LordBucket,
Despite your use of heavily loaded and woefully inaccurate language... yes, I've seen the behaviours you espouse in real life and, without exception, it consistantly forms the core of the worst relationships I've ever seen, leaving both parties miserable.
It turns out, no one wants to be an object, and no one forms meaningful relationships with objects.
You see, you're taking one of the fundamental relationship interactions - initiate->respond - and then taking it to it's most extreme and ludicrous position - act->receive. Most people might want to dally in this occasionally, but almost no one wants to live it. As Neonivek said, it's fundamentally unbalanced. One does not have a meaningful, long term relationship with a door or canvas. The actor will grow board, or the receiver will grow resentful, or both. You can not dance with a canvas, or be surprised by a canvas. Imagine for a minute the beginning of a house of cards - two cards acting on each. This can form the basis of an incredible structure, but if one card merely receives, there is no stability. The structure will collapse into disarray. So too in life.
Consider, instead, if you must foolishly follow such a black and white view of relationships, the more common variant of initiate->respond we can call act->evade. Rather than the river wearing down the stone to nothingness, never noticing or caring as the stone is destroyed, or the sculptor accomplishing his goals with a stone block and discarding it to move on to the next piece, imagine instead the wolf and the deer - the hunter and the hunted. Or, in a less predatory model, the gardener and the garden. The responder, here, is not passive - they actively influence the relationship. The actor initiates the relationship and determines the shape, but the other party responds - there will be surprises, the responder will adept, and success requires commitment and a willingness to overcome obstacles in pursuit of the end.
Now here you can have a healthy relationship (this doesn't mean you /will/, but you can). Both parties can enjoy the hunt, and the natural creative energies of the garden can be harnessed into a pleasing shape by the active gardener without suppressing the garden - a good gardener uses the garden rather than exerting their will on it, and a good hunter (in a non-lethal hunt) is always sure to avoid the certainty of permanent victory and permanent defeat. Think to your own life - surely you have encountered relationships that are more accurately described by this model. There is an initiator and responder, but both are actors. There is a give and take - unlike with the artist and a canvas, there is an inherent uncertainty and dynamism that a relationship needs to thrive.
This isn't the ONLY sort of relationship dynamic that can work. Hunts tend to end, and gardens become routine. Still staying within the initiator-responder framework, we have the concept of act -> resist. Here is an element you will see in all the strongest relationships. There is an initiator, but they are not alone in acting at all (like in the actor->receiver paradigm), nor is the relationship one way (like in the actor->evader paradigm). The responder, here, acts on them in turn. For an example of this in real life, watch some couple dancing - the dance comes from the responding partner /resisting/ the initiator in the appropriate manner and ways. Those who simply receive are doomed to fail, and this isn't the sort of dance for those who evade. Or take a friendly game of any sort - and relationships could easily be described as games. In chess, white initiates, but it would be foolish to say that black receives. As in volleyball, a "good game" is not one where the other actor acquiesces to your attempts, but where they actively resist them. Of course, in a relationship, unlike in a competition, the goal is not to "win" - simply to enjoy the dynamic for as long as possible. Like a pickup basketball game, victory, or at least permanent victory, is actually anthetical to success.
Some people forget this, of course - relationships built around competition happen. But surely you must agree that they /exist/ - and thus this model is an accurate descriptor.
But in truth? Most healthy relationships mix all these dynamics and more, and while one party always needs to initiate, and some parties may naturally initiate more, exclusivity in these dynamics is a detriment that leads to instability.
Author
Topic: "Why don't women like nice guys?" (Read 43630 times)