This is the sixth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.
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Q: My partner is a teacher who works ludicrously long hours but loves her job. I’m a law student preparing to enter a field that feels full of toxic, impossible work expectations, and on top of that I’m training in labor law because I’m passionate about workers’ rights. One night recently, when my partner was still up working at ten in the evening, I made a critical comment: Are all the teachers at her school worked this hard? Is everyone okay with it?
My partner was very defensive and felt that I was criticizing the work she loves. I didn’t intend to criticize her. I shared my thought with her because it’s a political, systemic problem that was bothering me—not a problem I had with her. But the disparity between our working lives does bother me. I couldn’t work the hours she does, even if I believed it was worthwhile. Her tirelessness makes me worried that we don’t share the same values. She’s always supportive of me in my work and respects the boundaries I enforce around my time with my work and school lives, but she’s consistently defensive of her own habits and can’t engage with them ideologically. She doesn’t understand or sympathize with my feeling of anger and protectiveness about our personal time.
A: For eight years I lived, in various arrangements, with my best friend, Louise. Like any deep friendship, especially between roommates, ours was filled with fears, resentments and insecurities that we carefully concealed from each other out of love. The only moments in which I became aware that I was upset with Louise had, on their surface, nothing to do with our relationship. Every so often Louise, who tends to be extremely generous and forgiving, would get angry at somebody else in her life. This was totally reasonable. Not only was it reasonable, I knew my role as her friend was to share in her anger and endorse it. But whenever Louise got angry at someone else I had an overwhelming urge to defend the person on the receiving end of her frustration. Sometimes I would refuse to acknowledge that I felt defensive. Sometimes I’d admit it, and we’d chalk it up to the fact that I’m a bit of a devil’s advocate by nature. Sometimes I defended people I didn’t even like! People who did things that would also make me angry! For no fair reason, whenever Louise revealed that she had it in her to be mad at someone, I became terrified that one day she would be horribly, devastatingly mad at me. I grew very anxious and argumentative—not understanding quite why—as I tried to undermine the source and power of her anger. And because I had no apparent vested interest in whatever conflicts Louise had with her other loved ones, I made my objections on the basis of some palatable, objective-ish moral reality that, of course, I had conjured in order to insulate myself from the thought that Louise’s anger could apply to me.
Louise and I don’t live together anymore, but I often have conversations that remind me of this habit. It seems to happen all too frequently that we find ourselves defensive about things that have nothing to do with us. Your partner’s situation at work, with which she is perfectly content, is on its face a foolish thing for you to get bent out of shape about. I don’t think it will shock you that I don’t think you’re actually criticizing your partner’s working hours for purely ideological reasons, nor that her defensiveness is unreasonable. In general, I think we read a problem like this about “work-life balance” or a “difference in values,” a classic of the advice genre, as a cipher for the asker’s ambivalence about their relationship. My impression this time, though, is that the argument is a cipher for your ambivalence about work.
If you and I live in the same society, everything in your upbringing and your unconscious education has taught you to love your work so much that no boundaries exist between it and your personal life. Your legal training and, I imagine, your political coming-of-age have affirmed your sense that this is a dangerous belief system to buy into; still, there’s no way to exist in the workforce without being subject to this meritocratic delusion. As you sit next to your partner, who works tirelessly and yet without resentment or degradation, you can’t help but feel: “Why does it come so easily to you, and not to me? Why do I have to be more easily fatigued, doubt my talent and my passion, and feel so ashamed about the days when I simply don’t want to work?” To feel this way is against your ideological commitments. To phrase your complaint this way would express not that you wish to live in a world with a less punishing relationship to work, but that part of you desperately wants to succeed naturally in this one. And how could you not? It’s destabilizing to be close to people whose natural orientations are so aligned with social reward systems. Of course, we feel both proud and frustrated when the people we are close to, the ones we compare ourselves to day and night, appear to surpass us in ways that we don’t think we even care about.
We are famously attracted to those who are different from us, and then we turn around and resent them for their difference. If your partner is a good person, a person who shares your concerns about labor justice, then how could she so blithely capitulate to a career that places such intense demands on its workers? But unless your partner has changed radically since you met her, you met her as a person who was devoted to her work and had a sunny willingness to go the extra mile for her students. I can almost guarantee that you admired and relished this quality in her. When you despair that she can’t engage with this problem “ideologically,” I think it’s because you are hiding—as I often hid with Louise, and as I still frequently hide—your personal grievance behind an abstract political façade. It’s much more uncomfortable to defend your own insecurities than to stake a moral claim and get outraged as you gather your weapons to defend it.
It’s my opinion—I’ll out myself here—that if a person reacts as if you are accusing them, they are usually right. We are very attuned to the nuances of criticisms against us, and often driving blind when we are leveling a criticism. It sounds to me as if your partner does share your values; the value that you share is the right of each person to determine their own capacities and boundaries at work, as much as is possible in a system of unjust remuneration.
There is no arena more frustrating—or, if we are frank and attentive to our own frustration, rewarding—than the one in which we find ourselves least suited to our world. If yours is work, you are certainly not alone. Sometimes I feel that work is also the arena in which I myself am least suited to my world. When we lived together, Louise joked that she couldn’t tell whether I was the laziest or the most disciplined person she knew. My work ethic is resoundingly inconsistent, fragile and in my opinion not remotely an ethic at all. Your career demands ideological devotion and a strong stomach for injustice, and you make these invaluable commitments as a protest against an outsized surrender of time; mine involves a vulnerability and a degree of tolerance for uncertainty that I pray, pretty blindly, will seem to me in a few decades to have redeemed the proportion of business hours I spend lollygagging around. Both of us spend a good amount of time ashamed that we don’t have your partner’s stamina.
But I’m sure there is some other arena in your personal lives in which things come more easily for you than they do for your partner. Do you not sometimes, as conversations about that other arena arise, feel accused, as if she resents you for your natural facility or her own inability to keep up? Do you feel suddenly as if you’re no longer acting out the same scenario, the shared narrative that undergirds your relationship? Be generous. You are not equals, and need not be. When we load our respective weighing pans on either side of the scales, the contents need not be the same, so long as the balance is precarious and collaborative enough to hold us up.
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Q: I’ve always found dating apps exhausting, but recently they’ve started to feel pointless as well. The premise of these apps is that, based on some photos and a little conversation, we can reliably identify what we’re looking for in a partner. The older I get, though, the more I feel like I don’t actually know what I want. Based on who I swipe on and flirt with, I have a distinct type, but those connections have never actually gone anywhere. By contrast, what I remember about the first girl I really fell in love with was how very not my “type” she was, and how I loved her if anything more because of that, because there was something mysterious about my initial attraction to her. My feelings felt all the more authentic because I couldn’t explain them.
With each failed relationship since then, my distrust of my own romantic intuition has grown. I’m setting up dates with people who, precisely because I think they are a good enough fit to ask out, probably aren’t a good fit at all. The only alternative seems to be to give up the whole idea of consciously directing my dating life and to simply wait for the right person to stumble into my life unbidden—but that seems like foolish optimism.
Can we ever trust ourselves to know what we want in a lover? And if we can’t, how on earth are we supposed to find love?
A: I have nothing approaching an answer to your question. I’ve chosen it because it expresses what I consider the foremost problem in my own life, and it’s an interesting problem to think through together. Can we ever trust ourselves to know what we want in a lover? And if we can’t… it’s almost too disheartening to consider, isn’t it?
About a year ago, frustrated with the consistency of my romantic failures, I started to consume a lot of content about energy and manifestation. I’m generally not a woo-woo person, and I didn’t take this content too seriously. But I did decide that when I didn’t want to go out with someone who wanted to go out with me, I wouldn’t, and when I wanted to go out with someone, I’d ask them. This sounds so elementary that I feel foolish discussing it. Yet your question gestures to the logic that had always dissuaded me from this approach, the logic I’ve been subject to all my life—and to which I suspect women are especially subject: that I’m not wise to what I want, that perhaps I am even the primary enemy of my own happiness, and that “taking a chance” on someone might transform my life at any moment. The problem of “finding love” is generally governed, in my view, by these two opposing logics, which fight for primacy, and which each have plenty of happy adherents: the logic of attraction and self-manifestation, which requires us to be richly fulfilled and in touch with ourselves in order to notice what truly attracts us; and the logic of open-mindedness, a sort of subtle self-negation, through which we trust that other people likely know better than we do, and that, in a diffuse sense, fate has something in store for us.
I find both of these logics almost terrifyingly compelling. I vacillate between them regularly; or perhaps it’s more true to say that I’m constantly engaged in a dialectic conversation with them. They may appear to be opposed, but they have a shared premise: that there is some more knowledgeable soul or rightness, whether in ourselves or in other people or in God, into the aura of which we must bring ourselves or allow ourselves to be brought. Parallel to these is a third logic, more cynical and intellectualized, best defined by Freud in the theory of transference. When we feel we are connecting with each other, we actually merely “invent each other according to early blueprints,” as Janet Malcolm puts it: the personal relationships that seem to us so real, so governed by one external logic or another, are produced by ourselves and projected onto the façades of other people. In a way, the very premise that you “have a type” implies some degree of belief in this third logic, since by “type” you’re generally referring to a physical look, a style or manner of speaking or a display of cultural tastes onto which you project that a woman has a correlated set of fundamental, invisible qualities, which perhaps you can’t articulate, but are associated in your mind with a person who looks or acts in this way that you find attractive. In this paradigm, there is no such thing as a right person for you, but rather you choose what to perceive as important, wonderful, painful, what-have-you, and make of it whatever your unconscious wishes (though not, unfortunately, what you would otherwise consciously wish).
Vivian Gornick, in an interview in the Paris Review, described a ubiquitous version of this perspective with her trademark lucidity:
The thing that feminism taught me very quickly was that we were all making instrumental use of each other, that, for instance, when a man was attracted to me, he wasn’t attracted to me as such—he was attracted to the feelings I aroused in him, and what he wanted from me was that I keep that arousal alive. That is what we call sexual infatuation, and it’s fine, delicious, necessary. But it does not constitute reality between people. That is not one human being apprehending another human being as a separate reality, akin to one’s own … The first time a man said to me, I can’t trust you, I said, What? You can’t trust me? That’s not the way it works—it’s “I can’t trust you.” But he was right to say it. I didn’t have his concerns at heart—I had my own. I wanted him to act in a way that would make me feel good more than I wanted to know who he really was or what he really needed. I wanted to be secure, I wanted to be loved, I wanted the telephone to ring. I didn’t want him as such. The aim of the feminist movement, I’ve always thought, was that ultimately we—men and women alike—will become more real than instrumental to one another.
This passage always reminds me of a prevalent love logic in our culture, one that is constantly articulated on social media and on romantic reality shows: that love is created and sustained by our being treated well. If there is a single conviction governing American romance right now, I am certain it’s that loving someone means making them feel consistently good, making sure they never doubt your commitment, learning how to speak the language of love on their terms. A few months ago I quoted a passage from a Milan Kundera novel from the perspective of a man who has no interest in being loved because he treats a woman decently, since this is clearly a “self-interested love.” The only love that is culturally condoned right now is this self-interested love. And the reason is, of course, that everyone is petrified in exactly the way you’re petrified: we don’t know what we want, and, in the absence of many of the practical desires that structured partnership for the better part of history, the best approximation we can make about what we should want or what it would be good to want is someone who treats us well and devotes themselves to making us feel good all the time. We are being taught—I should say, especially, that young American women are being taught—to look for people who can be instrumental to us. We are not encouraged to “apprehend another human being as a separate reality, akin to one’s own.” Is this apprehension even possible? Are we being discouraged from it because it’s impossible, or because, when we achieve it, it’s not nearly as comfortable as being self-interested?
Of course, I know it’s possible. I feel sure that in moments I’ve really apprehended another person’s reality, though certainly not for the entirety of the relationship, or even for long stretches at a time. When you apprehend another person’s reality, it’s intimate, it’s sublime—and most of the time, you realize that it isn’t a reality with which you want to commune forever. It isn’t a reality that appeals to you, or at least that appeals to you enough. It comes entwined with a suffering that does not feel characteristic to you. What appealed to you, actually, were the feelings that this person aroused in you.
Here’s my working theory at the moment, a few weeks out from age thirty and with few qualifications to offer: for a long time in a relationship, all we can perceive are the feelings someone arouses in us. As Gornick puts it, that’s “fine, delicious, necessary.” (I still believe that this approach is precious—that the love we crave is usually not brought about by spending time with someone who does not attract us, or by swiping on the people who we don’t find appealing but whose apparent qualities we think sound good in a partner. If fate or God does reward us, it’s for paying close attention to what we like, not for tricking ourselves.) Then, eventually, we brush up against the reality of that person, and we start to realize we like that reality or we don’t. Some people find it natural and easy to like other people, and these people have already been happily married a long time. But people like me and maybe you, who—and by my lights this is not a bad thing—don’t want to share our realities with most people: we strike out a lot. I don’t actually think there’s a way around this. This is not to say that we don’t both have relentless, painful, stupid pathologies that may have gotten in the way of our being with someone whose reality we really did cherish. But most people have relentless, painful, stupid pathologies, and at one point or another they find themselves deeply, properly in love.
Anyway, if you figure it out, please write to me again. Then we could get down to the problem of what “finding love” really means. After all, you’ve been deeply and properly in love at least once, with the girl who was “not your type.” You’re not simply looking for the experience. What kind of love are you looking for? Do you want a love like that again? Do you want a version that leads to marriage, or (not the same thing, of course) that lasts into old age? Do you want someone you envision as the parent of your children, a love that strikes you as practical, future-thinking, nurturing? (The trap through which we attempt to find all of these things in the same person, while calling them all merely by the name “love,” is a subject for another time.) I’m trying to answer these questions, too. My no-brainer decision to stop going on dates with people I don’t like and to ask out those I do has not yielded any magical, synergistic love affairs, although it has relieved the terrible sensation of being plunged during a date into existential angst. I continue to invent rules for myself and hope they yield some new information; but like you, I’m still holding out a sort of blind, fingers-crossed hope, despite my deep distaste for this whole premise, that one day someone will cross my path and all this thinking will be devastatingly, charmingly beside the point.
Photo credit: njhdiver (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)
This is the sixth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.
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Q: My partner is a teacher who works ludicrously long hours but loves her job. I’m a law student preparing to enter a field that feels full of toxic, impossible work expectations, and on top of that I’m training in labor law because I’m passionate about workers’ rights. One night recently, when my partner was still up working at ten in the evening, I made a critical comment: Are all the teachers at her school worked this hard? Is everyone okay with it?
My partner was very defensive and felt that I was criticizing the work she loves. I didn’t intend to criticize her. I shared my thought with her because it’s a political, systemic problem that was bothering me—not a problem I had with her. But the disparity between our working lives does bother me. I couldn’t work the hours she does, even if I believed it was worthwhile. Her tirelessness makes me worried that we don’t share the same values. She’s always supportive of me in my work and respects the boundaries I enforce around my time with my work and school lives, but she’s consistently defensive of her own habits and can’t engage with them ideologically. She doesn’t understand or sympathize with my feeling of anger and protectiveness about our personal time.
A: For eight years I lived, in various arrangements, with my best friend, Louise. Like any deep friendship, especially between roommates, ours was filled with fears, resentments and insecurities that we carefully concealed from each other out of love. The only moments in which I became aware that I was upset with Louise had, on their surface, nothing to do with our relationship. Every so often Louise, who tends to be extremely generous and forgiving, would get angry at somebody else in her life. This was totally reasonable. Not only was it reasonable, I knew my role as her friend was to share in her anger and endorse it. But whenever Louise got angry at someone else I had an overwhelming urge to defend the person on the receiving end of her frustration. Sometimes I would refuse to acknowledge that I felt defensive. Sometimes I’d admit it, and we’d chalk it up to the fact that I’m a bit of a devil’s advocate by nature. Sometimes I defended people I didn’t even like! People who did things that would also make me angry! For no fair reason, whenever Louise revealed that she had it in her to be mad at someone, I became terrified that one day she would be horribly, devastatingly mad at me. I grew very anxious and argumentative—not understanding quite why—as I tried to undermine the source and power of her anger. And because I had no apparent vested interest in whatever conflicts Louise had with her other loved ones, I made my objections on the basis of some palatable, objective-ish moral reality that, of course, I had conjured in order to insulate myself from the thought that Louise’s anger could apply to me.
Louise and I don’t live together anymore, but I often have conversations that remind me of this habit. It seems to happen all too frequently that we find ourselves defensive about things that have nothing to do with us. Your partner’s situation at work, with which she is perfectly content, is on its face a foolish thing for you to get bent out of shape about. I don’t think it will shock you that I don’t think you’re actually criticizing your partner’s working hours for purely ideological reasons, nor that her defensiveness is unreasonable. In general, I think we read a problem like this about “work-life balance” or a “difference in values,” a classic of the advice genre, as a cipher for the asker’s ambivalence about their relationship. My impression this time, though, is that the argument is a cipher for your ambivalence about work.
If you and I live in the same society, everything in your upbringing and your unconscious education has taught you to love your work so much that no boundaries exist between it and your personal life. Your legal training and, I imagine, your political coming-of-age have affirmed your sense that this is a dangerous belief system to buy into; still, there’s no way to exist in the workforce without being subject to this meritocratic delusion. As you sit next to your partner, who works tirelessly and yet without resentment or degradation, you can’t help but feel: “Why does it come so easily to you, and not to me? Why do I have to be more easily fatigued, doubt my talent and my passion, and feel so ashamed about the days when I simply don’t want to work?” To feel this way is against your ideological commitments. To phrase your complaint this way would express not that you wish to live in a world with a less punishing relationship to work, but that part of you desperately wants to succeed naturally in this one. And how could you not? It’s destabilizing to be close to people whose natural orientations are so aligned with social reward systems. Of course, we feel both proud and frustrated when the people we are close to, the ones we compare ourselves to day and night, appear to surpass us in ways that we don’t think we even care about.
We are famously attracted to those who are different from us, and then we turn around and resent them for their difference. If your partner is a good person, a person who shares your concerns about labor justice, then how could she so blithely capitulate to a career that places such intense demands on its workers? But unless your partner has changed radically since you met her, you met her as a person who was devoted to her work and had a sunny willingness to go the extra mile for her students. I can almost guarantee that you admired and relished this quality in her. When you despair that she can’t engage with this problem “ideologically,” I think it’s because you are hiding—as I often hid with Louise, and as I still frequently hide—your personal grievance behind an abstract political façade. It’s much more uncomfortable to defend your own insecurities than to stake a moral claim and get outraged as you gather your weapons to defend it.
It’s my opinion—I’ll out myself here—that if a person reacts as if you are accusing them, they are usually right. We are very attuned to the nuances of criticisms against us, and often driving blind when we are leveling a criticism. It sounds to me as if your partner does share your values; the value that you share is the right of each person to determine their own capacities and boundaries at work, as much as is possible in a system of unjust remuneration.
There is no arena more frustrating—or, if we are frank and attentive to our own frustration, rewarding—than the one in which we find ourselves least suited to our world. If yours is work, you are certainly not alone. Sometimes I feel that work is also the arena in which I myself am least suited to my world. When we lived together, Louise joked that she couldn’t tell whether I was the laziest or the most disciplined person she knew. My work ethic is resoundingly inconsistent, fragile and in my opinion not remotely an ethic at all. Your career demands ideological devotion and a strong stomach for injustice, and you make these invaluable commitments as a protest against an outsized surrender of time; mine involves a vulnerability and a degree of tolerance for uncertainty that I pray, pretty blindly, will seem to me in a few decades to have redeemed the proportion of business hours I spend lollygagging around. Both of us spend a good amount of time ashamed that we don’t have your partner’s stamina.
But I’m sure there is some other arena in your personal lives in which things come more easily for you than they do for your partner. Do you not sometimes, as conversations about that other arena arise, feel accused, as if she resents you for your natural facility or her own inability to keep up? Do you feel suddenly as if you’re no longer acting out the same scenario, the shared narrative that undergirds your relationship? Be generous. You are not equals, and need not be. When we load our respective weighing pans on either side of the scales, the contents need not be the same, so long as the balance is precarious and collaborative enough to hold us up.
●
Q: I’ve always found dating apps exhausting, but recently they’ve started to feel pointless as well. The premise of these apps is that, based on some photos and a little conversation, we can reliably identify what we’re looking for in a partner. The older I get, though, the more I feel like I don’t actually know what I want. Based on who I swipe on and flirt with, I have a distinct type, but those connections have never actually gone anywhere. By contrast, what I remember about the first girl I really fell in love with was how very not my “type” she was, and how I loved her if anything more because of that, because there was something mysterious about my initial attraction to her. My feelings felt all the more authentic because I couldn’t explain them.
With each failed relationship since then, my distrust of my own romantic intuition has grown. I’m setting up dates with people who, precisely because I think they are a good enough fit to ask out, probably aren’t a good fit at all. The only alternative seems to be to give up the whole idea of consciously directing my dating life and to simply wait for the right person to stumble into my life unbidden—but that seems like foolish optimism.
Can we ever trust ourselves to know what we want in a lover? And if we can’t, how on earth are we supposed to find love?
A: I have nothing approaching an answer to your question. I’ve chosen it because it expresses what I consider the foremost problem in my own life, and it’s an interesting problem to think through together. Can we ever trust ourselves to know what we want in a lover? And if we can’t… it’s almost too disheartening to consider, isn’t it?
About a year ago, frustrated with the consistency of my romantic failures, I started to consume a lot of content about energy and manifestation. I’m generally not a woo-woo person, and I didn’t take this content too seriously. But I did decide that when I didn’t want to go out with someone who wanted to go out with me, I wouldn’t, and when I wanted to go out with someone, I’d ask them. This sounds so elementary that I feel foolish discussing it. Yet your question gestures to the logic that had always dissuaded me from this approach, the logic I’ve been subject to all my life—and to which I suspect women are especially subject: that I’m not wise to what I want, that perhaps I am even the primary enemy of my own happiness, and that “taking a chance” on someone might transform my life at any moment. The problem of “finding love” is generally governed, in my view, by these two opposing logics, which fight for primacy, and which each have plenty of happy adherents: the logic of attraction and self-manifestation, which requires us to be richly fulfilled and in touch with ourselves in order to notice what truly attracts us; and the logic of open-mindedness, a sort of subtle self-negation, through which we trust that other people likely know better than we do, and that, in a diffuse sense, fate has something in store for us.
I find both of these logics almost terrifyingly compelling. I vacillate between them regularly; or perhaps it’s more true to say that I’m constantly engaged in a dialectic conversation with them. They may appear to be opposed, but they have a shared premise: that there is some more knowledgeable soul or rightness, whether in ourselves or in other people or in God, into the aura of which we must bring ourselves or allow ourselves to be brought. Parallel to these is a third logic, more cynical and intellectualized, best defined by Freud in the theory of transference. When we feel we are connecting with each other, we actually merely “invent each other according to early blueprints,” as Janet Malcolm puts it: the personal relationships that seem to us so real, so governed by one external logic or another, are produced by ourselves and projected onto the façades of other people. In a way, the very premise that you “have a type” implies some degree of belief in this third logic, since by “type” you’re generally referring to a physical look, a style or manner of speaking or a display of cultural tastes onto which you project that a woman has a correlated set of fundamental, invisible qualities, which perhaps you can’t articulate, but are associated in your mind with a person who looks or acts in this way that you find attractive. In this paradigm, there is no such thing as a right person for you, but rather you choose what to perceive as important, wonderful, painful, what-have-you, and make of it whatever your unconscious wishes (though not, unfortunately, what you would otherwise consciously wish).
Vivian Gornick, in an interview in the Paris Review, described a ubiquitous version of this perspective with her trademark lucidity:
This passage always reminds me of a prevalent love logic in our culture, one that is constantly articulated on social media and on romantic reality shows: that love is created and sustained by our being treated well. If there is a single conviction governing American romance right now, I am certain it’s that loving someone means making them feel consistently good, making sure they never doubt your commitment, learning how to speak the language of love on their terms. A few months ago I quoted a passage from a Milan Kundera novel from the perspective of a man who has no interest in being loved because he treats a woman decently, since this is clearly a “self-interested love.” The only love that is culturally condoned right now is this self-interested love. And the reason is, of course, that everyone is petrified in exactly the way you’re petrified: we don’t know what we want, and, in the absence of many of the practical desires that structured partnership for the better part of history, the best approximation we can make about what we should want or what it would be good to want is someone who treats us well and devotes themselves to making us feel good all the time. We are being taught—I should say, especially, that young American women are being taught—to look for people who can be instrumental to us. We are not encouraged to “apprehend another human being as a separate reality, akin to one’s own.” Is this apprehension even possible? Are we being discouraged from it because it’s impossible, or because, when we achieve it, it’s not nearly as comfortable as being self-interested?
Of course, I know it’s possible. I feel sure that in moments I’ve really apprehended another person’s reality, though certainly not for the entirety of the relationship, or even for long stretches at a time. When you apprehend another person’s reality, it’s intimate, it’s sublime—and most of the time, you realize that it isn’t a reality with which you want to commune forever. It isn’t a reality that appeals to you, or at least that appeals to you enough. It comes entwined with a suffering that does not feel characteristic to you. What appealed to you, actually, were the feelings that this person aroused in you.
Here’s my working theory at the moment, a few weeks out from age thirty and with few qualifications to offer: for a long time in a relationship, all we can perceive are the feelings someone arouses in us. As Gornick puts it, that’s “fine, delicious, necessary.” (I still believe that this approach is precious—that the love we crave is usually not brought about by spending time with someone who does not attract us, or by swiping on the people who we don’t find appealing but whose apparent qualities we think sound good in a partner. If fate or God does reward us, it’s for paying close attention to what we like, not for tricking ourselves.) Then, eventually, we brush up against the reality of that person, and we start to realize we like that reality or we don’t. Some people find it natural and easy to like other people, and these people have already been happily married a long time. But people like me and maybe you, who—and by my lights this is not a bad thing—don’t want to share our realities with most people: we strike out a lot. I don’t actually think there’s a way around this. This is not to say that we don’t both have relentless, painful, stupid pathologies that may have gotten in the way of our being with someone whose reality we really did cherish. But most people have relentless, painful, stupid pathologies, and at one point or another they find themselves deeply, properly in love.
Anyway, if you figure it out, please write to me again. Then we could get down to the problem of what “finding love” really means. After all, you’ve been deeply and properly in love at least once, with the girl who was “not your type.” You’re not simply looking for the experience. What kind of love are you looking for? Do you want a love like that again? Do you want a version that leads to marriage, or (not the same thing, of course) that lasts into old age? Do you want someone you envision as the parent of your children, a love that strikes you as practical, future-thinking, nurturing? (The trap through which we attempt to find all of these things in the same person, while calling them all merely by the name “love,” is a subject for another time.) I’m trying to answer these questions, too. My no-brainer decision to stop going on dates with people I don’t like and to ask out those I do has not yielded any magical, synergistic love affairs, although it has relieved the terrible sensation of being plunged during a date into existential angst. I continue to invent rules for myself and hope they yield some new information; but like you, I’m still holding out a sort of blind, fingers-crossed hope, despite my deep distaste for this whole premise, that one day someone will cross my path and all this thinking will be devastatingly, charmingly beside the point.
Photo credit: njhdiver (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)
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