Damned Nut

[bcholmes]

When I was at WisCon last May, the ultra cool and sexy Ian Hagemann talked about "nut and bolt" issues in relationships. He said: "say you have a bolt. And say you have a nut. If they're threaded to the same gauge, they actually fit together. If not, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the nut to go around saying 'that godamned bolt. How dare it be threaded that way?' or for the bolt to say, 'that stupid nut. What is its problem?'"

I thought that this was a nifty metaphor. Has anyone actually succeeded in thinking that way?

Comments

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

not exactly "succeeded", since i've never had to try to think that way, i just did. it's always been clear to me that people can be very different from each other, and i am in fact surprised when a relationship (of any kind) with another person takes little work for me, and few adjustments to co-threading. and while i don't like it when it happens, love has therefore never been enough to make a relationship happen, and i've done much better since i acknowledged that out loud and didn't start things where i knew our threads didn't match in important areas.

that last part was the important realization -- when i was a teenager i thought i simply had all screwed up threads and would never fit with anyone else.

-piranha