The Who and How a Person is.

New relationships often fill flowers and butterflies in the cup. The lesser you know a person, the more interesting they appear. And once you know them, you know them. But what does it really take to know a person. Because even after spending a lifetime with someone you might feel, you still don’t know them. And sometimes it just sounds a click.

The elements which brings a person close to you is ‘who they are’. And that which either keeps them in your life or drifts you two apart is ‘how they are’. And this might sound confusing. But honestly, it’s simpler than you think.

The ‘who’ part in a person includes the things that they choose and refuse, their likes and dislikes. The elements that appear on the surface right when you meet them. Your friend is kind, your spouse is generous, they love hearing music, they like rides, she helps poor people, he enjoys socializing. The ‘who’ of a person is what attracts or repels you with them. When you two think that you share a similar vibe, it means your tastes match, you have things in common. Your ‘who’ matches with their ‘who’.

The ‘how’ is a much later thing. It comes in layers. The more you get to know a person, the more you get to know how they are as a person. It simply means how they react to a situation. Suppose there are different expressions of anger. Some people rant too much, they don’t even mean them. Some grow silent. Some speak, much slow, but only speak what they really mean. Some storm out of the room. Some shout. Every person has a different way of reacting. This difference is how they are build. This way of expression shows their mechanism and way of handling things in life.

A person might appear very smart to you, because their personality is appealing. But they do not know how to handle situations. Like I have a friend. He loves talking. Like he talks. He can keep talking for at least one and a half hour without any interference. On our first few outings, only he spoke. I hardly had a chance to put forward my opinions. Before I could only say “oh really…” he would take me to another stream of tales. And yet when life and relationships demanded clarifications he always avoided conversations. He moved away. He would come back and tell me everything, what went wrong, what could better have been done. But when things happen, he moves away. Trust issues? No. This is how he is. It is an inbuilt mechanism.

And you cannot judge a person right or wrong for ‘who’ and ‘how’ they are. God has made them like that. Their situations have made them like that. The way they are, and the way they continue to be is their survival formula. There are certain human emotions which are not thoughtfully acted. Those are instincts.

Being able to differentiate between a person’s ‘who’ and ‘how’ brings clarity to us. It helps. It avoids and eliminates the chances of us saying, “I don’t understand this behavior”. It helps us to be aware of who we are dealing with. And it helps us to understand that they might be dealing differently with us when time comes. By now, to make it short, I can say that a person can have qualities different than their mechanism, and stand guiltless about it. People can choose to act and react in two different ways. When you know which element in them is on the driving seat, handling, staying, holding on to them, or moving on from them becomes easier.

Like the friend I said, he once asked me how I managed to hold on to him after how he had been for those long months. And I said, “Your actions towards me were but a collateral damage to how you were handling life back then. Your situations can govern you, not me.”