I was speaking with a client a few years back, who happens to be an attorney for the National Park Service. I asked him if he was working on anything interesting at the moment, and he responded by telling me that they were being sued by the mother of a child who had bitten while feeding a bear in Yellowstone… he muttered something about it being a wild bear, Yellowstone being a nature park, that there had been a sign three feet away from the family which read “Do not feed the bears” and people failing to realize that the real world is a dangerous place, it’s not Disneyland!
Relationship signs come in all shapes and sizes, however most of them are obscured by various obstacles which block our vision and make them difficult to interpret. Too often, the signs only come into focus after we’ve crashed the relationship, and then we have to combat the urge to punch our best friend in the face when they callously ask “well buddy, didn’t you see the signs?”
And of course, we (usually) refrain from punching our friend in the face, we just nod our heads and say something clever like “Hindsight is 20/20” and we hope that we’ll be able to recognize the signs if we’re ever presented with them in another relationship, sometime down the road. But the reality is that we probably won’t recognize the signs then either, because the signs are always different, because they are created and designed by women, and the sad truth is that most of the time, they don’t even remember posting them.
And did I mention that each sign is a test? A cumulative collection of Pass / Fail moments on the Relationship Highway, each one carefully designed to test the level of your love, commitment, and emotional intelligence… especially in the beginning of a relationship, when deep levels of trust have not yet been established. These signs are apt to be slammed into the ground, like spikes being prepared for your severed head to rest upon… Other times, they are just thrown up in your face “out of the blue” with the random sense of a monkey on crack.
This section of the blog is designed kind of like that, with the random sense of a monkey on crack. It’s an ongoing conversation between three clueless guys, discussing some of the relationship tests that we’ve encountered throughout the course of our relationships, with a little insight provided by our “spirit guide” Angelique Tsang, who is the author of the ongoing Confessions of an Ex Drama Queen ~ which provides insight into some of the storms which she’s created for the men in her life over the years…
Feel free to share this with your friends, ask questions and post comments below. But be forewarned, the “three clueless guys” driving the tour bus down this stretch of the the Relationship Highway are Keith Foley, Israel Ostrov, and Todd Gray, three Strategic Intervention Coaches who were trained under the guidance of Tony Robbins, and they ran over Politically Correct about an hour ago… this is a no holds barred, seat belt free zone, where anything goes, and anything can, and probably will happen!
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