Week Eight: The Date Report: You be the Judge

Week Eight, Date 1: Two less paper cups
“I could have a commuter car that gets good gas mileage” he says. "But I love to drive too – so I could have a sports car or an SUV that I don’t drive very much. Would that be OK?"

I panic. It’s not really what I want. I want someone who helps me use less in life, rather than someone who tempts me to use more. Plus, for the price of a sports car, you could feed, clothe, and shelter quite a number of starving children. But I revert to my usual nod and smile. I need more time to figure out what my reaction is all about. After all, many families have two cars – it seems logistically to work MUCH better. So what’s the big deal?

After a great weekend in the snow with friends, and some self-reflective snowshoe time on Tumalo, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not so much whether he buys organic food or not, or whether he volunteers his spare time helping other people or not, or whether he has one car or three (There are so many ways to contribute in this life, and everyone has their strengths. Lord knows I don’t do even half the things I could to make this world a better place). But the difficulty is that we don’t share the same base value system. It's not formulaic, i.e. two cars= bad person, volunteering= good person. What matters is that someone is in some way striving to contribute to this world.

I might not recycle everything I can (*sigh* it’s sad, but true), but the difference between Ultraman and I is that I want to. As M&A pointed out – there’s an ideal way which I want to live, and Ultramarathoner and I unfortunately don’t share that vision. Plus, I think we lack the chemistry to bridge the gap. When I said that I had kissed him and it didn’t suck, I should have mentioned that it wasn’t everything I ever dreamed of either.

Which means I need to tell him. But he’s unloading the dishwasher when I get to his house – it seems inappropriate to spring this on him while he’s doing chores, plus, I hadn’t quite got the courage just yet. Luckily, before I left, Merm strongly suggested I start the discussion within the first 10 minutes I was there- very good advice. In the meantime, he chats about how there’s been two less paper cups wasted this weekend- he took his travel mug to get coffee a couple of times. That’s super! But I figure that particular behavioral change is a moot point in about 10 minutes.

He’s very logical about the whole subject, asks many questions, and is good to talk things over with. He talks about compromises and how people in relationships have to make them. “Sure, I say. Take the whole where to live discussion. If I were to move out of the northeast, that would be a compromise, but nothing in my values says anything about where I have to live. But some of the things we’ve talked about to me aren’t compromises. They compromise my values, which is different.”

As some readers have pointed out, it's fair to ask someone I'm with to respect my values. The problem is that in life, you wind up living out the values you believe in. So with Ultraman, would I wind up in some suburban neighborhood, unable to walk or bike anywhere when that's what I like to do? (Plus it's an easy way for me to have less impact.) I'm not so afraid of the "does he vote differently than me" values questions, but more "what am I going to loose when I live with someone that doesn't believe the same as me?"

Can people who have completely different values be together? I've decided that in this case, it won't work. What do you think?