Imagine your life is a room. You and somebody special live in that room comfortably, enjoying each other every moment.

Without warning, an elephant appears that is so large it encompasses the entire room. You are no longer able to enjoy each other because there is an elephant in the way.

Things you have are getting crushed, broken beyond repair. It is too big to fit thru the doors. Everywhere you look, all you see, is elephant.

What can be done?

You can ask it to leave the same way it arrived.
Being an elephant, it doesn't understand you. It tries to move around but it is too big and it destroys even more of the things you love.

You can try leaving yourself but there is nothing outside worth going to. Everything you love is in the room with that elephant.

You hire someone else to come and try to talk the elephant into leaving. That doesn't work because the elephant is there for you.

You cut a huge hole in the wall and try to push the elephant out. It is too big. You can't budge it at all and sometimes when you think you got it to move it steps away from the direction you are pushing.

Here is what you do...

You kill the elephant.
Now you have a dead elephant in the room. You still can't really move much. Everywhere you look there is dead elephant. It starts to rot and it stinks up everything you hold dear. This is worse than the live elephant.

The only solution to rid yourself of this dead stinking elephant is...

You cut the elephant into small pieces and throw it out of your room.
You and your loved ones then work to rid the room of all traces of the elephant. Over time, there is no trace of the elephant except in memories.

The magically appearing elephant is like that unexpected life crisis that we get. Death of a loved one, financial disaster, fire/flood/quake, or any other unexpected major life changing event.

There is another elephant that can invade your room as well. This other elephant is sneaky and may already have designs on you.

The Ant Elephant!

In life, we encounter ants all the time. Those pesky critters seem to invade the room everywhere. They get into all the nooks and cranny's. Most of us stomp on them or get some barriers of pesticide to keep them out but still they can get in.

When we get so used to those ants in our room, they gather without us giving it much thought. We get so we don't really seem to look at them anymore. They gather and gather in our room.

Soon enough we have an elephant in our room. Only this elephant is different. When we look closely, it is made up of ants. It keeps growing. Everything we love is being destroyed. Something must be done.

You can try asking it to leave, part of it does but that hole is filled with more ants arriving. You can cut a wall out but that just allows even more ants to enter. You can try to kill it but even if you chop off its head, it just regrows a new one. You can't chop it up. You can't smash it. It just won't leave.

You must leave. You try to take the people and things you love with you to start fresh but you can't reach them because of this morphing elephant in your way. You are now all alone, outside your room. The ants have taken all you love from you.

There is a solution to the ant elephant.

Don't let the ants gather in the first place. Address each one as it enters the room. Turn it away, knock it down, kill it before it can lead its friends into your life. Protect what you love, show those you love how to do the same. Try not to let ant prevention encompass your existence. After awhile, they will stop trying to get in.

Certainly a long boring rant. What are you trying to tell us?

I apologize. Since you don't know, you are special.
May you never understand.

OOOoooookaaaaayy.

I like turtles!

Of course!

Since this thread was posted in the Dating & Relationships forum, what does the first post have to do with dating and relationships?

Would you like me to postulate a theory?

I am amazed at the responses I get on this.
I was expecting:
Well, duh
Thanx I never thought of it that way
Interesting analogy

but what I got was affirmation that either nobody has ever heard of the Ants & Elephants or relationships are not really that important.

For the impeded, I'll spell it out for you...

The Elephant represents the big thing that happens that tries to destroy a relationship. Usually, those one-time events can be dealt with and the relationship can return to a somewhat normal existence.

The ANTS represent the little things that hurt a relationship. If left alone they grow to a point that it becomes a major thing destroying a relationship.

The only way to prevent those ants from saturating your relationship is to remove them BEFORE they become an elephant.

DUH!!!

He wants to kill it ... when just a leash and a high voltage electric prod to the neither regions will get the elephant to use the same door it came in from.

People in their Toddler Tantrum mentality always want to destroy things and never use gentle persuasion by giving them an offer they can't refuse.

The dumb, deaf and blind kids sure play a mean pinball.

sumbuddie deux luv

Where do you get your weed?

Nah... He wants to show off how smart he is. Thing is, I got bored one sentence in. I guess I'll muddle through and figure out how to continue my successful 5 year relationship. Or... I'll listen to advice from my sister who has been happily married for almost 40 years.

I am a fan of analogies, and I had never heard that one so I didn't understand it either.

Thank you for explaining.

So when you get ants in your pants

You need to learn the magic that makes elephants appear to have the ants disappear?

Why?
It's not a very good story or analogy or moral lesson.

For one thing it presumes that both people see and recognize something as an "elephant."
When more often than not one person will see an elephant, where the other one doesn't.
And there's also the problem of one person seeing the elephant as an ant, and the other person seeing it as a regular sized magically appearing elephant.


So a relationship is just one persons life, that the other one has to learn to live in?

And how do you reconcile things like:

If without warning elephants can just magically "appear," how can you keep them from gathering? Especially if they are "ant" size?

and

How can you cut a hole big enough to get that big of elephant through, without completely destroying the room?

And if elephants that are too big to fit through the doors can get into the room...how could you possibly keep teeny tiny ant elephants out? Even if they don't have the magic ability of the big elephants to materialize inside the room and surprise you, the only way to keep them out is to completely seal the room, air tight...which would ultimately suffocate everyone inside.

and

That seems rather Herculean. "Ok. At any time an elephant can magically appear in your room. You not only have to be constantly vigilant against magically appearing elephants at any time, but you also need to be able to cut holes in the wall to get them out and then repair the holes in the wall, or kill them, dismember them, and clean up the mess to surgically sterile standards, all while being situationally aware at all times of every square micro inch of the room because at any time a single ant may enter the room and you have to kill it immediately, right now, before any more come in."


that can easily produce the elephant/ant elephant of not trusting your partners ability to protect themselves, seeing them as inferior and needing protection, or them believing you are treating them that way.


which can easily lead to the elephant/ant elephant of disrespecting their methods of protecting themselves or dealing with their own elephants/ant elephants.


You offer no reason why they would stop trying to get in.
They tried to get inside in the first place.
You don't really offer anything regarding removing the incentive for them to get in, only how to react when they do.


They aren't a good representation.
Relationships aren't like a barrel of apples you are trying to protect so you can consume them, or a secure bunker meant to isolate you from anything, so when ants get in they automatically start detracting from it, diminishing your supply and potential enjoyment.

Some hurts are necessary for relationships to grow.
Like getting through and over your first major fight, or being able to tell your partner "no," or learning you can be disappointed by them and still love them, or disparate belief tolerance.

Your "ant" analogy make hurts something to be killed and done away with before they have a chance to bite.
Don't ever fight, learn how to never fight at all...stamp that ant out right away!
Don't learn to tell your partner "no," just always tell them yes, or be passive aggressive...stamp that ant out right away!
Or back down when you say no and compromise...cut that elephant up or push it out of the way!


Sometimes "ants" are reality and you need them to "saturate" a relationship before you see how bad of a relationship it actually is.

Don't bring Dr. Who into this.

The problem I have with argument-by-analogies such as this one, is that the analogy itself becomes the thing being argued about.

Problems in relationships aren't at all like having a real elephant in the one space you need to live in. Nor are ants exactly like having small problems.

Just from a writers point of view, and from a teacher's point of view, any analogy that requires that much of an explanation, isn't doing what analogies are supposed to do: they are supposed to SHORTEN AND CLARIFY what you are talking about, not lengthen and confuse it with distractions.