Actions Speak Too Loudly

I sometimes think that having a brain is a curse. I’m no genius, heavens no! But I’m a thinker. I watch people, their actions, their words, and I catch similarities in patterns of behavior between different people that I interact with. Basically, I create generalizations and apply them to people based on their patterns of behavior. I do this all subconsciously. The problem with generalizations is that they don’t always apply to the people they’re labeling, at least they don’t always fully apply. But just try telling my brain that, I dare you. I am a very logical, sequential thinker. Once I’ve observed a person and their pattern of behavior, a label soon follows. The label and the person are together until death do them part, unless they begin a new sequence of behaviors that follow a new pattern. But in order to get a new label, the new behavior needs to be more extreme than the first, and continue for a much longer period of time. (I don’t write the rules, people. This is just how my brain works.) This way of thinking can cause many problems.

It’s not to say that I gold grudges, because I like to think I’m quite forgiving when I’m wronged. I would hope people could do the same for me. But when a girl shows a pattern of being a friend who lacks trustworthy qualities, my brain shuts her off. I don’t sit and stew over how upset I am with her, my brain simply forgets about her entirely. I never think to call her. I never wonder how she’s doing. I just do my own thing and assume she’s doing hers.

As I spend years and years mingling with the same singles, I categorize boys as friends, and they stay there. Even boys that come back into my life after 7 years, come back as friends. My best single gal pal gives me lots of grief for this. But it’s not me, it’s my brain… it can’t be controlled! As you can imagine, this particular application of my thinking patterns causes a lot of confusion. Apparently not all boys who are friends with girls wish to stay just friends with girls at all times in their interactions. This was a hard lesson for me to learn. When I finally accepted that a guy friend might, at some point, begin to have interest in being more than just friends, my world was turned upside down. Then my logical brain began to over-apply this new understanding in guy-friend situations. My logical brain started assuming or wondering if every guy friend had ulterior motives. My crazy, logical brain began making me think it would be a good idea to confront these "grey area" guy friends to find out which pattern of behavior applied to them. This was not pretty. Let’s just say that I’m glad to have this period of craziness far behind me. For those of you who are thinking of confronting most all of your opposite gender friends and asking them something like, “So are we just friends, or are you into me?”— THINK AGAIN! I got a whole lot of mixed responses. Each individual situation was different than I’d expected it to be. And in the end, I just stirred up a whole lot of trouble.

Life has gone on for some time now, and the dust has settled. My wisdom and maturity in these situations (neither of which came easily), has taught me that actions speak louder than words. If a boy is my friend and I’m curious to know what his motives are, time will tell. If I like a boy and he’s not asking me out on dates, but wanting to spend time with me, he’s interested in being friends. If a gal pal seems shady to me, she will continue to step over me to get what she needs over time, and my brain will shut her off. If I wonder which friends from my past really care about me, they will call, write, stop by, or make efforts to keep in touch. People are smart, but they’re still people. They will ultimately end up acting out what they feel, whether or not it’s the way we want them to feel— and there’s not a darn thing we can do about it!