we do it on (pur)pose

My friend met a foreigner who lives here. They went out for a few weeks when he told her that he needed papers to stay. She agreed to marry him as they were dating. It is now a year and a half, and she has been telling me from the start of his behavior that I find a bit difficult to take. This is the fifth man she has seen in a decade who refuses to do the simple things she gets into relationships to do. Actually, this is the latest person who continues to ignore that she should be able to do things that any normal relationship entails...meaning, going for drives, going to dinner,going to movies, going out for a long weekend to a bed and breakfast, traveling together, things like that. However, whatever the men have wanted, she has bent over backward and then up into a pretzel to accommodate. This dismays me no end and I always bring it to her attention, because this is a person who is very calculating and focuses on what she can get out of any situation, so the results in her relationships amaze me. She treats men very differently than she treats women. That is clear. What I am observing and am learning from, is the way that she set this last relationship up. It is a guide to how we all get or do not get what we want. She spoke to me a long time about the decision to help him by marrying him. Nothing happening with her now is a shock. But she chooses to see it that way. From the start he set a pattern, one that she shrugged off as just part of his quirky character. To me, you cannot suddenly complain about the very things that you complemented or accepted, but we all do this anyway. We choose a person, or a job and then from there there is a bit of 'coasting' that we all go through. What i mean is that somehow I think that we believe that whatever we choose to do, we are expecting that we do not have to work on ourselves as we evolve within the framework of whatever the thing is that we are investing our lives in. We want the 'thing' to somehow make us more comfortable or happy, and we do not observe that our unhappiness or our anxieties come from our expectations and our way of changing what we see to please our immediate needs. We are always testing the waters, always making choices and naming feelings and meaning. The blaming the other within that action is the crazy part, it is also the most typical part. My friend is seeing everything as 'happening to her' she is not and never seeing her role in the matter. I think that by her talking to me, she has shown me very urgently a habit in behavior to check within myself too. I take my own behavior with juliemangoman. I was oversaturated with emotions and could not really inoculate myself against the barrage of feelings. I remember thinking that it was going way too fast, but I didn't want that to put us off. I liked the excitement of the rush of feelings. I placed a great deal of meaning onto what was happening to me. I had no idea what he was feeling or doing. I could only speculate. I had my feelings, my insecurities and past history as a guide to helping me heap huge swaths of insecurity upon me. Then I had my hope and wanting to believe that it could be more...so there is the past, where I am comfortable with the known, struggling against the future that is ephemeral and hard to mold when it is being rushed. All of that is sitting against the fabric of reality. Cold, hard facts that are hiding in plain sight. You are left with the opportunity to pick your own basket of meaning from it all.