When Warned About Your Boyfriend Or Girlfriend

A friend of a friend of a friend is a criminal. He has not been arrested yet, but it's just a matter of time. He has stolen cash and hundreds of dollars worth of goods. He's a compulsive liar. Alarmingly, he makes threats ("I'm going to slash his tires"; "I'm going to kill that guy"), and one wonders if it's just talk or if some day he will actually do it.

Here is the weird thing about him: he has girlfriend - pretty, lively, seemingly bright - who still has not left him. Other people have warned her about him, but she does not listen. She says she loves him. Until she got this boyfriend we all thought she was rational. But the fact that she keeps up a relationship with this clown proves otherwise.

When I heard about this case it reminded me of similar stories I have heard of or have had experience with. Many years ago when I was in college I fell in love with a girl, I'll call her Ellen, who, though not particularly beautiful, was funny, wise, godly, pleasant and extremely bright. Our relationship did not proceed to engagement and marriage because she made it clear she only wanted to be friends. Ok, fine, I dealt with that. But then not long afterward she fell in love with a young man (she told me so herself), and it was clearly someone she could never marry under any circumstances. I was mystified. How could Ellen - so wise, so well-grounded - fall for someone so wrong? I thought she was smart!

I have learned since that nothing makes a person dumber than love. Or maybe I shouldn't even call it love - more like affection, or infatuation, or the fear of being alone, or the raw desire to have somebody. This state of mind warps the ability to think well. The person whose character you are least able to judge objectively is the man or woman with whom you are falling in love.

That is why I want to offer this unbelievably simple advice to any young person who has not yet ruined his or her life with a bad relationship:

If anybody ever warns you that the person you are dating is no good, LISTEN!!! The odds are, they're right and you're blind!

I am not saying that such warnings are always on target. It is possible for a warning like that to come from someone who is jealous or delusional or just mistaken. But far, far more often these people who wave their red flags see something you don't see or are making excuses for. So listen. Listen to warnings. Never assume that the rank stupidity you have seen in others will not some day paralyze your brain too.

Years ago I knew a pilot who served in the first Gulf War. He told me that as part of his training he was put in a chamber and subjected to low oxygen - like that at high altitude - and instructed to monitor his thoughts so that he could recognize the symptoms of losing brain function so that, if it happened while flying a plane, he'd know instinctively to reconnect his oxygen mask or dive to lower altitude. He told me that the exercise didn't really work. He was given math problems to do, and though he thought he was getting the right answers, he found out later that he was writing gibberish. Only one thing indicated to him that he wasn't himself: he could not sign his name when asked to do so. I must be pretty far gone if I can't sign my own name, he thought.

A warning from a fair-minded person about a bad boyfriend or girlfriend is like that pilot's inability to sign his own name. It may be your only link to rationality. Take it seriously. Get to oxygen-rich atmosphere and dump the jerk.