I've been meaning to write about this for a long time. With the help of my wife and some deep thinking about my goals (sparked by "Getting Things Done" of course) I came to the realization that I have a hard time with my wants and desires. In fact, I have for a long time. The difficulty is that I have a hard time articulating my desires to myself, let alone to my wife—or anyone else for that matter. In fact, it is a frequent occurence that I will walk into a Chapters or Indigo, spend an hour browsing books, and come up with nothing I want to read.

So when I came to this realization, I sat down for awhile and I thought about what my wants and needs were. I still had a hard time articulating them, even to myself. I made a list of my wants and needs. My list? Pretty short, and not at all focused on objects. The list itself is 6 months old, so it is a little out of date, but includes things like "Improve my self dicipline" and "Finish my Meditation Project".In fact, when Shell asked me what I wanted for my Birthday, I came up with a list of maybe 10 items (most of them being of parivate nature). I wracked my brain for 3 days on that list.

Things are just not that important to me. What I have suffices. My wife, my child, and my friends are way more important. And when I see my wife take sexy good pictures with her sexy good camera and flash, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel good knowing that I help provide for her creative expressions. I love "spoiling" my wife.

Why am I blogging this? Because this brings me to my second point about "want confusion" and its effect on relationships. One of the fundimental issues is that this in-equality can cause strains on a relationship, especially if either, or especially both parties are unaware of what is going on. Once "want confusion" is named however, this issue is diminished; especially if you have a wife who truely cares about you. The other fundimental issue is in how others, especially friends and family, view the relationship. They see the inequality, but do not see what is going on behind it. This puts strain on the whole relationship, both between the two people involved, and the observers because the assumption is that one individual in the relationship is taking advantage of the other.

This ultimately focuses in on the crux of viewing any relationship from the outside. We as a society seem to value an outsiders perspective. At times, the perspective of an outsider can yeild a viewpoint that one has not considered. In the context of an outsider viewpoint of a relationship however, the outsider is working from a flawed perspective. What they don't see is the in-depth, mano-a-womano conversations, the periods of deep joint-introspection, and the conclusions that come from it.