self worth and tolerance applied to intimate relationships and branching out to family, friends, work, and object ownership blatherings and thoughts

I actually wrote this a couple of days ago in my fb journal. Tonight, I got thinking and figured it should be here as well.

When I was housebound at the start of January, a friend loaned me the movie, “The Joy Luck Club.” I watched it, then watched it again, and watched it one more time. Three weeks later, I am still thinking. It just won’t go away.

Briefly, the film is about a group of four women who emigrated from China to the States, their lives, the lives of their daughters, the similarities, the differences, the hopes, dreams, and lessons that are to be learned from each life. The part that has captured me is the notion of what you are worth. I keep pondering this.

In the movie, it is strictly about what a woman is worth in regards to her relationship with a man. What is she willing to sacrifice from herself? What is she willing to settle for? According to the premise of the movie, the value a woman places on herself is the value she will be given in an intimate relationship.

I see this as a lesson that can go beyond an intimate relationship. Self worth is something that influences friendships and family dynamics. Work can be influenced by what one is willing to settle for too. Then I got to thinking about houses, and the miscellaneous stuff that we surround ourselves with and what we settle for and self worth. Then I think of self esteem and how buying objects can be done to replace a lack of sense of self, and yet I know that there has to be a sense of self worth in order to buy the self an object at all. The picture keeps growing bigger. But to return to the original thought . . .

Relationships. Why is it that a person is able to give so much of themselves away in a particular relationship with a particular person yet, at the same time, have no tolerance for the same behaviours from anyone else? We have various levels of tolerance for various folks in our lives. This is seen in how we react to children, the frail, people with challenges in their lives; most folks show more patience and understanding towards these people. Parents are probably far more tolerant of their children’s behaviour than most other people would be. We have more understanding when someone is faced with a hardship, or is ill, or is going through something. But why is it, overall, that people are able to have such high levels of tolerance for someone’s negative behaviour that they wouldn’t accept from someone else, if there was not a viable explanation for the behaviour? Does it stem from self worth? Does it stem from love? Unconditional love? Is there really such a thing as unconditional love? Okay, that is another topic all together… I digress.

Is tolerating a singular person’s negative behaviour while having no tolerance in someone else showing similar actions without a viable cause a reflection of self esteem in an intimate relationship, or is it a reflection of love and caring? I think in order to love someone else that a person has to be capable of loving themselves first. Loving the self is a huge part of self esteem, self worth and self respect. If a person doesn’t love themselves it is hard to provide themselves with comfort and caring, let alone be able to set higher standards for relationship expectations.

Now, that much said, what about if a person is escaping into an intimate relationship in order to avoid delving too deep into themselves? That could happen as well. Hmmm. Aha…that would be more of an obsession than a love though. Okay, so the ability to love another stems from being able to love the self. Now back to the thought of when someone tolerates behaviours in a person they love that they would not tolerate in someone else, even though they may have love for that person too. Why is there a difference in the levels of tolerance? Could it be biological? It has been shown (and no I am not going to go dig out the research right now, and yes I am just blathering off the top of my head, and yes I am still thinking of the article I skimmed in Time Magazine last week on relationships and chemical attraction, and yes thinking of various courses I have taken and books I have read), that people are attracted to other people on the basis of smell, what they see, pheromones and chemicals. We have the theory of evolution – we are driven to reproduce with people we are biologically compatible with. So is does this play a role in it? Is it because we have met the person who is most biologically compatible with us which gives us reason to tolerate their negative behaviours? Incidentally, a side note from the Time Magazine article, I thought it interesting that a couple could be attracted to one another, fall in love, get married, yet when the woman went off the birth control pills she had been on all through the relationship they lost their attraction. There may be more chemical attraction at play than what many of us would care to admit as we embrace freedom of choice.

So maybe that is part of it - that we are destined through chemical attraction to love this person and, thus, will tolerate the poor behaviour. But this still doesn’t explain the foundation of the poor behaviour and that needs to be explained as well for this to be a cohesive thought. And why would the tolerating person be tolerating so much in the first place if they truly loved themselves? If one person is tolerating then the other person is acting, one is giving away ones values that they apply to other people and it causes me to wonder what the other person is doing. This cannot be considered simply from the side of the person doing the tolerating; it needs to be more balanced…there always has to be balance. Are they giving away their values as well by performing the behaviour? Do they perform this behaviour with all other people or just this select one person? Do they love the other person as well? When does tolerance become too much tolerance and move from the realm of understanding into the realm of self harm. Definitions are needed. Balance. More pondering is needed. Maybe once I can get through the thought process of understanding the foundations of tolerance, love, and self worth as used in the movie, I can carry on and apply it towards the other areas I have been thinking of…family, friends, work, and ownership. To start though, I have to understand intimate relationships, self worth, and tolerance.

**sighs**

Damned movie.