Living With Not Getting What You Want
Honoring one another’s preferences and choices
I have seen so many adults debating who’s a better actor or who’s the best basketball player of all time. Folks will go back and forth for hours, and no one will budge. Very rarely will someone concede and say, “You know what, you’re right. They are better.” The truth is, that doesn’t need to happen. We are allowed to have different opinions. These aren’t life changing views. They are preferences.
When we say to a friend, do you want to go to the Beyonce concert with me, and that friend says no, we feel taken aback. Because we are in a relationship with that person, we want them to like what we like or want what we want. Life doesn’t always work out that way. When people want something different, it can be a knock to our ego. We think all our ideas are great and wonderful and when someone doesn’t agree, it can make us second guess ourselves.
I once had a friend who had a friend, who just wasn’t my type of person. However, this friend really wanted to be my friend. She would ask to go to coffee and spend time together and all but ask me “How come I’m not your friend?” I couldn’t really explain it. There wasn’t anything wrong with her. There wasn’t anything in particular that she had done. She just wasn’t for me.
Not being on the same page or wanting the same things inside of our relationships can make us uncomfortable. This discomfort can be triggered by:
Someone not being pleased with our actions
Disagreeing with someone
Not being aligned on the type of relationship you want
Making a mistake
Having to say a hard thing that someone else may not receive well
Not being forgiven
Being forgiven by someone who still isn’t interested in continuing the relationship
We sometimes try to fight this discomfort by forcing our perspective and preferences on others. Rather than accepting that this person is entitled to feel the way that they feel, we try to convince them of our point of view. When someone doesn’t want to go to a function with us, we may have to get comfortable going alone. When someone isn’t ready, or is unwilling to forgive us, we may have to make our peace with being unforgiven. Our work is not to try and change their mind.
There are many things in life that we won’t see eye to eye on with other people, and that’s ok. We get to decide who we want to be friends with, what concerts we do and don’t want to go to, who to forgive and who not to forgive. We can feel differently about how to handle situations. We can like and love different things. It’s our life and we each get to choose for ourselves.
Journal Prompt
How does it make you feel when someone you care about disagrees with you?
A Few Things That Caught My Attention This Week
New Episode of You Need To Hear This: Don’t Suffer for the Sake of Peace
The Lies Mothers Tell Themselves and Their Children, by Elise Loehnen in The New York Times.
What To Do When You Have Work Burnout but Need to Keep Going, by Tina Chadha in Oprah Daily.
Great post. as I got older I started to feel as though certain friendships or people weren’t aligned with my life if we disagreed on something. It wouldn’t be all things but it would be key things that made me think “maybe we’re not suppose to be friends”. But just recently I have accepted that we’re different and our experiences shape us and I just don’t need to share my opinion on those things with them.
Thank you for this, Nedra. This and several of your Nuggets have me looking back at a failed relationship from a newfound perspective. Your words are like an x-ray vision of past situations. I read this and can recall the moments of discomfort triggered by those same bullet points. Again thank you for posting these words.