Be Yourself

Despite what you might think, there was actually a point to my previous post. Other than it being one of my favorite mental pictures, it illustrates a point that I was trying to express to someone the other night. We were discussing dating and getting to know other people in general. Her position was that we should all be who we really are from the outset, which I think is a great ideal but one that I feel is rarely ever achieved. You simply are not going to know that other person through two dates or ten dates. It's going to be a process and this results from so many factors.

Some people are exceptionally private, like the friend I was driving to the airport. She wasn't going to tell me what was wrong until it suddenly struck her that it was now ok and safe to tell me. Sometimes it's because the situation doesn't arise. I wouldn't have known she was afraid of flying unless I had driven her to the airport that day, or some other event triggered such a conversation. Other times, we just don't know the other person well enough yet. I'm not necessarily going to get into a huge religious or political discussion with someone on the first or second date because I don't even know if I like them yet and what's the point of wasting all of that effort and time. Besides, why discuss inherently controversial things. Often beginnings of relationships are calm because it's still easy not to rock the boat. We can let more things slide because we aren't even sure we'll talk to the other person again.

Again, this is all grey because it all depends on the two people in the situation. There's nothing that says the person sitting across from you on that first date won't be that soul that you just feel completely comfortable confiding every facet of your life to right then and there, but I would say the odds of that are fairly low - I can only be so many places, people. Secondly, even if you did all of that on the first night, where are you really? You're just two people that hung out one night that still might never talk again. The conditions that you met under may never replicate again. What if the next time you meet, you're stressed or tired or some other variation of your normal self. You can't be all of the subtle variations of yourself all at once.

Being yourself is not as easy as it often sounds because while we are who we are, we are not always who we are. "Though we share so many secrets, there are some we never tell."