Ego

‘The Saturdays’ new song “Ego’ is one of my favorite dancing tunes lately, mainly because I find the tune catchy and upbeat but also because after liking the tune I started listening to the words and found they contained a message that I have thought very hard about (probably too hard given that it is a pop song and not intended to give people revelations!!!)

“Now you wanna pretend that you’re a superstar.

And now you want us to end whats taken you this for.

Don’t tell me that you’re done as far as we go,

you need to have a sit down with your ego .

When everyones gone and you are by yourself,

 you know that you’re gonna come to me from help.

Don’t tell me that its time for going solo,

you need to knock some sense into your ego. “

My fiancée tends to get a pretty hard time in our relationship………partly from me (of course) but he also gets a lot of stick from our friends about his ‘less appealing’ personality traits – in main his ability to forget absolutely anything important you tell him within 30 seconds along with all the other unimportant stuff you tell him – in fact absolutely everything he doesn’t write down excluding completely useless car facts he picks up off Top Gear and that no one EVER needs to know!

Add to this forgetfulness a complete inability to organise himself let alone anyone else and it is easy to see where the room for jokes lies……we are inevitably late for/completely absent for any event he is left to organise because he has forgotten about it/arranged something directly before it such a distance away it is impossible to be on time for both.

On top of this he gets endless stick for the fact that his deepest thought on any given day is probably ‘do I need new hub caps?’ which he could probably spend an easy 30 minutes contemplating, He is definitely not a thinker or an academic and would rarely contemplate picking up a newspaper let alone a book.

I on the other hand, am probably the polar opposite. It is incredibly rare for me to forget anything I actually want to remember, I am organised to within an inch of my life and much more academically orientated. I would mostly enjoy a good book as much if not more than TV.

It is very easy for me to consider that I have the upper hand in the relationship, that I am putting in the most valuable effort – in other words to let my ‘ego’ get in the way of the truth.

Because the truth is that I cannot judge someone against the things I value in myself because that is an unfair comparison. What I would be asking for then would be for someone more like me, and I would be forgetting all my ‘less appealing’ (lets face it downright unattractive!) personality traits.

I am obsessive to the point of insanity over tidiness for no reason I have ever been able to understand let alone explain to anyone else (although of course I would expect them to meet my exacting standards).

I am basically pretty selfish, stubborn and can be downright mean when I want to be. After years of bitching about my fiancée for putting work above me, I now do exactly the same and have realised that work will always come first over social events, birthdays and most other things as well. I have a very short temper and tend to get exasperated and crotchety very quickly.

I also make some very questionable decisions and there is no denying that I will never be a easy and predictable person as sometimes even I can’t predict what I will do next.

(Despite all of the above (and countless other failings) I should probably note that I am not actually all bad. )

Going back to the song, what it made me realise is that it is all too easy to shout at someone, chuck a relationship away because you want someone ‘better’ – someone who thinks more, tidies more, remembers more; all without remembering what is important.

In my fiancé I have found someone who never treats me badly, never shouts, makes me tea, breakfast, lunch, dinner and cleans the cat litter out at night. He is truly brilliant at sports while I will never exceed terrible at anything which involves even a modicum of hand-eye co-ordination. Anything mechanical starts working effortlessly the moment he touches it (we will exclude the time when he forgot to check which way the jump leads were on my car and nearly melted the entire electrical system!). His spatial awareness is truly legendary and he can explain anything he understands himself whilst I couldn’t explain ice to an Eskimo. He is loving, kind sweet, trustworthy (as much as a human being ever can be) and I know he will always look out for me, take care of me if I am ill. I can talk to him about anything and he will try and act interested even when he isn’t (whilst I would just tell him I didn’t care and to stop talking!)

In short he may not be all of the things I would normally judge people by, that I value as my own best features, but he is probably twice the person I will ever be and I expect that if I spend the rest of my life trying to make up for all the things I have ever done wrong and he spent the rest of his life making up for all of the things he had ever done wrong he would be finished significantly earlier than me – and that is not even counting the mistakes I have yet to make.

He may not be as academic as me, as organised, as tidy, or as thoughtful, but I do know one thing for sure – there is no way I deserve such an amazing fiancé, I will never know how I convinced him to fall in love with me, to ask me to marry him.

There are thousands of people out there who would connect jump leads the right way round in the first place. But there probably aren’t that many who would spend Sunday afternoon as Halfords in -2 degrees checking each and every electrical fuse a car has to find out which ones have melted. What more could anyone ask for?