What I've learned about Relationships from Poker Chips

I guess I'll start by saying that I'm not exactly in the best place reationship-wise right now...you can probably tell. But, I think I'm on to something tonight. See, my little brothers got me hooked on Texas (groan) hold'em and for months now, and I've been trying to learn how to shuffle poker chips to no avail. It's something that you see the pros do on tv and it looks soooo cool that you just have to learn how to do it. A lot like relationships, I guess. You see really good ones on tv all the time and you want to have the exact same thing, they make it look so easy. It just doesn't usually work out that way. To tell you the truth, relationships and poker chips so much alike, it's scary. It kinda scares me that I'm even reflecting enough to write this, but I guess I'll get down to business.
Okay, first I'm going to say that shuffling poker chips is not easy thing to do. I've been working on it for months and nada. Not a single sign of improvement in sight. I still can't do it. But tonight, I sat down at my coffee table and tried and thought...rinse, lather, repeat. And during this process of picking poker chips up off the floor and reflecting, I came up with some really great stuff.
When shuffling poker chips, you have to have a soft touch. If you squeeze them too hard, they'll just shoot out all over the place and it doesn't work. The harder your squeeze the further they fly, so it forces you to ease up. You have to be gentle and watch how hard you push, because the minute you start pushing them in directions that they don't want to go, is the exact moment when the poker chips roll from between your fingers forcing you to start over.

Now, here's how the perception thing comes into play:

When I shuffle chips, or try to anyway, I always make sure to use two stacks of different colors. I do this so I can look at them when I'm done and make sure that I did it right. Now, there are times when you start to shuffle and everything seems to be going well and you think that all the chips are falling into place. You've got just the right touch, you're not forcing them, and they just seem to want to do your bidding and slide into place like good little chips. Then you get done, pull your hands away, lean over to look, and damn it! You see two blue chips on top of each other and three green chips on top of that. Everything started out well, and it felt like everything was sliding into place. After you got them stacked, you just knew that it was right, but look from another angle, and nope. You were wrong. That's just the way it goes sometimes. Whether or not it worked is all in how you look at it. You may think you're doing it right, but upon closer observation, you're not. Simple as that.
Not only that, but the chips don't always fall into place as easily as you'd like them to. You can try and try and try some more, until your fingers are no longer functioning correctly and they still don't go where they should. You can try pushing and gently persuading, and even praying but somehow they still just don't cooperate. It dawns on you sometime around the eight hundred and twenty third time you try that maybe it's something that you're doing wrong. If you can learn this early on it makes the whole situation a lot easier, but most of us (and by most of us, I mean me) don't catch on that quickly.
That brings me to the BIG revelation and that is: You have to know when pushing will make more of a mess than stopping. At that point you come to a fork in the road. You have to either stop pushing or be willing to clean up the mess you've made. The age old question. That is the moment when you have to be honest with yourself. You have to weigh your options and make a choice. Personally I've always been afraid of that. Making choices, I mean. Because when you make a choice, you can never be sure that it's the right one. You never know how its going to effect you until after its made and it's too late to be undone. Relationships are them same way. You have to know when to fight for them, and when to just let the person walk away.
I haven't exactly decided yet what would be best for the situation I'm in at the moment, so I'm in a sort of limbo. Caught between being and not being...together, that is. I pushed for a while, but it started to make a mess, so now I've just stopped. Of course I still put in a little effort every once in a while. I give it a shot and give him a call. Just like with the poker chips. I haven't had them out in a week and then tonight we played and I tried to shuffle a few hundred more times while the game went on around me. Where the relationship is going, I couldn't tell you. I think I may have squeezed too hard and pushed too much and made too big of a mess to clean up with this one, but tonight I did shuffle the chips right once and I won the poker game.