Making quick judgements: small events can skew your perception and impression of someone else in the wrong way if you don’t verify and validate. For example, if a guy ruffles the head of another guy, I once assumed that must mean they are really good friends, since why would you let a stranger do that?  Turns out they were barely acquaintances.  A more common example is when a guy and a girl arrives together, and people assume they are a couple when they aren’t.  Read Who Am I? and Nature of Your Own Identity.  

Projecting the past: when you meet someone new who reminds you of someone you know, and you project, unfairly, the previous experience onto the new one.  While it is OK to use history as a predicting mechanism, don’t mistake prediction for truth.  Everyone deserves a chance to be judged independently for who they are.

Mistake Standards for Preferences: It’s OK to have preferences: to like sports and not like pickles; to like extroverts or prefer online forums.  Some people, you get along with better than others.  That is your preference: don’t mistake this for superiority, which is what you are saying when you accuse one person of being “better” than another.  You are friends with Bob and not Bo because you prefer Bob’s characteristics over Bo’s, not because Bob is superior to Bo.  On the flip side, if someone does not like you, it does not mean you are not good enough: it is a preference, not a standard.

Nice relativity: not being nice does not make someone mean, doing mean things does.  Also, unless you understand where the person is coming from, don’t make quick judgments–everyone has a different definition of what is nice, and what is mean, and they also have a different expectation for different people.  What someone might think is nice, someone else might think is normal, polite manners.  What someone else thinks is mean, might just be normal behavior to someone else.  Saying no is not mean, people have a right to say no.

Money and Desire: I used to think wanting money/etc. made someone a bad person. I have since learned that this is false: it’s OK to want things, and it is not the desire itself that makes a person bad.  It is in how that desire manifests into decisions and actions that determines whether a person is good or bad.

Pedestal – When you are overly judgmental in an extremely optimistic manner.  No-one is perfect (Overcome Perfectionism), if you see no cons it just means you haven’t found them yet.  Life has both good and bad, so it’s about finding the right combination for the relationship.

Identity Insecurity – If you don’t know who you are, then you are likely to give yourself up to the other person.  This is fine if that’s what you want, but if you want to be your own person, you need to know where you stand in order to make a stand when you need to. (How to Find, Understand, Construct, Who You Are)

Self-Confidence Insecurity – Lack of confidence in yourself, commonly because you have low self worth.  Read What is Self Worth to get it and Confidence to understand it.

Behaviors

Sacrifice: is an over-glorified way of demonstrating care, and it needs to be understood since it is frequently mis-used.  Sacrifice alone is not a sign of care: if you are doing something that isn’t ideal because you care about someone, you should ask yourself if there was a better way to plan ahead so that you didn’t have to make that sacrifice, while still achieving your goals.  Thinking that way makes you smart, not uncaring.  Only sacrifice when you need to, and not unnecessarily.  However, with that being said, unnecessary sacrifice can deepen a bond if used correctly: say you spend extra time on a gift for someone.  You sacrificed some free time, but you didn’t have to sacrifice any serious commitments–breaking a promise to someone else so that you can scramble to find a last minute gift would be bad planning and unnecessary sacrifice.

Lots more to read in my post on Insecurity and Overcome Illogical Thoughts of Insecure People

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Here are some important things to know about relationships.

Relationships have states, and that state can be based on time and context.  Time refers to how when you first meet, you are strangers, then you might become acquaintances, friends, close friends, like family, family.  Context refers to how at school you are a student, but at home you are a son or daughter, and in a club you might be president while at work you are an employee, etc.

Relationships have health, and the health behaves like a plant: it grows stronger if you water it, and weaker if you stop.  If you stop interacting with someone completely, the relationship has been suspended.  Sure you can resume the relationship, and if you are close enough friends, it will feel as though the relationship never ended, but the truth is that it did end for the duration that you were apart.  Don’t mistake a healthy relationship state (like close friend) for a healthy relationship health (traveling through life together).

Relationships take time and are not guaranteed: just because you want to have [deep] [meaningful] relationships, doesn’t mean you will get them quickly, or even at all.  You must wait and hope because it is out of your control.  It is out of your control because a true relationship is genuine: there’s only so much work you can do before you’re no longer true to yourself.

People Lie: Verify everything before accepting it as truth.  (Doing it too much is paranoia–focus on validating important information rather than everything.)  Fact checking “world facts” is easy with Google, but fact checking “people facts” is harder: be wary of gossip.  However, people have a right to privacy, and sometimes you don’t deserve the truth: it is not your right to know, so if someone lies to you, they may have good reason to–don’t force it out of them.  Example: Parents don’t want child to know the child was adopted.

See the Theory of What are Relationships? (add a like to this post to what are relationships?)

To find out when more Life Education Curriculum is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.  Please share your comments to this post below.