Welcome to 2017 and the Spring Semester, everyone. With the addition of some new talented writers to our staff, I have opted to write a few more personal pieces this season. Although you may find me writing a My Voice opinion, this column will deal with topics that come up during my time at Sinclair.
This week’s topic is New Year’s. While some struggle to keep their new year’s resolutions, I’ve been successful several years in a row. While it’s going to be Year of the Rooster, I’m calling this “Year of the Sidechicks.”
Reduce, remove or just pick one of the side chicks already.
I’m all for taking things slowly in relationships. I was entirely a prude for a good portion of my time in the dating world. What I’ve noticed lately is that these side relationships and connections people have on the backburner end up doing more harm than good.
Judge me all you want, but although I’m not entirely old-fashioned, I have had a renewed appreciation for the importance of commitments. This doesn’t mean someone has to go putting a ring on their partner anytime soon, or even escalate the casual dating towards a more serious courtship.
This way of thinking extends beyond the romantic areas of life.
It’s just that often, what keeps you from holding that New Year’s resolution–or any resolution at all–is that feeling of ‘if’ and the back burners of your mind.
Feel out the emotions you can responsibly feel out this year.
You cannot expect to move forward and get to happiness if you don’t let yourself actually deal with the emotions that often pack themselves in the crevices of your contingencies.
I find it quite dangerous, not to mention laborious, to make it a habit to deliberately obstruct commitment. The type of man or woman you become is a result of your habits.
If you make it a habit never to naturally explore your romantic potentials, instead opting to have numerous casual relationships, as a person you will become uninvested by default.
When you work so hard towards your diploma here at Sinclair, do you think you would rather obtain your degree or at the last minute switch to underwater basket weaving and withdraw?
All I’m saying is that if you’re somewhere in that zone where you remain uninvested, to see some positive changes you will have to be a little braver. You may not realize it, but when you really shoot for that homeostasis, comfort feeling, you end up feeling uncomfortable.
Every unresolved and unsatisfied part of your person will remain unresolved and unsatisfied, in exchange for your relative safety from change.
The cycle relies on the benefit from the immediate reward of casual relationships and endeavors providing the threshold amount of perceived benefit to continue the behavior.
By the time you come around off the high that the freebird lifestyle provides, you’re already prepared for another hit. Love is often compared to a drug for these types of reasons. The withdrawal from the lack of depth and connectedness causes many to simply relapse into those tendencies.
Many times, our innocent behaviors can lead to undesired consequences. Those innocent texts to that person you’ve disguised in your phone as Pizza Hut or Karen from finance have a lot of deeper meaning than many realize.
It says a lot about where you are as a person. Is always having another person a habit you feel comfortable developing?
If it is, just be sure that you can afford the consequences.
Barton Kleen
Executive Editor