Me: "It is ok... never mind."
Friend: "You turned away from my bid!"
It struck me that I wasn't practising what I "preached". I gave up on trying to explain myself when a friend of mine didn't really understand what I was driving at during a conversation. This came soon after I shared this article with her. When she said that, I stopped myself in my tracks and continued the conversation, mustering the energy to be kind even though my initial reaction was to clam up and escape.
"There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work."
-- Master of Love
Making requests for connection is known as "bids". One can then "turn toward" or "turn away" from the bids. It makes me reflect upon myself the number of times I have turned away from bids from friends, family and loved ones because I am "busy" and "pre-occupied" with my own thoughts, feelings or business. I have also begun to pay more attention to people who respond to my bids and show up whenever I need them.
Sometimes, it is hard because we all have our different priorities in life and own sh*t to take care of. How do you give your time and attention up for another person or people?
So you learn. You will learn when you open up, communicate and let the other person know. My friend telling me blatantly that I was turning away from the bid made me more self-aware.
Another friend of mine tried keeping count of her bids secretly without her partner's knowledge by keeping track of the frequency of her bids, the number of times her bids were received and responded to and how often she reacted to her partner's bids. She then shared her experiment with her partner after a week. Sometimes we avoid scientific approaches to love and relationships because they are counter-intuitive. You may wonder, why does one need to read, learn, test and invest when it comes to the matters of heart. I have no studies to back this up, but I believe for most of the things to do, when we want to make it work, we usually try to execute it in an effective and intelligent way.
"The issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are," wrote The Philosophers' Mail. I will not claim that I know what constitutes marrying the right or wrong person (definitely not in my capacity!), but I agree that sometimes knowledge and a continuous quest to understand yourself and your prospective partners / loved ones better are terribly important.
"Presently, we marry without any information. We almost never read books specifically on the subject, we never spend more than a short time with children, we don’t rigorously interrogate other married couples or speak with any sincerity to divorced ones. We go into it without any insightful reasons as to why marriages fail – beyond what we presume to be the idiocy or lack of imagination of their protagonists," said The Philosopher's Mail.
While I am in no place to determine or to recommend what is right or wrong way of loving but i guess, there is really no harm in taking a more scientific approach sometimes in our relationships with people around us as my "bidding" experience has shown.
So, this is my bid to our readers. Will you turn away or turn toward the bid? :)
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