The Destructive Samaritan

I believe that any friendship is based on the mutual need of two people to help each other out in times of need. In times when you have upcoming exams, all you can eat is Cadbury caramel chocolate, drink 8 Starbucks a day and get increasingly more stressed, in times when your period is late 5 days and you've ripped out half your skull in anxiousness and of course, in times of relationship dismays and troubles. If this ingredient is missing, the friendship lacks guininety and I don't think can be classified as real. However, how far should one go in trying to maintain some kind of label, status to a relationship? Of trying to, en quote, "keep it real"?

My ex-boyfriend of 13 months and I have catastrophically been attempting revival of friendly communicating for 2 or 3 months now. Details put aside, it just did not work. We either fought and argued like a married couple after way too many evenings spend in front of the TV arguing whether they will watch Oprah or NFL, ignored each other like archenemies or inevitably, spoke together in a civil yet very suggestive manner. No pattern of communication seemed to work and I got frustrated to the point that I threw a vase out of my window (and was incredibly pissed off the next morning as it was quite a beautiful vase). And now, imminently after a 3 and a half hour conversation with him in which I helped and advised him in his relationship problems with a women he left me for, I am wondering what the fuck I and the women in my situation think they're doing.

How far is it too far when it comes to the topic of helping people in need with their personal problems? When is it that people cross the line of caring and delve into the line of loosing their own self dignity a inevitably sacrifice themselves for the cause of some fabricated image of a functional relationship unit? It is hard to say. I feel strange about the conversation I had with my ex-significant other. And other than the fact that I am exhausted to the fullest, I don't think it made him any less confused about his situation, but gave me much more information to work with and inevitably, I feel a certain clarity has settled upon my relationship vision. Same can be said in situations in which the person I am helping out is not someone I used to be emotionally involved with on a profoundly intimate level. How far is it too far to help someone in need?

I doubt that a mark will ever be placed upon this imaginary boundary, for it is to thin and fragile. People of all sexes, ages and races will inevitably learn from their own mistakes and move onto to deal with situations in different, more self protective ways that will still prove beneficial towards both sides. It is never worth sacrificing a piece of yourself in order to please someone else or create the illusion of a harmonious relationship. I suffer from the complex of the destructive samaritan. I can't live with, or without it.