I was thrilled to write a guest post for Samantha Karol’s Appreciation Revolution series over at her wonderful blog, Life is Like a Box of Chocolates.  I admire her mission to encourage us to think more about how and why we appreciate the people and things that make our lives truly meaningful.

To read my post about how true appreciation is completely lacking in self-interest, click here.  Be sure to check out the other great posts in her series!

At this time last year, I was a month away from graduating and should have felt on top of the world.  In reality, I was terribly lonely, unhappy, and scared out of my wits about the future…and I’d fallen out of touch with everyone who could relate to what I was experiencing.  I had managed to completely tie my sense of self-worth to leaving college with a full-time job offer, and had put all of my relationships on the back-burner.  When that didn’t pan out the way I’d planned, I was crushed.

Fast-forward to now: my mom is no longer the only person to call me on a regular basis.  I’ve reconnected with the friends who bring out the best in me and make me grateful to be alive.  I’ve branched out, taken risks I’d never imagined actually taking, and have met some wonderful new friends along the way.  And, lo and behold, I’m starting a new full-time job in May.

The one factor responsible for my turn-around?

Trust.  Trust in myself, and in others.

According to psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, our disposition to trust (or mistrust) others is formulated during the first 18 months of our life.  His theory holds that “If we pass successfully through this period of life, we will learn to trust that life is basically okay and have basic confidence in the future. If we fail to experience trust and are constantly frustrated because our needs are not met, we may end up with a deep-seated feeling of worthlessness and a mistrust of the world in general.”

While this stage of our development may create a filter through which all of our subsequent experiences pass, it does not damn us to a life of foolishly trusting others or keeping them needlessly at bay.  We just need to keep this predisposition in mind as we evaluate our relationships with others.

Trusting others had come easily and naturally for me until an awful party during the middle of my collegiate experience.  After that night, I began attributing the trust-destroying acts of others to some inherent flaw in myself, and questioned my ability to judge the trustworthiness of others.  Eventually, I became so focused on removing the potential for future hurt and disappointment that my mistrust prevented me not only from reconnecting with the people I sorely missed (and still trusted), but also from forming new relationships.

Knowing that I had gotten myself into this situation, I finally stopped waiting for everyone else to reach out to me.

It’s frightening to re-establish the lines of communication with friends you’ve been out of touch with – especially if, like me, your tendency toward isolation in the face of challenging circumstances caused the schism in the relationship to begin with.  Reconnecting with these individuals gave me the courage to reach out and begin to establish new friendships, which could flourish should I continue to allow myself to trust.

This hasn’t happened over night, nor has it been easy, but when I think that I might have missed out so many fulfilling relationships because of the painful actions of a few, the hurt pales in comparison to the joys that have come as a direct result of trusting others.

Find a balance (though it’s easier said than done).  You don’t need expose your deepest vulnerabilities to every person you meet – remember there is such a thing as TMI.  But, if the barrier you’ve erected makes the Berlin Wall seem like a picket fence, perhaps you need to reevaluate the mental fortifications you’ve made over the years.  Detachment as a defense mechanism is a recipe for unhappiness.

“We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone—but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.” – Walter Anderson

Do you bestow a certain implicit level of trust to new people in your life, or do you expect them to start at zero and prove their trustworthiness over time?

I’m no stranger to the old adage “opposites attract” – looking back on some of my past relationships leaves me wondering exactly how I ever managed to date someone so dissimilar from myself.  There’s a certain novelty to being in a relationship with someone who challenges your status quo, and sometimes, finding a yin to your yang really can balance you out.

While some differences can be worked through – religion, political beliefs, cultural norms – some are deal breakers, and in my experience, being in college can delay their appearance.  One that is all too easily masked until you’re in the real world is personal initiative (or self-motivation, if you like).

It may initially sound counter-intuitive, but college provides a series of already-defined tasks that don’t necessarily require a tremendous level of personal initiative to progress through.  But, what happens when that system is no longer in place, and you (and your partner) are left to your own devices to determine what comes next?  What happens when you’re dedicating yourself to preparing for a successful career and your partner decides to postpone the job hunt, and suddenly displays a completely indifferent attitude toward beginning the post-collegiate life?

Well, if you’re anything like me, you assume that should you lend some support and encouragement, your somewhat overdeveloped sense of personal initiative will be catching.

In all likelihood, you will be wrong…and one of two things will happen:

1.  You will smother and alienate your partner with unwanted information. Erika Lawrence, an associate professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recently conducted research regarding the support couples give one another.  She found that “too much informational support — usually in the form of unwanted advice-giving — is the most detrimental” to a relationship – more so than not providing enough support.  When you bombard your significant other with job postings or suggestions as to things he or she could do to “step up” an area of their life that is lacking in your opinion, you’re not doing anyone any favors…yourself included.

2.  You will enable your partner to become dependent on you as an external source of motivation…which is fine, until you decide to stop being a full-time cheerleader and to invest that energy elsewhere.  Psychology Today’s Jeremy Sherman recently pointed out that unlike humans, other mammals don’t require an external source of Vitamin C.  Apparently, we have the genes required to self-produce Vitamin C, but they’re “damaged beyond functionality.”   As our ancestors incorporated fruit into their diets (and in the process got Vitamin C), the dual sources of the vitamin resulted in what is coined “lazy gene theory.”  Once fruit was readily available, our Vitamin C genes “had no effect on survival” and “just accumulated errors until they didn’t work…And now we’re addicted to this external source of C. Our dependency on it constrains and shapes our behavior.”

If their personal initiative was never there to begin with, what happens when you stop bending over backward and accept that it’s not your responsibility?  If your over-involvement hasn’t already resulted in your partner’s resentment, you’ll begin to resent having to pony up motivation for two.

My (slightly embarrassing) case in point: I briefly dated a home-schooled, Frisbee-golfing waiter who worked at a Thai restaurant and was raised on a miniature donkey farm.  He had no desire to go to college and completely lacked a direction in life – something that didn’t bother him in the slightest (and drove me up a wall).   While it was thankfully a short-lived relationship, had I considered the fundamental difference in our ambitions and levels of self-motivation, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day.

Zero personal initiative combined with excessive personal initiative doesn’t “average out.”

Since I’ve been living sans-roommate, I’ve become more cognizant of how the moods of those around me impact my own mood.  Not every day as Ellen is a beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood kind of day, but by and large, I try my best to focus on the positive and roll with the punches.

I’m an ENFJ – and a self-professed care taker.  When I see others in situations that are making them unhappy, I feel obligated to do whatever I can to help…even when it has detrimental effects on my own well-being.  After making a conscious effort to be in the company of upbeat, funny, and generally happy people the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the true importance of the people I choose to spend my time with.

The moods of others (and their subsequent impact) can have lasting implications in our own lives.

In their book The How of Happiness, Ken Sheldon, David Schkade, and Sonja Lyubomirsky theorize that genetics determines roughly 50% of an individual’s happiness, while another 10% is attributable to our circumstances (e.g., wealth, health, marital status).  The remaining 40% is “within our power to change.”

UC San Diego professor James Fowler and Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School studied the power of our real-life social networks, and found that your friend’s friend’s friend (that’s 3 degrees of separation) can influence both your emotional and physical states.  The two researchers found that “each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent.”  How many 7% decreases can we afford to have if less than half of our happiness is within our realm of control?

Of course, you could argue that by being exposed to your happiness, your friend’s mood is likely to improve – but there’s a difference between someone who is having a rough day and a friend who will, without fail, reject any suggestion you make that could lead to a change for the better because it’s easier to continue to wallow in self-pity.  Time will show that friends like these are emotional black holes – regardless of the effort and energy you expend trying to cheer them up, they’ll turn any semblance of positivity into gloom and doom.

Now, onto raincloud number 2: the frenemy.

You’re gearing up for a meeting, or drafting an important e-mail, and happen to check your Facebook stream for updates.  Much to your dismay, one of your less-than-kindred contacts has posted an update that, for one reason or another, gets under your skin.  It’s embarrassing to admit that such a small thing aggravates us, but it’s true – I’m regrettably familiar with hypertension-inducing wall posts.  In a nutshell, they’re irritating.

As Dan Ariely and Eduardo Andrade confirmed in their research, when we’re in an irritated, we’re more likely to make irrational decisions.  This finding may not come as much of a surprise….but when we’re faced with a similar situation in the future, our propensity to make the same irrational decision is heightened – even if we’re no longer in an irritated mood.  Our irrational decision becomes “part of the blueprint for… future decisions;” what our brain considers to be the “way to act.”

Ariely writes, “When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off.”

Is it worth botching an important decision in not just this meeting, but the next, because you’ve voluntarily exposed yourself to someone who can so easily manipulate your mood (as they’ve proved to do time and time again)?  If a single status update can throw your whole day into a tailspin, your next course of action should be obvious:

Account > Privacy Settings > Block List

Voila!  Irritating acquaintances aren’t as easy to deal with in the real world, but if you routinely spend a lot of time with individuals who make you feel like pulling your hair out, you must enjoy pain on some level.

As for me…well, going into my 24th year, I’m resolving to try to do my best to represent one of those 15% bumps in the likelihood that my close friends are happy…even if that means distancing myself from others.

There have been a handful of times in my life when I’ve just met someone and immediately known – without a moment’s hesitation – that we would become true friends. When a mutual friend introduced me to Carly, I was bored to tears in Zoology lecture.  Within two minutes of talking to her, I had a feeling that she and I would be a force to be reckoned with.  I didn’t have any hesitation or insecurities in befriending her – there weren’t any elements of my personality that I tried to “play up” while masking others.

At other times, I’ve met people only to be instantly turned off by their demeanor.  They may have uttered just a few sentences, but something about the vibe they gave off made me feel as though for some reason I couldn’t quite articulate, I should be cautious in getting to know them (or avoid the process completely).

However, I realize that I don’t always make first impressions that are truly characteristic of my personality.  I can be guarded, and seem aloof or distant when really I’m just trying to get a feel for the individual or the situation.  So, I push my intuition aside and decide to “give it a go.”  Such was the case with my former roommate, who I refer now to as “She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named” because she’s the female counterpart to Lord Voldemort.  I only wish I was joking.

When I first met Lady V, I was completely put off by her egotism and attitude of entitlement; her interests seemed to lie not in people, but in what people could do for her.  Long story short, when we were living with 3 other roommates, I gave her a chance and forged a friendship with her.

Things were fine until we moved into an apartment by ourselves.  Every nagging suspicion, every assumption that I had initially made about her but later written off as foolish, proved to be true.  While living with her, I was in a constant stage of agitation and anxiety.  I felt like a prisoner in my own home – should I open my bedroom door to find her sitting on the living room couch, her only acknowledgement of my existence was to shoot me the stink eye and go back to watching her favorite TV drama: The Hills.

You may have heard of the concept of “flow” at work or in a psychology class.  Mihayli Csíkszentmihályi established the idea in his 1990 work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  By definition, flow is “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy…”

With a friend like Carly, I was completely myself from the get-go – the way I am only around my family and long-established friends.  It was (and is) the concept of “flow” applied to friendship.  When you’re with that person, you are spontaneous, energized and happy to be alive even though all you’re doing is laying around listening to Radiohead while pondering the merits of a summer road trip.  You’re fully involved in the conversation -  not daydreaming or hiding an eye roll thinking, “oh great…here we go again.”  There’s no anxiety or agitation – there’s only joy.

Csíkszentmihályi identified 9 elements of flow in his research.  When you spend time with an individual you are truly yourself with, 8 of the 9 appear in abundance.

-  There’s immediate feedback to one’s actions
-  Action and awareness are merged
-  There’s a balance between challenges and skills
-  There is no worry of failure
-  Distractions are excluded from consciousness
-  Self-consciousness disappears
-  The sense of time becomes distorted
-  The activity becomes “autotelic” (an end in itself, done for it’s own sake).

Some friends drain you.  They call you only to unload a myriad of complaints while waiting for the obligatory pep talk and ever-insightful words of encouragement.  Naturally, every friend requires a solid reminder of their awesomeness every now and then, but you know the type I’m talking about – the 80% “all about me” with the half thought-out “so, how are things going for you?”

The best friends are those with whom you are true to your own nature, but who also challenge you to explore the unknown and get out of your routine.  They have the remarkable ability to make you lose all sense of self-consciousness – like when they drag you onto the dance floor at a show (and you’re awkwardly lanky and profess not to dance in the continental US)…and 3 minutes later, you’re gettin’ down like it’s your full time j-o-b.

When you meet someone and feel like it’s “flow,” go with it.  Relish the freedom of being you – no pretenses, no red flags, no sweeping things under the rug.  And heed the warnings of your intuition: if something about the person you just met doesn’t sit right with you, trust yourself.  Research has shown that the correlation between first impressions and long-term perceptions is remarkably strong.  And, when you’re choosing friends, remember Csíkszentmihályi’s words of wisdom:

“Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished.”

When Elisa of Ophelia’s Webb tweeted that she needed another post for her “All You Need” series, I jumped at the chance, and was flattered when she offered me the opportunity to write.  Throughout the entire month of February, she’s been featuring the posts of a host of fellow bloggers discussing what love means to them.  I’m so thrilled to have the opportunity to thank one of the most important people in my life and offer my own perspective on love.

Head over to Ophelia’s Webb to check out the full post:

Love Grows With You: All You Need Series

Photo Credit: deviantART – Social-Disaster

So, here it is: the obligatory Valentine’s-Day-is-looming-so-I’m-going-to-write-about-love post.  It’s probably a little different than the heart-warming tales of true love you’ll find scattered around the blogosphere, but I promise not to be one of those sullen singles who would rather undergo a spinal tap than acknowledge that true love really is great.  It is.  But, in my opinion, no amount of endorphins and effort can make your love last in a truly satisfying way if you haven’t taken the words of a certain Russian writer to heart (despite her penchant for amphetamine and married lovers).

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

When we think of love gurus and relationship experts, Ayn Rand probably doesn’t come to mind.

Whatever your opinion of Atlas Shrugged and Objectivism, I believe that you aren’t capable of truly loving someone else until you love, and live for, yourself.  Until you do, you’ll constantly battle with the lingering self-doubt that you (yes, YOU) could indeed be worthy of another person’s love and affection.

You can not, and will not, lead a fulfilling life if you’re always willing to subordinate your desires and values to those of another.  You must be cognizant of your own purpose; your aim; your desired ends before you create a life with someone else.

Until you live for your own sake, it becomes all too easy to fall into the role of a caretaker; helping your significant other achieve his or her goals and objectives while putting your own on hold.  And there they’re likely to remain, until at some point in your relationship you realize how unfulfilled you are–and you’re faced with accepting the status quo or suddenly explaining to your partner that you’re unhappy because you’ve been pouring all of your energy into their wants and needs.  Neither scenario is appealing.

I understand that it takes time to figure out what we’re living for.  It’s a process–no one rolls out of bed one day to realize they’ve somehow achieved self-actualization overnight.  But, I believe that  until you have a well-developed sense of self, and the strength to say no when you believe another’s ends don’t justify the means, the relationship you’re in is a ticking time bomb.

If you’re the person in a relationship that expects your wants and needs to take priority every time, all the time….well, best of luck to you.   Chances are you’re on the fast track to losing one lover and taking two new ones named Ben & Jerry.