A Metaphor for Immaturity
Some people never grow mature, but superficially, nobody notices.
Imagine a person, who cannot see colors, who sees the world only in black and white. Imagine him painting a picture. He takes the paint from a tube with 'blue' written on the label, because he knows, that the sky is blue, he takes green for the meadow, red for flowers, yellow for the sun. With enough such knowledge, he might paint a picture, that while he himself only sees shades of grey, could look completely natural in color to anybody. Those, who do not know of his affliction, would never suspect anything.
He can either be aware, that he can never recognize the color of any object. He knows 'blue' as a label, a trait of an object to memorize, it is stored information, not his perception. He describes the sky as blue, like everybody does, so nobody suspects, that he does not perceive, what he is talking about.
Or he might himself not be aware of his affliction, if yellow is a lighter shade of gray than is blue, and he has learned to distinguish those shades of gray.
An immature person is just like him. He can talk about trust abstractly and very sincerely as very important in a relationship. But when in a situation, where he has to decide to trust or not, or to behave trustworthy or not, he has not clue at all, what to do and what others expect from him.
Again, he might either know himself, that he is too immature and attempts to pretend or to learn, what is expected, or he might not know himself, that his immature understanding of trust is not the same as that of others.
The same with love, commitment, responsibility. He can accept them, appreciate them and mean it sincerely, and yet he is not capable to behave accordingly.
This makes immature people such a hazard to unsuspecting others, who rely that if somebody agrees on the importance of trust as the fundament of a relationship, they both mean the same when using the word trust. When the mature person finds out, that trust was for the immature person just a meaningless word, it is many times already too late to recoil without having been hurt.
Some people never grow mature, but superficially, nobody notices.
Imagine a person, who cannot see colors, who sees the world only in black and white. Imagine him painting a picture. He takes the paint from a tube with 'blue' written on the label, because he knows, that the sky is blue, he takes green for the meadow, red for flowers, yellow for the sun. With enough such knowledge, he might paint a picture, that while he himself only sees shades of grey, could look completely natural in color to anybody. Those, who do not know of his affliction, would never suspect anything.
He can either be aware, that he can never recognize the color of any object. He knows 'blue' as a label, a trait of an object to memorize, it is stored information, not his perception. He describes the sky as blue, like everybody does, so nobody suspects, that he does not perceive, what he is talking about.
Or he might himself not be aware of his affliction, if yellow is a lighter shade of gray than is blue, and he has learned to distinguish those shades of gray.
An immature person is just like him. He can talk about trust abstractly and very sincerely as very important in a relationship. But when in a situation, where he has to decide to trust or not, or to behave trustworthy or not, he has not clue at all, what to do and what others expect from him.
Again, he might either know himself, that he is too immature and attempts to pretend or to learn, what is expected, or he might not know himself, that his immature understanding of trust is not the same as that of others.
The same with love, commitment, responsibility. He can accept them, appreciate them and mean it sincerely, and yet he is not capable to behave accordingly.
This makes immature people such a hazard to unsuspecting others, who rely that if somebody agrees on the importance of trust as the fundament of a relationship, they both mean the same when using the word trust. When the mature person finds out, that trust was for the immature person just a meaningless word, it is many times already too late to recoil without having been hurt.
