It’s amazing what a person can grow accustomed to.

I wrote a few months ago about how stressful it was when I went into my office one day to find that my building was under construction.  Everything was scaffolding and plastic and drilling noises.  It really bothered me… for about two weeks.

And then I adjusted, and it became “the new normal”.  I would walk in, greet the security guard, empathize with their having to work while their space was under construction, and make a joke about how appropriate it was for Halloween.  On one particularly amusing December day, I walked through the scaffolding in the lobby, where drills and hammers abounded, and noted that the song playing was Silent Night.  I chuckled to myself – “All is calm,” indeed!

Then, today, I arrived at the office to find that the scaffolding was gone.  And I took a deep breath that filled me with what I can only describe as lightness and wellbeing.  I was reminded of our enormous capacity to adjust to things that are uncomfortable – to create a “new normal”, and how easy it is to lose sight of the ways in which there is potential for positive change.

And this made me think of frog legs.

 

The Apocryphal Story of Frog Legs

There’s an old story about how frog legs are prepared as food.  A quick Google search says it’s not true, but it still holds tremendous power for metaphor, so I’m going to tell it anyway with the disclaimer that you should think of it as a story rather than an instruction manual about how to make French cuisine.

Here’s the story:

If you’ve ever made lobster, you know that it’s prepared by placing a live lobster into boiling hot water – well this is also the case for frog’s legs.  But unlike lobsters, frogs have legs and are adept at jumping.  If you place the frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately.

The solution to this problem is to place the frog into a pot of room temperature water.  The frog will swim around, unaware that anything is amiss.  Then, you slowly heat the water.  Because the change is so gradual, the frog doesn’t know it’s being cooked until its legs are ready to be battered and fried.  In other words, because the changes happen slowly, the frog isn’t even aware that anything is wrong – but that doesn’t mean that all is well.

 

How this Applies to Bad Relationships

Sometimes, people find themselves in really ungratifying relationships, and they’re not quite sure how they got there.  Like me with the scaffolding, or the frog in the slowly heating water, they may not even realize how bad it’s gotten.

If you’re in one of these bad relationships, you can probably remember a time at the beginning when you really enjoyed spending time with your partner.  You felt warm inside when you saw them, you looked forward to sharing hours with them, and you missed them when they were gone.

But as you’re examining the current state of your relationship, you’re not sure how you got there.  Maybe you and your partner argue constantly.  Maybe you feel unsupported by them, or unsupportive of them.  Maybe you don’t feel connected to them anymore.  It’s not an abusive relationship (that’s another topic for another day), it’s just not a particularly gratifying one.  Sometimes you don’t even notice it – it fades into the woodwork, and it’s become the new status quo.  And you can justify it to yourself… like The Offspring sang in their 1994 hit single Self-Esteem, “the more you suffer, the more it shows you really care.”

But some days, you think, maybe this isn’t working out anymore.  Maybe I should leave.

Can it be fixed?  Maybe.  Just like the scaffolding in my building disappearing, sometimes things that are messy can be cleaned up.

But as for the frog… well, that’s another story.

Featured photo courtesy of Jerry Kirkhart – CC 2.0