Confidence

It's really hard to get to know a person, and I think that's both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, it would be really lame to talk to someone for a couple hours and then know everything about them. It would be boring and there would be less reason to continue to pursue relationships with said person. On the other hand, it kind of sucks that you really can't gauge much of anything until you're really comfortable with the other person. I wish it was easier to tell what a person is really like the first time spending time with them. Maybe not completely, but just more.

I think the main reason for all that is the general lack of confidence people have. We live with ourselves everyday, we see the good and we see the bad. But for some reason, our minds automatically focus more on the bad than on the good. If you hear a person talk about themselves honestly, it'll almost always come out more negative than positive, regardless of the person. Humans these days naturally have a lack of confidence and self esteem. That translates into them coming off as boring, bland people when they first talk to new people. I would say that I think this is more true in females than males, but I can't say that for sure because I spend a lot more time trying to figure out what girls are like than what guys are like.

I've been on my fair share of first dates and none of them have been spectacular. They've all been at least a little bit awkward (although I think I do a fantastic job at keeping interesting conversation flowing and avoiding most awkward situations), and the girl has always seemed a bit on the boring side to me. In most cases I have gone on to realize that the girl really wasn't how she seemed, she was just nervous and a bit scared to show her real self because of the lack of comfortability with me. That's completely understandable and probably happens with most everybody. If two people don't know each other and aren't comfortable around each other, there's no way for the true personality to come out.

There are just times when I wish that people could always be comfortable with other people and you could really judge a potential relationship based on its first impression. Again, that would create a shallow base to the relationship and would surely make the rest of the relationship far less interesting. It's good both ways and bad both ways, just kind of one of those things.

I do think that there is a difference between being uncomfortable and being unconfident. Being uncomfortable is natural, being unconfident is unnatural (at least in my eyes it is). Imagine if we could see all the positive traits and only the positive traits we have. Imagine if we looked at negative traits ONLY in terms of how we can improve them. What reason would we ever have to not be confident? What if we came into every new relationship without worrying about the other person thinking negatively about us? What if all the shields were down, because you fully realized that you didn't need them? How much better would that make your day-to-day interactions, and your relationships in general? I think that's how God naturally intended humans to be. I could be wrong about that, but that's how I feel.

For whatever reason, we have fallen so far away from loving ourselves that the majority of the thoughts we have about ourselves are negative and destructive, which holds us back infinitely more than any flaw we could ever have.