Investing in Relationships

Yesterday I felt pretty bad when I wasn’t teaching, and I was quite busy too. But today I feel much better. I went to sleep right around ten last night and woke up just before six feeling well-rested. Since I had plenty of time and felt mentally adept, I decided to try to sort out my admissions situation with Liberty. In about ten minutes I received the message that I was officially accepted into the program. The person helping me also registered me for classes in the spring, but it seems that I will need to send my transcripts to a particular email address in order to have my transfer credits evaluated. Oh well; it’s progress.

Despite my cold, I managed to finish the pong tutorial yesterday. I started the snake tutorial, but the new presenter is much faster, less methodical, and to be honest I find his code to be a bit messy. So it’s not going as well, but even worse is that I can’t figure out how to properly run the program. Because I’m using the pygame library now, I apparently can’t use Python’s built-in debugger, but when I try to use the command prompt it only compiles without running. It should be an easy fix, but not one that I can do while short on patience. I also received my JLPT ticket yesterday, but I didn’t study Japanese at all.

I’ve been meaning to write about a kind of realization I had this past weekend by talking with Big D. He was complaining that girls don’t seem willing to invest in a relationship, but I think it’s fairly natural to be cautious about investing in a person that you don’t know well. After all, with a typical online relationship, one person could very easily cut off all communication, which would destroy any investment made. Or the person might turn out to be troublesome, or even bad, and it’s very difficult to know this until one has spent a good amount of time around them or have familiarity with them in a context outside of dating.

I think I have made a mistake related to this. I thought I was being genuine and interesting by divulging deep thoughts and personal revelations to girls that I was interested in. But with the tables turned, I realize that one needs to be more familiar with a person’s context—what they’re like in a normal situation—before these thoughts and revelations can really have meaning. Without the context, they’re kind of intimidating and can come off as overly dramatic, and I think at least one of my romantic failures can be attributed to this. I’m not sure that this problem and the one above are necessarily the same, but I think they are at least related because in both cases time spent together is lacking.

So the solution to a solid relationship, I’ve decided, is spending a good amount of time together. But dates get boring and can be too ceremonial, stressful, and intimidating. Therefore, church is a good supplementary activity, or being a part of the same group doing activities together, or even working together. I think in the past I expected too much in too little time, because at school couples naturally spent a lot of time together, and dating co-workers in other countries made it easy to casually spend time together frequently. So I think if I find another person I want to date, after two or three dates I will try to set up some kind of regular meeting that is convenient and inexpensive and where the other person isn't the primary focus of the activity.