The Right to Make Mistakes

From earlier this month is this NYT column asking whether third parties should share what they know about one of the parties in a relationship based on past experience.  My feeling is people need to butt the hell out unless that person is a criminal of some sort.

I was a person from a family that had severe boundary issues, chiefly my mother.  I think in retrospect she suffered from a personality disorder thanks to having lost some babies during the course of her life.  She overcompensated and thus started dictating several of the rest of us children how we should live our lives.  I don't want to go into further details because of time constraints, but it was not a particularly great childhood for me growing up.  I was verbally abused by both parents and one brother on an almost daily basis.  It tore away at me, and I think it was done especially by my mother in order to make me more dependent on her and give meaning to HER life.  That is narcissism, and it is destructive as hell.

Anyway, anybody who takes it upon himself or herself to "warn" me about somebody else would be dropped like a hot potato.  I would have nothing to do with these people.  I can find information out about somebody all by myself without having people coming around with unsolicited advice.

People HAVE to make mistakes in life, for that is part of what makes a person confident in his or her own abilities.  If you aren't allowed to make mistakes or have failures, you can't grow as a person.  You have to the ability to take risks.

Besides, if a relationship doesn't work out with one person, that doesn't mean the relationship can't work for another person.

The only exception to this is people who have violent/criminal tendencies.