March 11, 2004
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How do you express anger to your enemy? To your best friends? To a parent? Have you ever noticed that we are so much worse with the people we know and care about when it comes to anger. If I am angry at an enemy of mine, I usually don’t even associate with them, so it’s kind of a moot point. With best friends, we’ll argue and call each other stupid or what not. With parents, it usually gets to the “I hate you” statements and big time yelling.
Is that because we are more comfortable with them? Is that because we feel, whether consciouly or subconsciously, that we can get away with more? I liken it to a sine wave, where the amplitude is the amount of love you give a person. When we are mad, we dive into the negative, and can be as negative as we are positive at other points in the wave. We show them more love and we show them more anger. Maybe it all evens out. That’s the scientist side of me though. Realistically, we shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t mistreat our loved ones just because we think we can get away with it.
I have a couple of friends that were arguing with each other and one asked the other, “Why are you bitching me out, but you don’t do the same thing to anyone else? They did the same thing.” She responded, “Because you’re my boyfriend.” Does being in a relationship change or raise the bar on morality? I understand that one expects more from their significant other as far as understanding and tolerance, but that doesn’t give you the license to go bashing them whenever you feel like it. Nor does it handcuff them to accept all the abuse. It’s just ironic.
Comments (3)
AMEN brother
Those are some very good points and questions! I don’t have an answer for it tho =P
I personally think that we feel we can dismiss the faults of strangers or people who aren’t as close to us because those people aren’t around much. So it’s something that does not have to constantly be in our faces or something that we have to deal with daily. With parents, or significant others…they’re there all the time…so the sense of urgency to “solve” the debate, convince someone you’re right, or make your point is much greater because if it isn’t “solved” then it will continually be a problem brought up which leads to a greater annoyance. Sorry..that was long =)