The Manual

Have you ever bought a new microwave? Did you see the manual? It’s huge! Would you ever read it? The nice thing about a manual is it’s super detailed. If you want to know how to do anything with your microwave, it’s in the manual, in detail. However, if you wanted to know how to use your dishwasher, it wouldn’t do you any good to read the manual for your microwave.

We all have manuals for the people in our lives. Guess what, they’re usually just as detailed as the manual for your microwave. Just like the manual for the microwave, we don’t usually even know what’s in it unless we really think about it. We also very rarely share our manual with the person it’s for. We have all of these ideas of how they should act and think, and then we feel disappointed, angry, annoyed when they are thinking and acting that way.

The other problem with holding onto our manual is that people aren’t appliances. They’re not all made alike. They’re individual. They have their own thoughts and feelings and ideas of who they want to be and how they want to act. Our manual wasn’t written from how they are, it’s written from how we think they should be.

If you really want to love someone and get to know who they really are, throw your manual out the window, and get curious about the person in front of you.

Who triggers you the most? How would your relationship change if you threw out your manual of who they SHOULD be, and observed who they really were from a place of curiosity?