cliche redressed

talking to my friend melissa on the way back from chili and music jam at sue's tonight, i said something out loud that i hadn't quite articulated fully in my head yet. i said, 'in a relationship, you can only be responsible for one person's emotions.' i meant, you can't be responsible for how the other person feels--only how you feel. and you also can't help not feeling what the other person feels--you only got what you got. i'm not saying that you shouldn't care about other people's feeling--that's not it at all. and i'm not saying that you should intentionally play loose with other people's heads, either. it's just that the idea of compromise doesn't always cut it: sometimes there's no middle ground, and it's a mistake to pretend that in-between is possible. relationships, in general, are about feeling connected--but they're also about understanding the disconnections. sometimes i think that's the harder part--being honest about the things that don't fit, and not trying to pretend that they can be explained or justified or assimilated into your own sense of truth.