reasons why you should never cheat or leave a wet towel on the floor

I had this really interesting conversation last night. I was with two of my friends and we got on the topic of personalities and this typing system called the Enneagram. I guess there is a lot to this personality typing system and I’d like to read more on it but one of the main things that was cool was it pin points what a persons basic motivations behind certain behaviors and actions are and once you recognize why you are doing something then you can hopefully adjust it. Which is of course logical but ironically completely the opposite of what human beings actually do. When something doesn’t work out for us we tend to just do more of it. Or at least I do…. like, yeah, this relationship with emotionally unavailable buddy didn’t work out so I know, let me just pick a similar guy and try harder this time….  great idea, genius.

Anyway, someone brought up the example of having the pet peev of hating when a wet towel gets left on the floor and we all agreed that it bugged us too, but when we went around the table  and found out specifics of why we hated it, we found out we all had completely different motivations for never leaving a wet towel on the floor - which happened to correspond with what the Enneagram said about our personalities.

My one friend hated the idea a damp floor towel because it might attract little bugs or perhaps start molding. This blew my mind because I have never had this thought before. I had never imagined that bugs could find a home in a moist towelette - but I personally hate when I leave a wet towel somewhere because to me – the towel is not in it’s place on it’s hook and I feel stressed if too many items around my house are out of place – I feel like things are unraveling when my environment is out of order. Then my other dinner guest expressed yet another variant of why a wet floor towel was disturbing and she said that she hated the thought of having to use a damp towel hours later.

Writing this out it seems like it was a totally simple conversation and maybe it was and the wine just enhanced it, but I was utterly fascinated by the different insights into our personalities from it.

This then got me thinking about this one time I asked an Ex of mine if he’s ever cheated on anyone. He said no and I naively thought that his motivations for not cheating would be the same way that most people (including myself) typically would answer that question – with some version of morality about how it’s wrong, or how you love the person so much you could just never do that to them – but he said that didn’t factor into his reasoning. Sure, he would have felt bed but that wasn’t the real deterrent.

He said that the reason he has never and will never cheat on someone is because he doesn’t want to screw himself over. He didn’t want to ruin his ability to trust someone because if he was capable of cheating, then they were capable of the same deceit. And I agree, it’s sort of like stepping over some invisible boundary of knowingness that once you go there you can never go back and be innocent again.

Things that make you go hmmmm….