rollover topic

I'd like to extend the previous 'theory' or philosophy beyond family, because indeed it does extend beyond family. Those unreasonable feelings of personal accountability aren't just limited to parents. It can extend to anyone you really care about. And it sucks, because it almost always makes you look like an irrational jerk.

A few examples: last summer my best friend got married. The person he got married to and situation he married into, and the way in which he married, were all things I disagreed with, or to be more specific, weren't the way I would've done them...........but it's not about me. It took me a long time after he got married to come to terms with all that.

I've always held an image in my mind about how marriage should be, the way things are supposed to work. It was established by the way I'd seen it happen over and over in the world in which I was raised in. The 'world' I was raised in was almost entirely Mormon. My influences from inside the house were 100% Mormon, and the vast majority of all of my influences outside the house were Mormon too. It wasn't until I was 15-16 that I start going back to an outside school and was able to experience life outside of a completely Mormon influence, but by that point I'd had 15 years of Mormon influence that had already established and deeply rooted certain ideals in my brain. (Obviously that was the point). Anyways, very seldom in Mormon society do women have children outside of marriage, and very seldom do people get a divorce, both of which mean that very very seldom are there ever kids involved from a previous relationship or marriage. Also, Mormon weddings are really played up, very celebrated. Very seldom is there a marriage in which there wasn't an engagement, invitations, a reception, yada yada. So when this is what I expect for myself and from everyone else, and then my best friend marries a girl who has a kid from a previous relationship, and they don't have any kind of engagement or anything, it really threw me for a loop.

At first I was all "Wow, I can't believe you did that, you're crazy, this isn't right for you, you could do so much better" yada yada yada and so on. After awhile I started to realize that it's his choice and really none of my business, but I still didn't like it. Now I am realizing that I'm having those same feelings of accountability almost. I care for my best friend, and I want him to have the best opportunity in life possible, and I didn't think the choices he was making would lead to that opportunity. I felt like he was cutting himself short. I certainly must have felt responsible to some degree because I kept trying to talk him out of it the idea that his situation was 'okay'.

So in that case I was getting emotionally involved in someone else's choices that didn't really have anything to do with me. I was crusading my beliefs and morals on his behalf. It was selfish but me to fight him on the topic and to treat him any differently than I would have otherwise.

In any case, I've been doing the same thing with my brother, and it's unfair in this case too. He was really close to getting married to this girl a few years ago but things didn't work out. A few years later she comes back into his life but she's married to another guy and she has a daughter. She's on the brink of divorce and my brother is caught up in a whirlwind of emotion thinking back to times when he was in love with her. For a long time I've been fighting him on the topic saying he needs to stay far far away from her, that she's no good, that he needs to find a better girl, and so on. The same kind of thing with my best friend. I want only the best for him, or rather, what "I" think would be the best for him. But more and more I'm beginning to realize what I think is best for him and what's actually best for him may be entirely different. If she makes him happy, that's really all I should ask for. Having a kid from a previous marriage puts him at a disadvantage, yes, but if he recognizes that and is willing to deal with it, then good for him I guess, that's his choice. If he wants to start dating her again after her divorce, I won't completely fight him on it anymore.

And getting away from me, I've been victim to this kind of behavior before. I've explained what happened in a previous post. In my freshman year of college my room mate was giving me lots of grief for no apparent reason, and he later said it was because I was doing so poorly in my grades and being generally anti-social. He was holding his standard of living for me, and must have felt somehow accountable for my poor behavior.

In any case, this can really happen to anyone you really care about. You want the best for the people you love, but sometimes you just have to stop and consider that what you think is best isn't always necessarily what is best for them.