Today is a beautifully dreary day. It’s an ideal day for blogging and napping. So far, today’s excitement has consisted of Ramsey (our golden retriever) taking off and running very near to the street as a car was bounding in her direction. Thankfully, she yielded to my scream for her return and came bouncing back up to the front door – blissfully (and ignorantly) unaware that she had been in any danger at all.
Ignorance can be a turnoff. When you think of ignorance do you think of someone who is uneducated or someone who doesn’t want to be educated? Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines ignorance as: the state or fact of being ignorant: having a lack of knowledge, education, or awareness. Lacking knowledge, education, or awareness can be a turn off to a lot of people – especially those who make it a point to stay in the know. However, on a grander scale, I think an attitude of ignorance is a bigger turnoff.
Most of us wouldn’t walk up to a five-year-old and ask him or her to recite multiplication tables, but we would expect a 10-year-old to be able to do so in most cases. Ignorance can be educated and certain knowledge comes with age or stage of life.
For example, my husband knows a lot more than I do about almost everything. ~smile~ He is a student all the time and he loves to learn. If I ask him a question he doesn’t know the answer to, he will often look it up on the spot. He truly cannot understand why anyone would be content to stop learning. His respect for others is not determined by how much a person knows; however, his respect is often withheld from people who do have the opportunity to learn, but choose to remain in ignorance.
Is ignorance a turn off for you? Personally, I am turned off by people who refuse to see or accept new concepts. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t particularly like change. I get really comfortable doing tasks the same way. But it drives me crazy when someone’s only defense against change is: “It’s not the way we’ve always done it.”
There are people in my life whom I love dearly who don’t see value in my field of study of counseling or my work with couples; but, what bothers me most is that they don’t try to see or understand it. They just wrinkle their noses and assume that they know best. After all, they lived many decades, raised kids, and endured grief without counseling, therefore no one should need it. This is an attitude of ignorance and it can be very difficult to endure in a marriage.
One consequence of an attitude of ignorance is complacency. If I choose not to learn and grow, I adopt the attitude which says, “My life is good enough” instead of it saying, “How can my life be even better?”
If you are dating someone who refuses to grow or sees no value in gaining knowledge, think about what your marriage will look like. If he or she is not willing to grow as a person, how committed do you think he or she will be to seeing your marriage grow and prosper?
Take a look at your life. Are you taking the lazy way out and choosing not to learn and grow? How do you think this may affect your future marriage relationship? I’m not suggesting that you spend every waking hour on a quest for knowledge, but I am suggesting that you open your mind a bit.
Study other cultures and try to understand what is going on in the world a little better. Find topics that your parents, friends, and boyfriend or girlfriend enjoy, and learn something about them. Your marriage will require constant growth and learning, so practice learning and growing now. ~smile~
Are you growing daily or do you struggle with complacency?