Analogy of the day
Though I work within a very linear methodology, it seems that I’m able to explain a lot of what I do or think in abstract ideas that seem to be grasped more easily than me rambling on in boring acronyms and specifics.
This being one of them.
Maybe a relationship is like a floor. It gets used all the time, sometimes people don’t take off their shoes and track dirt onto it. We try to keep it looking nice, so we wax and buff it. Sometimes we get in a rush and don’t mop before we wax, only sweep the big stuff off of it first. Over time, that little bit of crud left over from not mopping gets caught up in the wax, and many layers of wax now have a little bit of dirt in them, making the shine look uneven, bumpy, and making the floor look older, more used, not kept up.
The only way to get the floor looking good is to strip it all the way down to the base floor, be it wood, tile, whatever. It takes a lot of solvents, a lot of elbow grease, and when you’re done the floor is very dull, doesn’t have color, looks even more used.
After this however, you mop it real good. You put on that first coat of wax, maybe hand buff it so there are no wrinkles, then buff it to a shine. The floor starts looking good again.
Maybe that’s what’s needed in relationships. Every so often, all the old wax and buildup from just hastily trying to make the floor look decent needs to be stripped to the core. It needs to be built back up, maybe next time with a bit more care taken than last time….doesn’t mean that it won’t need to be stripped again, it will, but at the end of it you’ll know that it’ll be a nice looking floor again after some hard work.
