View Single Post
Old 12-18-2014, 06:53 PM   #10
Adam Huss
 
Adam Huss's Avatar
Location: Ohio
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 710
United_States
Offline
Re: Problems Dating on the Mat

Quote:
Julia Campbell wrote: View Post
Long, slightly tortuous tale.

I started studying aikido about 2 years ago and found that it helped amazingly with the stress&stuff from growing up in a situation where my mother was abused. I've taken self defense courses, but something about the environment and the peacefulness on the mat made things better in a way that nothing else has been able to duplicate.

A few months ago I started dating a really sweet, intelligent boy who moved to my dojo. He's shodan; I'm sankyu. Off the mat our relationship is very good, but I have the most terrible time working with him. I invariably feel smothered and claustrophobic with him, and like he's being stiff, self-righteous and unyielding, pedantic, and condescending. I'm aware that my perspective is very, very likely being warped by my formative experiences of men being violent pieces of refuse, but there have been a few incidences that occurred between us, where a third party mentioned to me that it looked like the boy had a touch of arrogance or dominance to him. So, objectively, it must be something like x% truth and (100-x)% my personal craziness.

It's really disorienting. It's thrown off my training and my sensei has mentioned several times for me to get my game on. I don't have a clear question I'm asking, but I'm hoping that by writing it out and getting a few responses, I'll at least have a little more to go on.
I've always been told to avoid dojo relationships as they almost always end with one of the two students leaving the dojo. That being said, the person who gave me this guidance has been married to one of his students for like 20 years, haha (ok, she's a sixth dan so maybe 'student' is no longer an appropriate term).

On your training issues with your guy - I know how to do several things well. Some of these things my wife is interested in learning. Never once has my attempts to teach her these things have they not resulted in disaster (martial arts, cooking, snowboarding, mountain biking, rock climbing, etc) and I generally consider myself better at teaching than doing with most others. Some people have relationships where they can learn from each other, but many girlfriends and wives I know feel awkward and have little patience when their man tries to show them something (speaking from my own gender POV, the same is true in reverse roles). Not really sure why, its just something I've noticed.

Ichi Go, Ichi Ei!
  Reply With Quote