Playing the Stock Market

 

There are many analogies that are used for friendships.  My personal favorite is banking.  We are all investors: each one of us has a finite amount of capital that we are willing to spend throughout our lives.  Daily activities such as eating, hanging out with friends, and homework are all stocks that we invest in.  These stocks all pay out a unique type of dividend.  Invest too much in eating and you’ll gain weight, too little and you’ll grow skinny.  Invest too much in work and you’ll gain stress, too little and you’ll drop in performance.

With relationships the lines get more muddled.  A comparative investment system exists where you invest so much in your friendship along with your partner.  If you have invested equally, then there is a balance and happiness is achieved.  If one person invests too little, or too much—well then you’re both eventually going to get hurt.

I often find myself overinvested in relationships.  I always have more time and energy that I want to spend with my friends than my friends, me.  I am willing to get very close to my friends, and they often open up to me on a deeper more intimate level.  The problem though is that I am a “package deal”, you can’t get my advice when you want it and need it without the rest.  If you want me to be a part of your life you have to have all of me.  You need to spend a minimal amount of time, put in a minimal amount of effort, and listen and be concerned for a desired minimum as well.  As a result, you’ll get everything that comes in the package: friendship, advice, understanding, integrity, and commitment.  I think I offer a good deal, problem is it’s a big package, and a lot of people aren’t ready and willing to join without a lengthy trial period.

I don’t like trial periods.  They hurt.  They require me to treat everything as normal and fulfill their needs while ignoring my own.  Why is it that I am the one always being tried out, why can’t I be the one trying them out?  Why do people trust me so much less than I am willing to trust them?  It is a system I am personally sick of.  It makes me feel used and later, abandoned.  It has effected my long term self confidence, diminishing it with each failed trial.

As a result I often use defense mechanisms to protect myself.  The simplest and most frequent being the ultimatum.  I put time constraints on my friends; reasonably excessive from my point of view, but too immediate in theirs.  Ultimatums never work, and I end up hurting myself even more.

I hate these destructive friendships that I am in.  And I currently find myself in a plethora of them.  However, I am not ready to tear apart my social structure after such a recent heavy restructure.  It is too painful, too difficult, and something that I need to do when I graduate from school soon enough, anyway.

So I press on.  Painfully accepting my personal defeat, suffering under the social pressures that I hold myself to unwittingly.  Just so that I simply don’t look bad in the social scene.

What hurts the most, is how unoften and infrequent my pain is noticed by those who think they are closest to me.  And how little they view themselves responsible for the tidal wave of emotions that they bring crushing relentlessly upon the rocky shores of my resolve.