promises so much and has so much about it that is yet to be desired. We wait for the Sunday morning to find out whether or not the promises we hoped for were worth the wait we have invested; we watch the sky in hopeful expectation.

One of my best friends called me in absolute tears the other day. Two of her younger sister’s, both unmarried, are now in their second trimester. Nobody else in the family was aware that they were pregnant until this week. Theirs is a Christian family devoted to rescuing children from troubled situations. Both my friend and her mother have actively devoted their professional careers to stopping the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in separate ways. Her mother is an epidemiologist, my friend, a humanitarian worker that focuses on getting young women off the streets and out of prostitution, by showing them their value does not merely lie with their talents in bed. But for both of these women, their immediate reaction became a circumstantial symptom of abject failure.

Many families, particularly in more faith-based circles consider it embarrassing or even representative of a familial breakdown when a daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock. And it does evoke whispers among the people who surround that family, but it’s by no means the absolute worst thing that a child can do. Yet, the expectant grandparents often blush at how others will judge them rather than focusing their effort on creating the best family situation possible for the baby to come. I’m not saying that my friend’s family have fallen victim to this fallacy, but I have seen other families in the exact same situation do exactly that.

There is overall, a negative reaction within a family that bases its foundation in the Christian faith when an occurrence like this arises. There is a persistent fear amongst such people that the actions of their adult children somehow imply people are bad parents. Often I have seen parents threaten and even out right disown their children as well as their future grandchildren as the pregnancy in their eyes is the ultimate slap in the face to their child raising skills. Some of the most unchristian qualities actually come from those doing the disowning rather than those being disowned. However, what reflects worse on parenting skills in expecting grandparents refusing love to the expecting mother and child? Surely this is less of a Christian attitude than the act of getting pregnant ever was.

It is the unexpected events in life that cause us to drop our own masks of respectability. In truth, as a society, Christians today seem to care more about how other’s struggles can reflect poorly on them than what they can do to minimize struggling for any and all. When has it ever been morally responsible to even care about what the outside world thinks? Even in the most conservative families, public approval should never act as a barometer for actions or as a means to test what is morally right.

We all know somehow that there is a right and wrong, though we disagree on what exactly the nature of that division is, no one ever says, “I am going to go ahead and do the absolute wrong thing and make my life miserable as a result.” But the best among us sometimes set out to be the least controversial which creates almost a vacuum of morality. The fact that something makes waves doesn’t illustrate the fact that it is wrong and if someone disagrees or turns their nose up at your willingness to create a little trouble in the name of morality, chances are that person isn’t worth the effort it would take to appease them.

I know we love each other because we can scream at each other without worrying that it will ruin our friendship. Despite anything we say or might disagree about, or no matter how deep the issue runs, before the sun sets it will all be fine. Secure love, the best kind of friendship there is, can survive through rough waters even when going through dangerous territory is self induced. It has taken me several years to come to this conclusion, but in fact the people who you love the most are the ones you can allow to see you at your worst. Anything short of that and the relationship is built on very unstable ground.

There is of course a cliché that any couple doubtlessly believe when they first get together, and that is the idea that “we will never fight.” We hear this particularly as girls in our infancy seeing Disney movies and countless happily ever afters. All of this is infinitely harmful to our idea of what love is. More often than not, young women (and probably men, although I can’t speak from first hand experience on this one) will do anything to avoid conflict just for the sake of living up to hopelessly high expectations. Not only do they change small preferences such as what items they would normally order off a menu in order to seemingly agree with their date, but eventually it reaches into other areas as well. What they say, what movies they prefer, what books they read, and eventually what ideals they hold. All of this to be able to give the illusion that indeed, together with their mate, the two are the perfect couple.

Our idea has changed from the notion that love conquers all except for conflict and disagreement or, better yet, love can conquer anything except pure honesty. What this does is shatter our expectations of what love is. If an honest opinion is something that love won’t stand, what hope does love have to conquer any struggle?

Too often I have witnessed my female friends trying to soften the blow of truth when a situation is particularly sticky. They wind up selling half truths and reinventing the situation for someone who they are attracted to in order not to shock their potential soul mate or at the very least, to coax their lover into agreeing with their own opinions. If you have to do this, then your problem is not breaking news to someone, your problem is the entire relationship being on unsteady ground.

During one of my favorite moments in the film “Juno”, the father states “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is going to think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person worth sticking with.” His statement doesn’t sound romantic at all, but it’s true. Every relationship is going to go through periods of conflict and that is the basis for sharpening each other, making each other better, more loving, and more human than the two of you could be on your own. This is the beauty of a relationship that works.

I’ve often heard it said that lover’s quarrels are the worst kind of verbal fights around, and in many ways, true. That’s how they should be. After all, if you can’t really fight with the person you love the most while understanding that the freedom that tomorrow is another day with new challenges and testing new boundaries of your love for each other, there’s really not much hope of any relationship surviving.