Intentioned

I teared up the other day listening to a friend talk about how his girlfriend was secretly planning a trip for him. He saw an email or something that tipped him off and we chatted for over an hour about how incredible that was. It’s not even that the trip was a big deal, it is. But, It was more about how she was planning it around a brewery he really digs. Going through the effort of setting up a cool date around things she knew he loved. That’s huge. And honestly, pretty rare. I love seeing people give freely. I love watching the excitement of planning something special for someone you love and the receipt of that love. It’s all just this magical ball of amazing within the human experience.
I’ve been seeing a new obsession with what people deserve for their efforts lately. Whether within relationships or work or passion projects, it feels as though everyone is pushing the same line:

If they don’t appreciate you, drop them.

I get it. I really do. We live in a weird time of selfish survivalism. Really, the people telling you to drop someone that doesn’t appreciate you are trying to protect the fragile hearts we all carry. The idea of course being, that when we are unfulfilled or underappreciated in our own circles, we should hop into a circle that allows us to feel accepted and to grow.

But, I don’t know that this is the right way to approach it. 

I’ve been thinking alot about conditioned versus intentioned giving. 

“If they don’t appreciate you, drop them” Is a prime example of conditioned action. And while it’s certainly not the highest on the hierarchy, I think it’s a factor in the slow crumbling of our ability to interact with and love each other.

At risk of sounding like a philosophy major that won’t pause long enough in my diatribe to take your coffee order, I want to simplify the differences I see between conditional and intentional giving. I think it makes sense to focus on a romantic context, but this really applies anywhere.

You like a girl, right? She’s that one you dreamed about before you even knew you liked girls. That sort of show stopping, oh my god, there must be a soul inside me because it matches so perfectly with hers, kind of girl.

You take her coffee, buy her flowers, ask her on dates and buy her food. You both travel to beautiful places and get lost in each other’s adoring company.

Or so it felt.

But the girl really just wanted a few months of free meals and company while she waited for her ex boyfriend to get out of prison. And now, you sit alone in a booth, in a poetically drab diner, or on a beach somewhere, analyzing everything you did wrong over the last thousand dollars or so of courtship.

She used you, right? Used you to fill the vacuum left by someone else and further, gave you nothing in return. 

That hurts, right? And you screwed up.

But you didn’t. You only screwed up if your actions were conditional. 

“I buy you coffee, you be my girlfriend. I pay for dinner, you kiss me goodnight.”

Or whatever. And conditional action, while incredibly common, leaves everyone feeling worse. It’s an exchange, and insofar as exchanges work, someone will always feel shorted.

But if you look at those months and that investment of time and energy and money. The emotional capital wasn’t a drunken savings dump into DogeCoin because your cousin swore it would go to a dollar, but rather a reflection of your character. The humanity inside of us.

Intentioned giving is bringing her coffee because you want to impress her, date her, have like 12 kids with her. I don’t know what you look for in a partner. Maybe it’s 12 kids. But you want her to see that you care. And you did that. Intentionally and not conditionally.

With intention, it’s not that the rejection and misplaced effort doesn’t hurt, it does. It’s that it matters less because the goal was focused on things you can control rather than a strange scale of effort that so many people attempt to keep in balance throughout their lives and personal relationships.

When we focus on our own shit and the pieces that we can effectually change, we free up that mathematical fatigue of who did what and how much that was worth and are able to simply give. 

I’ve been told alot that I’m too easy to take advantage of. That I give my time or talent away too easily and freely. 

That can be true in a professional context, but with my friends or with anyone I might be chasing romantically at the moment, it’s simply how I choose to show love. And to steal a phrase from Gary Vee, “You can’t take advantage of somebody who’s given with no expectation.”

I want to act in the way I expect everyone to act. It’s cliche, “Be the change”, I know, but I want more people to stop expecting a return on their personal investments and instead choose to live in a way that’s reflective of their heart and what they want from the world at large.

I wanna be the guy that you know will help you move a mattress, or lay tile, or watch your kid, or fix your computer without an expectation of a return because I genuinely believe that everyone would be better off if we just stopped acting so transactionally.

See, now I’ve morphed from the philosophy major to a socialist stoner, but I’m still a barista not making your coffee. Sorry.

I hope you look at your own actions and measure them against conditional or intentional giving. And if you’ve been conditional for a while, maybe try and reshape your thought process inward rather than outward. It doesn’t matter if she loves you or not. Bring her a damn coffee and keep pouring out love. Eventually, someone out there will be doing the same thing and you’ll be much better prepared to receive it and give it back in kind. And really, that’s why we are all here, right? An endless exchange of energy that hopefully results in a positive impact.

That’s what I think anyway. 

Thanks for reading. I probably love you.