promises...promises...
Monday, April 1, 2013 at 10:50AM Promises. Everyone makes them. Some make them seriously, with every intention to fulfill said promise, moving heaven and earth to make sure their promise is kept. Others, be it intentionally or not, do not. An unkept promise can be a very detrimental thing to any relationship, if said promise was given and taken in full faith to be the serious kind.
Promises seem pretty simple. It's difficult to suss out a gray area for promises. Specifically speaking to the serious ones made by serious people. For one thing, there's the promise itself, "I say I shall fulfill this thing" Is there gray in that seemingly black and white statement? It's important to be able to trust people when they say things, trust that you know what they're saying, trust that you know their intentions, trust that they have the ability and the will to do the thing they said they would do. That's a lot of trust, which is why an unfulfilled or unrealized promise can be so painful; it hurts the not easily attained trust built to that point, and without trust (of some kind or another) in a relationship, there is nothing. Trust is too big to go on about now. Maybe later. I'm looking for gray areas. I understand that with people 1 does not always equal 1, sometimes it's 0.90, sometimes it's 1.2. I think life involves rounding to the nearest number in an effort to accept what you can and reject what you cannot; the gray area is holding an ideal situation as the end-goal and asymptotically approaching it, accepting that it may never meet and life makes math a little sloppy. Does that make a broken promise? Is a promise 95% there, by definition, unfulfilled?
If I look at two people, their connection with each other and their connections with the outside world as three distinct dimensions, I can't help but think of a fourth: Time. Man can be a fickle beast and, as any living, breathing being should, he changes over time. What matters today may not matter tomorrow. What he felt about a promise made 9 months ago may not hold him the same way. A promise made to him not fulfilled within a time he feels appropriate may be considered unfulfilled. Time erodes everything. Everything. Just as time and wind and water erode even the hardest rock; time and waiting and expectation erode people. Anticipating an outcome based on a promise and seeing that promise (i.e. outcome) pushed into the future, even blamelessly, damages the trust inherent in the promise. Despite the best intentions to wait, to keep the end goal as important, moving the promised outcome in time to some unknowable future makes it just as unfulfilled; man must change.
But just like anything else that involves two or more people, things aren't as simple or straight-forward as they seem. The delicate threads binding two people in relationships and the threads binding each person to the outside world are as vast and as complicated as they are intertwined. Pulling on one will invariably bend, stretch, twist, kink or even break another. Hearts change. Minds Change. People and their priorities change. Life happens and, as it so often does, it tends to fuck with things in unforeseeable ways.
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