I remember a while back I’d met up with a woman for dinner. The conversation turned to relationships. She said she had a crush on a friend who was very overweight (dealbreaker….she wasn’t attracted to overweight men). They’d been friends for 2 years and he’d just helped her move to a new place. He would pay for dinners when they would hang out, but he told her if they ever became more than friends, every cost would be split down the middle (50/50….another dealbreaker of hers). She told him she did not like that idea. She spoke with him about her desire to one day have a child. He told her if he ever had a child, his wife would only have the option of breast feeding because formula was too expensive (another dealbreaker for her). Over time, they discussed his previous failed relationships…and she noticed a pattern. All of his past relationships ended for the same reason…he was too cheap (surprise!). She then told me something I found interesting… she gave him 6 months to change, and I told her she should have exited like Road Runner asked her how she could give someone 6 months to change when she was never in a relationship with them to begin with.
Let’s take a closer look at what was happening. She believed if she gave this man 6 months to change without communicating to him that she was expecting him to change over the course of a made up timeline, he would shape shift/morph into a completely different person for her. It did not matter that this man repeatedly told her he was cheap (he did not lie). It didn’t matter that he told her he had a slew of relationships that didn’t work out due to the same issue. It did not matter that he paid for her meals as friends, and that he admitted if they were to ever have a relationship, she would be paying for her own meals. It didn’t matter that this man didn’t actually meet the criteria she said she was looking for. She could not see she was barking up the wrong tree…and it had absolutely nothing to do with her. Their expectations for a relationship were too different. They were incompatible.
I did ask her how she came to the conclusion that she should give a man she wasn’t in a relationship with 6 months to change without telling him her agenda. Her response was “I thought it was the Christian thing to do”. She could not give any scriptural basis for her way of thinking, and she only ended up wasting time tethering herself to an incompatible man who did not even know she’d effectively put herself on house arrest for him. Could she have saved a ton of time if she’d just been as honest with him as he was with her?
Cheap Charlie: “Hi, I’m habitually cheap, don’t want much responsibility in life, and if you ever decide you’d like to get with me, you’re going to have to fend for yourself during the course of the relationship.”
Learning to Listen Linda: “Oh, no thanks.”
Boom! Save your time and sanity. Moving on…
