It's amazing how much practical knowledge can be gained over 2 years: I feel like that looking back at where I was 2 years ago, I knew nothing about relationships and the stock market, and now I feel like I can write a little playbook about each of them with tips and tendencies about each. It takes a lot of self-reflection and assessing who I am as a person, how I react to certain things, tendencies I do, and what works and doesn't work.
I've found that one of the many weaknesses I have (in addition to loud voice, heavy steps, not properly washing things the right way, etc.) is that I tend to let emotions control my actions, not in a very obvious way where I'm screaming and yelling (although, that does happen in extreme cases, I admit) but it definitely shapes my mood and how I act and affect others. When the stock market tumbles, I feel lost, confused, betrayed, disappointed, disheartened, not to mention less wealthy, so many negative emotions all bundled into one that it makes me lose faith in myself and press the sell button, when really that's the time to fight my emotions and buy low, where a much more reasoned and practical approach is to realize that it's still the same company that I bought the stock at at a higher level, and I'm actually getting a price now so I should be buying into this lowered price. But all my scrambled emotions gets me riled up and makes me miss this very important point.
MJ, my wife, is a lot like the stock market! She has her ups and downs, she has very high days, and also very low days when she dips, but over time the stock market has always been going up, just like our mutual love has always been going up steadily. Not in a straight line; we have many fights that often feel like taking one step forward but 2 steps back, but somewhere along the way we manage to build up some love equity and get dividends of nice moments with each other along the way (She's a dividend AND growth stock!) But the one thing I have to remember is that when MJ gets really down and depressed and complains to me about things (often things involving ME) I can't get wrapped up in my emotion of getting upset......I have to act like the stock market's having a down day or week and actually buy low by comforting her, make her feel loved because that's the time when she needs to feel loved the most, and the returns can be so much higher of getting her back to her normal lovely self or maybe even pushing past those previous highs. I usually am too bitter and self-absorbed about my own happiness being disturbed in that moment by MJ's complaining that I also start getting cranky and edge on towards a fight, in essence selling low (which can actually start a panic in socks too which push stocks lower) and causing both of us to get more upset. Many times I've tried to tell a joke or something to change the mood, but it sometimes backfires; I think the important thing is to make MJ feel loved during her times of weakness and not contribute to that bad feeling, not pour more fuel onto the fire.
Does it work the other way, when we're at the highest in our relationship, sell high? Not really......we just let it run and enjoy the ride as long as we can! The only thing maybe is to create some guidelines for how to avoid future large dips in the future by talking out how to deal with those situations when we're both happy, but that doesn't really prevent the dips; they will come and we need to be ready, both in the stock market and in a relationship.
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