Another Milestone reached thru diplomacy and honesty

One of my obsessions or motivations in life is seeing the progress and growth of various things I'm involved - anything from swimming 40 laps to my personal relationships with others. Each time I swim, I like to see myself adding additional laps. So is with friendship - I like to see it grow. This same obsession is also my weakness. When I don't see things progress or progression is very slow, I give up easily.

Human nature, as we all know, is not perfect. That's why there are always issues in dealing with other people. It gets worse when people get closer. It seems like the older I get, the more I see people being afraid of getting close to other people. They somehow keep the distance. Just before my ex committed a relationship with me, he said it feels really vulnerable to open up and be close to someone else. That's why it seems that relationships/friendships do not progress much as we grow older. Both sides are afraid of being vulnerable and getting hurt, and also hurting some other person.

As with everything else, I don't like any form of unreasonable restrictions. In human relations, truth telling is very liberating! However, raw honesty can ruin the relationships/friendships unless any one of the two doesn’t have enough trust in the friendship. The same time, I believe that honesty is very important if you really want to have any kind of relationship to progress. Hiding what you really think about others either because you are afraid that they won’t like you or afraid to ruin so called ‘friendly terms’. To me personally, I’d rather have true honest friendships instead of sugar-coated fake ones that I need to pretend or hold the truth, at least with those I care about.

Recently, I had pretty big fights/arguments with one of my best friends. There were some of the things that had been bothering me but I somehow held those because I wasn’t comfortable enough in telling those for several reasons. But when things got piled up inside me, I started throwing those. It was not nice at all in the beginning. Worst thing was still instead of telling the truth, we were just trying to hurt each other verbally. When it got ugly, she was the FIRST one who seek to reconcile by saying that ‘you are important to me so hope we can pass these issues.’ There I also realized that she’s important to me too and didn’t want to hurt her. We were not against each other side. So I told her the truth – things that had been bothering me. I tired to not be accusing her instead explained what things made me think of those assumptions I had. But still things I told her was very rough. I don’t think any one else could take it unless they really really trust in the friendship and me personally.

She not only took it well; she explained to me ‘point by point’ – topic by topic on those. I was so impressed. I could probably never handle something like that as I’m never really diplomatic when it comes to conflicts. Instead, I’m very confrontational and don’t try to understand the other side to make my arguments more effective. I learned a lot of things from this instance and from her – how I should approach conflicts by being mature and open enough to understand the other side and how I could improve myself on the things I’m still uncertain about.

Mostly importantly, I’m very grateful that I have got such a great friend who really trusts in our friendship and trusts in me.