Who is to Blame Here?

Your washer / dryer breaks down.  You go to the local store and the salesperson tells you that there are no washer dryers available right now, they will be coming soon but  no one knows  when.  He then shows you a range of washing machines and you decide that maybe you can make do without the drying feature as you have so much laundry piled up at home and you need something NOW.  The salesperson also tells you that with this particular washing machine, you probably wont need a dryer anyway.

So you buy the washing machine, clear the laundry and all is well for three months, until the seasons change and it starts to rain every day.  You then wish you had waited for the washer dryer, because this isn’t really what you wanted, and when that sales guy said you wouldn’t need a dryer if you bought this machine? Well he was misleading you, but YOU chose to believe him.

Who is to blame here?

Now lets apply what just happened to relationships.  You are lonely.  You dread holidays, you fear the future, maybe your biological clock is deafening you.  You know what you want from a partner but you never seem to meet anyone who ticks all the boxes.  You want someone NOW.  So along comes Mr Unavailable.  He may be married,  have a girlfriend, have several girlfriends, have emotional baggage or even a personality disorder, drink or drug addiction. But hes ready to fill that empty place in your life RIGHT NOW.

You know that he isn’t really what you want, but you have been so lonely for so long and you have a deep fear that you will never find someone special. So you take him home and begin a relationship ( or at least that’s what YOU think it is).  Everything is fine for 3 months, you are both trying to impress the other, you are both excited at having met someone new, you love the honeymoon period.  All is wonderful.

Then it gets shaky.  He calls less, he backs off, he needs to spend time some place else and you are wondering why this is happening.  You then enter into a cycle of looking for answers.  You change your own actions in an attempt to get back the guy you had for the first three months.  You wonder when he will change, when he will leave his wife, why he doesn’t stop drinking, why he treats you so badly. When he lead you to believe that he was going to be enough for you he was misleading you, but YOU chose to believe him.

Who is to blame here?

The moral of this story is that if you enter into something, anything from purchasing a washing machine to starting a relationship, what you see is usually what you are going to get.  You enter into an agreement that accepts the terms as they stand at that time.  That washing machine was never going to turn into a washer dryer.  You bought  a washing machine and that’s EXACTLY what you have.  That married guy came to you with a wife.  You ACCEPTED those terms, you agreed to those conditions. You started a relationship with a married man ( attached, drunk, addicted, jobless) and that’s EXACTLY what you have.

Who is to blame here?  The psychic who tells you that he has no intentions of leaving his wife?  The man who came to you married, told you he was married and cant understand why that was OK then and now its not? Very often what we have is exactly what we agreed to and the only person we have to blame is ourselves.