Actions speak louder than words.  This statement has truth to it, especially when it comes to the negative side of things.  For example we can quickly pick out the person who we have most recently applied this old adage to.  If I tell someone that I will be somewhere at a certain time and place, then either don’t show up, or show up late there is a negative reaction.  I would be judged based on this action showing either my insensitivity or absenteeism, correct?  We asses and categorize a person’s past behaviours in such a way that it will reflect how we interact with that person going forward.  If a person is late for dinner more than once, we will either respond by being late ourselves, manipulating the time of the events to prevent this occurrence but rarely would we resort to cut out the person from our lives for tardy behaviour.  We like the person and we will be lenient for their shortcomings, hardly do we demand them to swear up and down that they will never present this negative behaviour again.  But we also recognize that this is simply a negative action and we do not let it cloud our overall judgment of our relationship with this person.

Here is the interesting part of this, would you say this universally holds true for a positive action?  More to the point, what actions does your partner have to display that you react and know that they love you without having to say so?  Here is my reason for asking this.  I have at times felt that my partner did not love or care for me.  He verbally said he loved me, but there was no clear cut action that he took to make me doubt his words, however the words were only words.  Often there are not actions to back up his words, rather just a sufficient lack of negative behaviours towards our relationship.  Further to this, I have felt unloved because of one tiny little misunderstanding and the mere words were not enough to dispel my doubts.  Now this is a troubling thought when looked at rationally.  Why do we expect our partners to constantly show that they love us, or display emotions of affection, support and tenderness?  And why does just one tiny little situation have the power to undo our whole support system.  Are all relationships just based on a house of cards? A precarious list built solely on loving words which all fall to the ground after one unpleasant gesture?  We don’t lose all the cards, and they get easier to build as time goes on, but don’t we get tired of re-building the same thing?

It’s funny that when I was trying to write this post, I was taking a stance that positive actions really do not get noticed nearly as often as negative ones.  Sadly today I learned the cold hard truth of that.  I needed more time to show my actions, and instead had one of my favorite relationships end because of the impact of the negative ones.  So I guess the short of it is that actions do speak so much louder than words, and unfortunately positive actions have less weight than negative ones.