Steven Wilhelm

Well, go on Steven, write something…………… Ok, so truthfully, I could write a full length novel about relationships, and more specifically, my experience with them. I will try to keep the length somewhere between a pamphlet on the usage of semicolons in modern English and a Harry Potter novel. I am going to try to write as if no one will EVER read this and then edit it as if my grandma will because she probably will.

So I’m writing this because I am currently enduring a personal dilemma, namely, what role should relationships play in our lives and therefore to what ends should we pursue certain ones. That is the current motivation, but let me first just spew some thought garbage about relationships. I have definitely had my fair share of experiences from relationships despite my less than gloat worthy amount of them. I have learned things about myself from them, for instance, that I struggle to be self aware and therefore have hurt people by acting as if I felt things that truthfully, I didn’t. I have also learned that I have a tendency to overreact to certain actions like say people who are not always right there to respond to messages. I 100% believe people should be able to be autonomous and not always be at my beck and call, but because of some experiences in the past it is difficult for me to not feel like people are going to leave me if they aren’t always right there.

I think relationships are a great way to grow as a person because they kinda make you grow by necessity if you care about other people at all. They have made me address toxic traits about my personality because if ( and sadly when) I have continued to act poorly, I hurt people of whom the absolute last thing I would have ever wanted to do is hurt them. Oh yes… on toxicity. I see a lot of thigs on the internets that talk about toxic people, and while I do believe that there are people who are more (sometimes a LOT more) likely to have toxic traits than others, no one is inherently, or wholly toxic. I dare say I believe everyone on this earth either exhibits toxic traits or would exhibit them if put in the wrong circumstances. Except John Stamos, he is a perfect specimen of what it means to be a human. Unhealthy celebrity crushes aside, I think we should definitely not let people kill us with their toxic traits and therefore we remain perpetual victims, but I also think we should do our best to try to understand everyone as best we can. Some people, we may never understand, but I think we could understand most if we are willing to just try, and then maybe we would understand them enough to at least not feel the need to hate them.

Hard to know if I should use this post to talk specifically about my personal experiences with relationships or about my thoughts regarding relationships in general as the title suggested that I would… I guess that you and I will both find out that answer together. I’ve been thinking a lot about how society should address relationships and maybe more so, what modern tech could do for relationships. One thing I think can be said is that modern tech has made proximity no longer such a determining factor in people finding relationships. Now, if you love purple unicorns and System of a Down but no one else in your town of 300 people share the same affinity, the internet can tell you where very such other person lives and you can both enjoy horned, equestrian, metal rock together forever. I hope that we keep developing technologies relating to relationships because I think we could get it right and make dating websites not so… whatever they are right now. I think the more we understand psychology, the more we will be able to help people find relationships that can actually work for them… Like that episode of Black Mirror on Netflix “Hang the DJ”. Maybe I believe in SciFi too much but come on… History has shown us that technology can just shatter our expectations of what we think is possible. I don’t think that a program being able to profile our exact desires and match them with what can work with others is that much of a stretch. I think humans are WAY less complicated than we think we are and therefore much easier to understand than we act that we are.

OK, back to me. What I am struggling with is truly an attribute of my codependency but also wondering how much it is my codependency. God, being a human is weird because you cannot truly see the world except through your own, very inherently biased, eyes. I cannot know if any of my desires stem from mental illness or not. I don’t know if relationships should be our number one goal, not a goal at all but a thing we accept in passing, or what. I do want to clarify I am talking about romantic relationships here and throughout this post. I really could write a book on how I feel about relationships and I’m trying to avoid that here. Me personally, I absolutely love having a partner in crime, just that one person you know is there, period. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a draw if our society was more community focused and therefore people far less often feeling like they had no one to turn to or just feeling alone in general. I say this because while I love the intimacy thing, I am also very interested in the concept of polyamory. I think that experiencing as many forms of love as this world has to offer is just an amazing thought. I personally feel like poly is the next logical step in the evolution of relationships, or something very like poly is. The biggest hurdle will be combatting the feeling of jealousy, but just how we combatted our lack of wings and learned how to fly, I think so can we learn to be a species that loves more often than not. Something that weirds me out about monogamy is that humans are ever changing creatures. When you marry someone you are truly marrying who they are in that moment, it’s impossible to know what dramatic life changes they will experience that change the very things you love them for. I think my biggest reason for desiring a world where poly is the norm is that close relationships to other people are absolutely amazing, and each can help you grow and feel different things, how dreadfully sad it is that we experience less of them because of an emotion like jealousy or fear. Not saying I don’t experience these things or act on them myself.

Now to the motivation for writing this post in the first place. When you meet someone that you think could really be something worth having, what do you do? What do you do if they are far away, what do you do if they couldn’t even know how they feel unless they met you in person? How often or likely is it really that we find people that are really, truthfully, a potential good match? If it is rare, I dare say with how much relationships can give us it is almost a responsibility to ourselves to overcome as many personal and practical barriers as we could possibly overcome to just try.

Yay, post two has come to fruition. I said last week that I’ll be posting once a week and currently I am not sure exactly what day each week I’ll be posting but sometime between Tuesday and Thursday seems right. I’ll pick an official day soon. Also hurray I can now take donations on my about page. Still no obligations at all, but if you are rich and see potential, this is me waving my hand saying HEEEEELP! Much love to everyone and I’ll talk to you next week. ❤

I guess I’ll start by saying I don’t know that I am ready to start yet but I need to start somewhere. I want to talk about all the things but I haven’t done much writing so I believe there will be some learning to do. Anyone brave enough to try to stick with me during this learning process, I salute you. My goal with this blog is really just to have a good (more formal and put together than Facebook) medium to express my thoughts about existence and maybe be able to resonate with others who think like me. I would like to eventually be an influencer and be someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the complex problems we as a species face. I believe having people whos main job it is to think, is something our current economic model severely struggles to support but is very necessary for our long term survival. When people take time to sit down and think about things, they catch problems that others may have missed in. Experience, and deliberation of said experience, are equally important.

On a different note altogether but also somehow not, I’m quite tired of the accepted belief that humans should have to each individually prove they deserve to exist otherwise live a life of poverty, homelessness, and often feel shame for themselves. If luck wasn’t at play at all in any way shape or form I could almost back this idea (but still not really because a punishment should fit the crime and no crime is deserving of poverty), but since luck absolutely is a component, I absolutely cannot and will not back this model. I understand the necessity of this model in the ye-olden times where resources where scarce but that is no longer the case and just like we learned how to fly, I 100% believe we can learn to stop living just to survive and start living to thrive, because we have the resources to do it, now we just need the majority to stand up for themselves and demand a new way of thinking. We can do it, it’s hard, but I believe we can do it.

So There, there are some words. I hope whoever you are you enjoyed reading this and more hopefully you are rich enough to fund me since the system doesn’t inherently value non product centric work. I will be adding a way to sponsor me soon but seriously zero obligation, if you have it to spend and feel compelled, then yay, if you don’t, I have passed on funding a million things so I understand. Hope all is well, we shall see how this goes, till next time, love you all.

P.S. Any and all feedback very welcomed and encouraged, I want to get good at doing the words and ideas on “paper” thing.

P.S.S I plan on uploading a thing, be it words, words with pictures, or some other hopefully relevant thing once a week.