“She was not a miracle. She was not an adventurer. She was not some fine, precious thing. She was a girl.” – Paper Towns (John Green)
We have grown up with the idea that everything will turn out the way it’s supposed to if we just wait for it. That somehow, everything will end up the way it is supposed to end up. As if the world already has our lives predestined and we are just waiting for every piece of it to be placed together to make some beautiful, exciting puzzle.
When we think about our futures, we imagine a life full of happiness and love with someone who we were meant to share life with. We often meet people and envision the type of person they are based upon their actions within minutes of the introduction. We set impossibly high standards for this person just by the way they look, how they may act and what we have heard about them. We hope that one day, they will give us exactly what we hoped for. That they will save us from ourselves and be the person we have been longing for. With this vision we have of the person, we are unable to recognize them for who they truly are. This can often lead to our disappointment when they do not live up to our made-up expectations.
We often forget that these people are humans just like us. They have their own struggles and hardships. They have their own views of life, which may not be similar to ours. This is OK. But with this act of forgetting, we often become disappointed when these people act in ways that may be out of the ordinary. Little do we realize, they are not acting out of their ordinary, they are just acting out of the ordinary that we created for them.
It is important that we give everyone the opportunity to be himself or herself. We must not create our own vision of someone based on the way they look or by stereotypes. Everyone is their own person. They have their own hobbies. They have their own struggles. They may have been raised differently. They may believe in different things. They may like different types of music. They may like to read. They may like to draw. They may have tendencies that we may not be able to recognize within the first few moments of meeting them for the first time.
My advice to you is to not set yourself up for disappointment by setting up impossible standards for someone you just met based on the type of person you wish they would be. It is nor fair to us and it is not fair to them. Give everyone you meet the opportunity to show you exactly who they are. By doing this, you will be able to prevent your own disappointment and also give that person a clean slate. After all, as author John Green once said in his famous novel "Paper Towns," “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person”.
