On Hurting People

The things we are taught and told about hurting people, or being hurt by people, is quite contradicting when you really get down to it. It's from one extreme - "if they love you, they wouldn't hurt you" - to the other - "we hurt those that we love the most." These two stories have the possibility to drive someone like myself up a fucking wall. Regardless of my continuous cursing, and my never-ending cynicism, I'm the biggest sucker you'll ever know for romance. I've been this way for as long as I can remember (if only I knew where I got it from, so I had someone to blame for my sometimes ridiculous standards). Thus, I tend to lean toward the "if they loved you, they wouldn't hurt you," theory, because I mean, come on. Who WANTS to be hurt by someone they love just to be able to tell themselves "well, they hurt me, so they must love me most of all!"

Due to my romantic, fairy-tale believin' nature, I regrettably, by default, tend to judge people that I care about very quickly when they make mistakes and hurt the people they love, and, if I, myself, make a mistake and hurt someone, I tend to beat myself up about it for a long time (usually ending in a 'Okay, Erica, one more day of calling yourself a bitch, then you can be off the hook').

Now, when I say "hurt someone," I don't mean you dump someone and break their heart because you just aren't feeling what's between the two of you anymore, and I don't mean those little white lies we all tell like "NOOO, that dress doesn't make your ass look big..." I mean those hurts that literally hurt you just as much as the person you're hurting. When you know immediately that you've done something so stupid and careless that you don't even know what to tell yourself to make it go away. By hurting someone, I mean you've crossed a line and done something completely uncalled for. By hurting someone, I also mean that you are a cheater, or a liar, or you are constantly taking someone that you care about for granted for your own selfish reasons (*FYI, these are hypothetical examples*). Hurting someone in this manner shouldn't be the way you are "living your life." That's the life of a single person, no doubt. Not the life of a person in a 'messed up' relationship.

Because I melt to/wet my unders with the idea of monogamy, and because I have a one-track mind when it comes to who I'm buying alcoholic beverages for, and who I'm banging, I take my relationships more seriously than, maybe, most twentysomethings probably do. I also take the thought of hurting someone very seriously (don't we all?). Luckily, I haven't found myself in the situation on multiple occasions where I've felt like I completely fucked up. I've always taken pride in being loyal, honest and trustworthy. In retrospect, I must proudly admit that I have been on the receiving end of fuck ups on more occasions than I have been the one fucking up.

It's because of this little fact, however, that I've recently discovered how much like SHIT I feel when I know that I'm in the wrong. You see, for example, when you are a serial cheater, or a pathological liar (read: *again, these are just examples, I'm not attacking you, I swear*), these dishonest things become habits, and we tend to forget that not all habits are good ones. Just because it's how you've done things in the past, that doesn't mean that's how it should be. And just because something is already doomed, or not working, that doesn't give anyone a right to run it into the ground, crushing any pride and dignity that may be left. Kellie Pickler doesn't have to be right when she says "once a cheater, always a cheater," damnit. The woman CAN DO wrong.

When it comes to things like cheating, or being a "player," someone simply not being able to make up their mind, or someone crossing a line and just plain ol' effing up ROYALLY - I've, unfortunately, come to the realization that I cannot hold someone to my standards of what a relationship should look like. While I'd love everyone and their Mother to be honest, trustworthy and monogamy-loving people, some people just refuse to get down like that. Or maybe they don't refuse, but they are too scared to put all of their eggs in one basket, or maybe they just can't seem to get the fix that they are looking for. Regardless of why people do some of the things that they do that, in turn, hurt people, chances are those mistakes are not intentional.

It turns out, I usually have some almighty point that I intend to make with these blogs, or some ultimate "Erica believes this so this must be right" theory that I would like to thrust upon you for my own satisfaction. But lately, it doesn't seem politically correct to think that I would be capable of changing a persons way of thinking about relationships, as much as I thought I could with my, apparently unrealistic for modern relationships, logic and reasoning. In the time I've spent brainstorming about the topic of hurting someone (you know, just that little, tiny, minute thing of hurting someone), coming to an all-encompassing solution as to why we hurt people has been virtually - and intellectually - impossible. And trust me. Like everything else that's on my mind, I over-analyzed this in every way that I could in attempts to come to a conclusion.

So, instead of a clever ending to a not-so-clever blog, I'll leave you with this: I wonder how many times something has to happen before it becomes a bad habit we can't seem to break? Lessons learned from the ghosts of girlfriend's past? Trial and error? Three strikes and you're out? When does a relationship make the turning point from "hurting the people you love the most," to the point where you've hurt someone so many times, you couldn't possibly love them?