Dear Earl,

I think getting to know someone is a lot like having tea. At first you sit properly with your best manners and polite conversation. There is the weather, poetry, then talk of the past. You start to look forward to that shared time. In fact, you start to feel a bond in knowing that you don't have to start from the beginning anymore, there is enough shared knowledge to start where you left off each time. After awhile you get more relaxed and you move to other rooms of the mind, but in order to get there, you have to have honest conversation and to start with an empty cup. If you don't have an empty cup, you can never take the other person in for who they are. It is most unfair to have tea with a full cup, even if the cup isn't desired. When pouring tea into a full cup someone will get burned, perhaps both. Also, if the cup is filled with bitterness it poisons the new cup. One can never give a relationship a chance if the cup has the leftover spoils of the last relationship. You wouldn't pour a new bottle of your favorite Zin into the cup you left out from last year, right?
Sometimes you must empty the cups and let go of all the things that hurt in the relationship in order to sustain it. Sometimes you must let go of the cups. This requires honesty. It is the hardest thing. Both people have to be able to be at that place at the same time. A person who isn't complete is like a cup with a hole in it, they can never be filled, nor can they ever embrace the depth of the other person. How unfortunate.