Beoman Claudiu Dragon Emu Fire Golem:
Hermetically Sealed:
Richard Zen:
My advice is to talk about the things you find hard while still having your awesome equanimity when relateing to people at work or old friends. They'll relate to you just fine. From my experience people don't read faces as well as they think they do and they often underestimate how deep some people are. For close relationships like close family and a girlfriend I would let them know the truth because it's impossible to hide at this point.
Perhaps you're right, but many girlfriends will resent it. She'll see it as you all of a sudden wanting to rock the boat and inject some 'holier than thou' dynamic into the relationship that wasn't there before. This happens even if you try to broach it in a very subtle way. This is because usually she's already a little bit jealous of your level of self-control and she'll see this new subject matter as you trying to rub it in her face. It will almost always be perceived as an ego thing "he thinks he's better than me because of the intellectual/spiritual crap he's been reading".. and then the resentment begins and that's the beginning of the end.
Dood, all that is happening exactly
because you have an air of "holier than thou". Look at the way you're describing the other, though I replaced the pronoun to make it more personal since you are talking about yourself here after all: "she's already a little bit jealous of level of self-control".
I agree it does sound 'holier than thou' never the less that doesn't mean it wasn't accurate. It's my duty to attempt to describe the situation as I perceived it. There's a difference between sounding 'holier than thou' when describing the situation on a forum and acting 'holier than thou' in real life. In real human relationships there are power differentials, this is a fact. Relationships constellate around these power sincs or power mountains although they are rarely spoken of directly. It has always been this way although in the most ancient hunter-gatherer times it was far more obvious. A romantic relationship can be a precarious balance of power. The feminine has certain power sources and the male other power sources. Why would a very physically attractive woman mate with a less physically attractive male ? Usually this is because he has some other source of power to offset his lack of physical attractiveness (I'm not saying I'm not physically attractive mind you this is just an example). In such a situation there can be a game of tug of war going on where the woman is trying to prove that her power approximates that of the male's. Many women like to feel slightly less powerful than their mate but not majorly so.
If during the course of a relationship either lover unveils a previously concealed source of power which he cannot immediately share with his partner then the entire balance of the relationship has shifted and the partner has to reevaluate how she feels about the new dynamic. If the new power gradient is say, a million dollars earned from a winning lottery ticket, then it's not a problem because the winner can merely share the money with his mate, but when the new source of power is something spiritual then that can indeed cause problems because such power is not easily transferred. Some people are happy to see that their mate has a greater abundance of power than previously imagined, but for others it will be perceived as a loss of control, and many people feel like they need to have a certain amount of control in order to feel comfortable.
Many times it is impossible to describe such dynamics without sounding egotistical especially if you try to do it using very few words.
Beoman Claudiu Dragon Emu Fire Golem:
I'm reminded of an old mailing list I read somewhere where someone was asking for advice on how to deal with women. He said he had problems with women because they were intimadated by his inteligence. Yes, he had tons of spelling errors in his post. It was fairly clear that actually he wasn't quite that intelligent, so it wasn't that women were intimidated by his intelligence but they were put off by him feeling like he was very intelligent when in fact he wasn't.
right on, point taken; What you say is true and these examples are real. With that said I do think that in many cases individuals really are intimidated by other individual's intelligence. To illustrate my point lets take an example that is common ground for both of us; a job interview at a web startup company. If you are the one being interviewed and your skillset and prior accomplishments are impressive then you are in danger of causing the other team members to worry that you might try to 'take over the lead' of the team when that may not necessarily be what they have in mind. Some team members might even be afraid that you will replace them or point out the shortcomings of their work. As the interviewee it is your task to not only prove that you are qualified for the job, but to also prove that you don't intend to wield your power in ways that may be perceived as threatening. I have personally witnessed many instances of people being intimidated by other people's intelligence in this scenario and it has caused many teams to pass up amazing talent and literally seek the mediocre thereby shooting the company in the foot while it is trying to get off the ground. A thoughtful CEO must be aware of this dynamic and always seek to counter this tendency in a skillful way. I have been the overzelous interviewee before who was oblivious to this dynamic and didn't get the position even though on paper he was the most qualified, and I have been a team member who helped counter this tendency and helped guide the team to a balanced solution. I'm a big fan of balanced solutions. There's no secret to balance, you just have to feel the waves.
Beoman Claudiu Dragon Emu Fire Golem:
I could be wrong, of course, this is just an educated guess, so I leave it to you to determine whether it's accurate. But if it is, how will you proceed?
Thank you for always providing me with a legitimate challenge. One must always act based on what one feels to be true although one should make use of every reasonable opportunity to double check his assumptions. If I realize that I've made a mistake then obviously the right thing to do is to apologize, do whatever damage control may be possible, and make damn sure I don't make the mistake again. I try to make sure that the next time I'm about to act on an assumption, I think much harder about that assumption, and spend much more time making sure I've hunted down all the relevant data which I can get my hands on. I try to never shut out the possibility that I could be mistaken especially about such subtle relationship issues. I assume that I must be completely wrong some percentage of the time. To err is only human, but I seek to eliminate that tendency whenever possible, and I try to make use of both my facilities of intuition and of logic before coming to conclusions. I admit that I have made such errors in the past, and I seek to never make them again, that's really all I can say. Thank you again seriously for your help, sometimes having someone there to play the 'devil's advocate' is exactly what I need.