This is the second installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read the introduction and first installment here.
●
Q: I started masturbating at a very young age, long before I knew what it meant. As a teenager who wasn’t sexually active, I explored my sexuality with myself through porn and fantasizing, and built up a private sexual world that was completely my own. When I started having sex with other people, I developed a distinct new social sexuality. This social sexuality was performative, responsive to the desires of my partner, and ultimately felt quite shallow compared to the deep well of feeling and knowledge that existed in my private sexuality. I went through long periods when I was living primarily in this social mode, but it never felt as fulfilling as what I could give myself, even when it was very good in a different way. I felt deep reluctance to bring fantasies or ideas from my private sexual world to my partners. I was protective of that realm and preferred to orient myself toward the desires that my partners brought to sex.
Having now been sexually active for over ten years, I still feel that I’ve never truly bridged these two worlds. My unwillingness to merge them feels like a barrier to a deeper level of sexual fulfillment and connection with my partners, and has often (I think) made me abstain from sex for long periods since my own sexual life is enough and finding sexual partners is “not worth the trouble.” It feels like my attachment to my private sexuality is holding me back from experiences I’d like to be having. At the same time, I’m not sure how to open up a channel from that world to the real world without giving up a part of myself that’s accompanied me most of my life.
A: I, too, started masturbating and watching porn long before I started to have sex. As a teenager I would scroll the homepage of Pornhub, and in the fifteen or so years that I’ve been watching porn, I haven’t ventured particularly far. I’ve thought a lot about why this might be, and my sense of shame over the suspicion that I must simply have mainstream tastes for heterosexual sex between conventionally sexualized women and well-endowed men. Over time I’ve had to acknowledge that even more prevalent than conventional porn stars on the homepage of Pornhub are the taboo scenarios: students and teachers, models and directors and, most of all, teen stepsiblings and stepchildren—the closest that this site can come to invoking the incest taboo. Every friend I’ve spoken to about their taste in porn claims to be vaguely disgusted by this step-incest category, though of course, given the stats, it’s unlikely they’re all being candid with me (or with themselves). At the same time, my friends are without exception ashamed or even disgusted by whatever form of porn does interest them: one that perhaps doesn’t appear on the homepage and that they consider niche enough to confer on them, to some degree, the status of someone whom a regular person could never love. Of course, this is the same fear I have about my attraction to the homepage saturated with basic taboos. Am I this close-minded, this complacent? I wonder as I scroll down it, with that mingled arousal and despair that haunts our relationship to porn.
I say this to point out that it seems straightforwardly impossible, even while we have learned pretty successfully how to embrace our partnered sex lives, not to harbor some acute shame about our private sexualities. The very fact of having a private sexuality—one that doesn’t exist simply to enable and enrich a shared sex life—disturbs us. I wrote in a letter to a new mother about the fundamental misconception that sex is about, and grounded in, the self. Our relentless training is that becoming experts in ourselves—sexually, psychologically, emotionally—is what will make us available for intimacy and connection. If this were true, you would be exceptional at enjoying deep sexual relationships.
I thought about your question for a long time, and at one point I described it to Marcela, the woman I’m dating. We discussed the salient mystery in your question: Is your reluctance based in an ambivalence about whether you enjoy sharing your private sexuality, or are you desperate to share it but simply too ashamed or too afraid of the response? We circled that phrase “great reluctance.” It sounds like you’ve already tried to bridge these worlds before, in some way or other, by talking about or enacting some of your private thoughts with a partner; you don’t say so explicitly, but it’s clear from your letter that the effort to merge these two worlds has been long and fruitless. Marcela said that, given this assumption, she thought the fundamental quality of your private sexual experience was solitude itself. She described how different she understands the experience of solitary masturbation to be from sex, and how, in fact, they are almost unrelated, despite utilizing some of the same impulses and parts of the body. Even if your private sexuality is based around fantasies of sex with other people in realizable ways, she said, to verbalize these fantasies and realize them with a partner would not evoke anything like the experience of masturbating, which is as different from sex as writing is from conversing. We generally assume that bringing a sexual fantasy into reality will expand it and allow us to feel a much deeper type of pleasure than we’re capable of in our minds. This is one of the assumptions, among others, that makes some people suspicious of porn as a fantasy-vessel. Your experience is so interesting in part because it’s an inverse of the political story we’re so accustomed to hearing these days about the sterile sexual lives, masturbation-dependent and bereft of pleasure or communion, produced by the ubiquity of porn. In your case the landscape of deep pleasure is your mind, and you know instinctually and from experience that to bring your thoughts into shared reality only diminishes them.
Marcela felt that there was a certain luck in your having such a meaningful masturbatory life; but she said she imagined that your two realms were unbridgeable. As soon as Marcela articulated the special and unshareable solitude that might underlie your problem, my own special, unshareable solitude began to make a racket inside me. I too have a realm like this, which I protect at great cost. My friend June calls herself a dilettante in friendship; she has a lot of friends, and she prioritizes the fun over the serious. Unlike June—who falls in love rarely, and with a seriousness that makes me gasp—I’m a dilettante in love. Romance is one of my great skills, yet when the road begins to lead into the territory of love, a familiar feeling of self-protectiveness draws me again and again to my computer, to confess and explore what I am almost never willing to with the person I’m intimate with. I can’t share what I think and feel most, the feeling murmurs, because then it won’t belong to me, and I won’t be able to make art. It feels like my attachment to my work (if I replace “private sexuality” with “work” and otherwise use your exact phrase) is holding me back from experiences I’d like to be having. I’m tormented by the suspicion that if I enter a serious and totalizing love, I won’t know how to think and work alone anymore. This inexpertise—the felt gulf between what is natural for us and what we have to teach ourselves—is what makes us dilettantes in realms that are sacred to us, but that we fear will never satisfy as our own cultivated expertise does. As I’m a dilettante in love, you’re a dilettante in sex. You guard yourself against the serious and prioritize the fun. Instinctually, you and I both believe that we were only made for the thing that has been easy and deep for us since we were young: being alone with ourselves. What makes this conundrum so difficult is that there is little like the comfort of having a strong relationship with oneself. Anything that might endanger it seems “not worth the trouble.”
You describe your sex life as divided between the private and “the real world.” In terms of sex, there is no real world. There is only the familiar and the unknown. Your private sexuality is profoundly familiar, and your partnered sex life, in which you please and perform, is familiar too. I don’t think you want to simply invite your partners into your private known world, even if you could; you want to find something unknown with them, and you assume—you have been reminded at every turn, not only by sexual culture but probably by your partners, who beg you to confide your private fantasies to them—that bringing them into your private realm is the only route through which to do so.
You have not really experienced the shared. Probably you have in conversation and emotion, but not in sex. I know this sounds very harsh, but I don’t mean it harshly. I’m using the word “shared” in an absolute rather than a descriptive sense. What you have experienced with your partners, however generous, tender or enjoyable it was, was something you allowed to be shared with you, but in which you held yourself apart. What if holding your private sexuality apart is not the same as holding yourself apart? Lie on your bed and imagine that you are a vessel without a history and without a set of neuroses and beliefs—as if you’ve ridden the elevator up into the Lumon offices in Severance and left behind any knowledge beyond that of language and human functioning. Your lover enters the room. You know merely that you trust them. You have no narrative about yourself or about them with which to navigate or trouble the afternoon. Where do you want them to touch you? What do you find yourself saying?
●
Q: A few weeks ago I was on vacation with the woman I’m seeing, whose name is Marcela. While we were away, Marcela mentioned that her ex-girlfriend was making one of her favorite desserts, a plum torte, and that she was excited to go over to her ex’s to have some when we got back to the city. I told her it sounded delicious and asked Marcela to send me the recipe. Only midway through the process of making the torte, back at home, did it occur to me that there was something disturbing about what I was doing… making the same torte for Marcela that her ex-girlfriend had just made… perhaps unconsciously hoping my torte would be better than her ex’s. By the time Marcela came over that night I was feeling pretty humiliated. I asked Marcela why she hadn’t told me it was weird that I asked for the recipe. She said she hadn’t wanted to make me feel bad.
I don’t think of myself as an especially jealous person, and I don’t have any problem with Marcela being friends with her ex—I’m friends with my exes too, and this is very standard in lesbian culture. But it’s obvious that I feel like I’m in competition with her ex. It’s disturbing to be behaving in ways that I don’t recognize in myself and dislike so much. I’m not interested in solutions that involve asking Marcela to cut off contact with her ex, or simply dumping her myself, which are the standard pieces of advice I get from mainstream sources. I’m looking for a new way to think about my own confusion about whether I’m right to be jealous, and how to handle or express it.
A: I’m going to admit something here right out of the gate: I wrote this question. This is my problem, and Marcela is the woman I’m dating. I thought I’d put myself on the chopping block, by way of asking for your trust and confidences. The subject of jealousy—our need for it, our misery at its hands—is one that I find endlessly engrossing, and that arises frequently among my friends. As I was contemplating this situation with Marcela, I found myself circling the diverging perspectives of two people with whom I was talking it through: my friends Jeremy and June.
Whenever I dabble in the problem of jealousy, I think about Jeremy, a good friend of mine since college. Jeremy spent a few years in his twenties dating a woman who had another longtime partner. It was a heady, disorganized polyamorous relationship, carried, from what I could gather, by the strength and generosity of Jeremy’s radical relationship values and his devotion to the woman he loved. Over their years together Jeremy had a few personal requests, one of which was that when he and his girlfriend sat down to dinner together, she didn’t text her other partner. Though they discussed it many times, and though his girlfriend believed that this was a reasonable request, she could never really refrain from texting her partner at dinner.
Jeremy understood that there was a sense of fragility and profound enmeshment between his girlfriend and her partner that seemed to demand constant contact. He had great empathy for her, even though he was hurt by her inability to respect his wishes. I was amazed by the equanimity Jeremy maintained in all our conversations about this over the years, even when he was dismayed that she wouldn’t allow him closer to her in the ways he craved. His qualms seldom led him to anxious worrying about what would happen in the future, whether his girlfriend loved him sufficiently, or “what he should do.” Part of his radicalism was not simply his belief in, but his actual feeling for, the totality of the present, and of constantly evolving processes. He had dreams of deepening the romance between himself and his girlfriend, but he had no fantasies of some simpler future, or a world in which their modes of intimacy would finally align and they would “be happy together.” I had to resist wondering about these things aloud when he and I were talking.
Like Jeremy, my friend June expresses herself passionately and honestly. They’re both among the most forthright, uninhibited people I know. But where Jeremy feels an irrepressible dignity and pride, June loves to bemoan her emotions and what she calls her “indignity.” When I told June about the episode with the plum torte, she told me that it’s by doing undignified things that we discover we’re in love. June’s no stranger to jealousy. She said that it was up to Marcela to be friends with her ex, but that she thought it was disrespectful for Marcela to be texting or calling her ex in my presence, and telling me, while we were on vacation together, about the plum torte she was eager to get back to. She didn’t think it was openness on Marcela’s part, but rather a guilty and punishing instinct, that made her tell me about the plum torte. “She doesn’t have to shove it in your face,” June said.
When I talked to Jeremy, on the other hand, I felt that there was something undignified not in the way I’d responded to my jealousy with the torte, but in my jealousy itself. Wasn’t that a feeling of wanting Marcela to belong just to me—a totally selfish, fearful and impossible desire? If Jeremy hadn’t had the generosity and equanimity to empathize with his girlfriend’s complex loyalties, he would have denied himself a long and fulfilling passion. When I wailed over my problem, Jeremy advised me to lie on my bed and let my discomfort move through my body. “Let yourself feel it,” he said. “Then meet Marcela where she is.” (“But what about where you are?” June said.)
What Jeremy struggles against is that his lovers are seldom as fearless as he is. Time and again they find some reason in themselves to duck away from the degree of intimacy to which Jeremy gives himself so naturally. Jeremy is relentless and unshrinking. Many times, we’ve sat across from each other at a table in a restaurant, and I’ve wondered how it is that he can face such vast uncertainties and trials without anxiety. Why isn’t he afraid, I asked myself, that his girlfriend will never be able to have an uninterrupted dinner with him, and, by extension, that he will never “be happy” with her? But the thing that terrifies us when we’re unhappy, or facing a painful romantic situation, isn’t, of course, that we don’t trust our partners, but that we don’t trust ourselves. We fear we’ll betray ourselves, undermine ourselves, blind ourselves, out of misplaced desire or cowardice. My fear isn’t of Marcela’s loyalties or her ex-girlfriend’s influence. My fear is that I will deliberately misunderstand the relationship I’m in; or that I’ll find myself too cowardly, too lovesick or too stupid not to impale myself on my love for Marcela.
I don’t think June is wrong to talk to me about respect and boundaries. Inherent in her advice is the protectiveness she feels toward me. Our friends get exasperated with us for ignoring their good ideas, but we can do so because we trust them to continue carrying that torch of protection behind us and to brandish it when we’re in need. Marcela’s communication with her ex reminds me painfully of how much more deeply they know each other, how vast their history is, and how comparably thin and superficial my relationship to Marcela feels by comparison. But this represents a profound truth, which I want to forget, yet do well to remember. Of course I tell myself that in fact the strength of the connection between me and Marcela can in some way elude or exist apart from her recent breakup. I say to myself: If Marcela didn’t talk to her ex so much, only this present experience between us would exist! Yet if I want to really live in the world—not delude myself about it, not hide from it—it’s necessary that I see and suffer from her communication with her ex, because it reminds me that there is no solid delineation between the two relationships. From one perspective, I’m an interloper into a phase of Marcela’s relationship with her ex that hasn’t yet run its course. I’m not remarking on the health or wisdom of remaining close friends after a breakup, or of beginning to date someone else so soon. Very little in love is clean, and often when a romance feels clean, as if we two are alone together in a meadow of our choosing, it’s only because we’ve hidden from ourselves and each other—as June remarked that Marcela should do, in order to be “not the asshole”—the fact of the emotional mess and resounding consequences of other entanglements that we are still, and constantly, living within. Jealousy’s demand, and its bequest, is that we face this reality, which is not only painful but fertile.
Want to submit a question to Higher Gossip? Write us at highergossip@thepointmag.com.
Photo credit: awhiskandaspoon (Flickr, CC / BY-NC-ND 2.0)
This is the second installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read the introduction and first installment here.
●
Q: I started masturbating at a very young age, long before I knew what it meant. As a teenager who wasn’t sexually active, I explored my sexuality with myself through porn and fantasizing, and built up a private sexual world that was completely my own. When I started having sex with other people, I developed a distinct new social sexuality. This social sexuality was performative, responsive to the desires of my partner, and ultimately felt quite shallow compared to the deep well of feeling and knowledge that existed in my private sexuality. I went through long periods when I was living primarily in this social mode, but it never felt as fulfilling as what I could give myself, even when it was very good in a different way. I felt deep reluctance to bring fantasies or ideas from my private sexual world to my partners. I was protective of that realm and preferred to orient myself toward the desires that my partners brought to sex.
Having now been sexually active for over ten years, I still feel that I’ve never truly bridged these two worlds. My unwillingness to merge them feels like a barrier to a deeper level of sexual fulfillment and connection with my partners, and has often (I think) made me abstain from sex for long periods since my own sexual life is enough and finding sexual partners is “not worth the trouble.” It feels like my attachment to my private sexuality is holding me back from experiences I’d like to be having. At the same time, I’m not sure how to open up a channel from that world to the real world without giving up a part of myself that’s accompanied me most of my life.
A: I, too, started masturbating and watching porn long before I started to have sex. As a teenager I would scroll the homepage of Pornhub, and in the fifteen or so years that I’ve been watching porn, I haven’t ventured particularly far. I’ve thought a lot about why this might be, and my sense of shame over the suspicion that I must simply have mainstream tastes for heterosexual sex between conventionally sexualized women and well-endowed men. Over time I’ve had to acknowledge that even more prevalent than conventional porn stars on the homepage of Pornhub are the taboo scenarios: students and teachers, models and directors and, most of all, teen stepsiblings and stepchildren—the closest that this site can come to invoking the incest taboo. Every friend I’ve spoken to about their taste in porn claims to be vaguely disgusted by this step-incest category, though of course, given the stats, it’s unlikely they’re all being candid with me (or with themselves). At the same time, my friends are without exception ashamed or even disgusted by whatever form of porn does interest them: one that perhaps doesn’t appear on the homepage and that they consider niche enough to confer on them, to some degree, the status of someone whom a regular person could never love. Of course, this is the same fear I have about my attraction to the homepage saturated with basic taboos. Am I this close-minded, this complacent? I wonder as I scroll down it, with that mingled arousal and despair that haunts our relationship to porn.
I say this to point out that it seems straightforwardly impossible, even while we have learned pretty successfully how to embrace our partnered sex lives, not to harbor some acute shame about our private sexualities. The very fact of having a private sexuality—one that doesn’t exist simply to enable and enrich a shared sex life—disturbs us. I wrote in a letter to a new mother about the fundamental misconception that sex is about, and grounded in, the self. Our relentless training is that becoming experts in ourselves—sexually, psychologically, emotionally—is what will make us available for intimacy and connection. If this were true, you would be exceptional at enjoying deep sexual relationships.
I thought about your question for a long time, and at one point I described it to Marcela, the woman I’m dating. We discussed the salient mystery in your question: Is your reluctance based in an ambivalence about whether you enjoy sharing your private sexuality, or are you desperate to share it but simply too ashamed or too afraid of the response? We circled that phrase “great reluctance.” It sounds like you’ve already tried to bridge these worlds before, in some way or other, by talking about or enacting some of your private thoughts with a partner; you don’t say so explicitly, but it’s clear from your letter that the effort to merge these two worlds has been long and fruitless. Marcela said that, given this assumption, she thought the fundamental quality of your private sexual experience was solitude itself. She described how different she understands the experience of solitary masturbation to be from sex, and how, in fact, they are almost unrelated, despite utilizing some of the same impulses and parts of the body. Even if your private sexuality is based around fantasies of sex with other people in realizable ways, she said, to verbalize these fantasies and realize them with a partner would not evoke anything like the experience of masturbating, which is as different from sex as writing is from conversing. We generally assume that bringing a sexual fantasy into reality will expand it and allow us to feel a much deeper type of pleasure than we’re capable of in our minds. This is one of the assumptions, among others, that makes some people suspicious of porn as a fantasy-vessel. Your experience is so interesting in part because it’s an inverse of the political story we’re so accustomed to hearing these days about the sterile sexual lives, masturbation-dependent and bereft of pleasure or communion, produced by the ubiquity of porn. In your case the landscape of deep pleasure is your mind, and you know instinctually and from experience that to bring your thoughts into shared reality only diminishes them.
Marcela felt that there was a certain luck in your having such a meaningful masturbatory life; but she said she imagined that your two realms were unbridgeable. As soon as Marcela articulated the special and unshareable solitude that might underlie your problem, my own special, unshareable solitude began to make a racket inside me. I too have a realm like this, which I protect at great cost. My friend June calls herself a dilettante in friendship; she has a lot of friends, and she prioritizes the fun over the serious. Unlike June—who falls in love rarely, and with a seriousness that makes me gasp—I’m a dilettante in love. Romance is one of my great skills, yet when the road begins to lead into the territory of love, a familiar feeling of self-protectiveness draws me again and again to my computer, to confess and explore what I am almost never willing to with the person I’m intimate with. I can’t share what I think and feel most, the feeling murmurs, because then it won’t belong to me, and I won’t be able to make art. It feels like my attachment to my work (if I replace “private sexuality” with “work” and otherwise use your exact phrase) is holding me back from experiences I’d like to be having. I’m tormented by the suspicion that if I enter a serious and totalizing love, I won’t know how to think and work alone anymore. This inexpertise—the felt gulf between what is natural for us and what we have to teach ourselves—is what makes us dilettantes in realms that are sacred to us, but that we fear will never satisfy as our own cultivated expertise does. As I’m a dilettante in love, you’re a dilettante in sex. You guard yourself against the serious and prioritize the fun. Instinctually, you and I both believe that we were only made for the thing that has been easy and deep for us since we were young: being alone with ourselves. What makes this conundrum so difficult is that there is little like the comfort of having a strong relationship with oneself. Anything that might endanger it seems “not worth the trouble.”
You describe your sex life as divided between the private and “the real world.” In terms of sex, there is no real world. There is only the familiar and the unknown. Your private sexuality is profoundly familiar, and your partnered sex life, in which you please and perform, is familiar too. I don’t think you want to simply invite your partners into your private known world, even if you could; you want to find something unknown with them, and you assume—you have been reminded at every turn, not only by sexual culture but probably by your partners, who beg you to confide your private fantasies to them—that bringing them into your private realm is the only route through which to do so.
You have not really experienced the shared. Probably you have in conversation and emotion, but not in sex. I know this sounds very harsh, but I don’t mean it harshly. I’m using the word “shared” in an absolute rather than a descriptive sense. What you have experienced with your partners, however generous, tender or enjoyable it was, was something you allowed to be shared with you, but in which you held yourself apart. What if holding your private sexuality apart is not the same as holding yourself apart? Lie on your bed and imagine that you are a vessel without a history and without a set of neuroses and beliefs—as if you’ve ridden the elevator up into the Lumon offices in Severance and left behind any knowledge beyond that of language and human functioning. Your lover enters the room. You know merely that you trust them. You have no narrative about yourself or about them with which to navigate or trouble the afternoon. Where do you want them to touch you? What do you find yourself saying?
●
Q: A few weeks ago I was on vacation with the woman I’m seeing, whose name is Marcela. While we were away, Marcela mentioned that her ex-girlfriend was making one of her favorite desserts, a plum torte, and that she was excited to go over to her ex’s to have some when we got back to the city. I told her it sounded delicious and asked Marcela to send me the recipe. Only midway through the process of making the torte, back at home, did it occur to me that there was something disturbing about what I was doing… making the same torte for Marcela that her ex-girlfriend had just made… perhaps unconsciously hoping my torte would be better than her ex’s. By the time Marcela came over that night I was feeling pretty humiliated. I asked Marcela why she hadn’t told me it was weird that I asked for the recipe. She said she hadn’t wanted to make me feel bad.
I don’t think of myself as an especially jealous person, and I don’t have any problem with Marcela being friends with her ex—I’m friends with my exes too, and this is very standard in lesbian culture. But it’s obvious that I feel like I’m in competition with her ex. It’s disturbing to be behaving in ways that I don’t recognize in myself and dislike so much. I’m not interested in solutions that involve asking Marcela to cut off contact with her ex, or simply dumping her myself, which are the standard pieces of advice I get from mainstream sources. I’m looking for a new way to think about my own confusion about whether I’m right to be jealous, and how to handle or express it.
A: I’m going to admit something here right out of the gate: I wrote this question. This is my problem, and Marcela is the woman I’m dating. I thought I’d put myself on the chopping block, by way of asking for your trust and confidences. The subject of jealousy—our need for it, our misery at its hands—is one that I find endlessly engrossing, and that arises frequently among my friends. As I was contemplating this situation with Marcela, I found myself circling the diverging perspectives of two people with whom I was talking it through: my friends Jeremy and June.
Whenever I dabble in the problem of jealousy, I think about Jeremy, a good friend of mine since college. Jeremy spent a few years in his twenties dating a woman who had another longtime partner. It was a heady, disorganized polyamorous relationship, carried, from what I could gather, by the strength and generosity of Jeremy’s radical relationship values and his devotion to the woman he loved. Over their years together Jeremy had a few personal requests, one of which was that when he and his girlfriend sat down to dinner together, she didn’t text her other partner. Though they discussed it many times, and though his girlfriend believed that this was a reasonable request, she could never really refrain from texting her partner at dinner.
Jeremy understood that there was a sense of fragility and profound enmeshment between his girlfriend and her partner that seemed to demand constant contact. He had great empathy for her, even though he was hurt by her inability to respect his wishes. I was amazed by the equanimity Jeremy maintained in all our conversations about this over the years, even when he was dismayed that she wouldn’t allow him closer to her in the ways he craved. His qualms seldom led him to anxious worrying about what would happen in the future, whether his girlfriend loved him sufficiently, or “what he should do.” Part of his radicalism was not simply his belief in, but his actual feeling for, the totality of the present, and of constantly evolving processes. He had dreams of deepening the romance between himself and his girlfriend, but he had no fantasies of some simpler future, or a world in which their modes of intimacy would finally align and they would “be happy together.” I had to resist wondering about these things aloud when he and I were talking.
Like Jeremy, my friend June expresses herself passionately and honestly. They’re both among the most forthright, uninhibited people I know. But where Jeremy feels an irrepressible dignity and pride, June loves to bemoan her emotions and what she calls her “indignity.” When I told June about the episode with the plum torte, she told me that it’s by doing undignified things that we discover we’re in love. June’s no stranger to jealousy. She said that it was up to Marcela to be friends with her ex, but that she thought it was disrespectful for Marcela to be texting or calling her ex in my presence, and telling me, while we were on vacation together, about the plum torte she was eager to get back to. She didn’t think it was openness on Marcela’s part, but rather a guilty and punishing instinct, that made her tell me about the plum torte. “She doesn’t have to shove it in your face,” June said.
When I talked to Jeremy, on the other hand, I felt that there was something undignified not in the way I’d responded to my jealousy with the torte, but in my jealousy itself. Wasn’t that a feeling of wanting Marcela to belong just to me—a totally selfish, fearful and impossible desire? If Jeremy hadn’t had the generosity and equanimity to empathize with his girlfriend’s complex loyalties, he would have denied himself a long and fulfilling passion. When I wailed over my problem, Jeremy advised me to lie on my bed and let my discomfort move through my body. “Let yourself feel it,” he said. “Then meet Marcela where she is.” (“But what about where you are?” June said.)
What Jeremy struggles against is that his lovers are seldom as fearless as he is. Time and again they find some reason in themselves to duck away from the degree of intimacy to which Jeremy gives himself so naturally. Jeremy is relentless and unshrinking. Many times, we’ve sat across from each other at a table in a restaurant, and I’ve wondered how it is that he can face such vast uncertainties and trials without anxiety. Why isn’t he afraid, I asked myself, that his girlfriend will never be able to have an uninterrupted dinner with him, and, by extension, that he will never “be happy” with her? But the thing that terrifies us when we’re unhappy, or facing a painful romantic situation, isn’t, of course, that we don’t trust our partners, but that we don’t trust ourselves. We fear we’ll betray ourselves, undermine ourselves, blind ourselves, out of misplaced desire or cowardice. My fear isn’t of Marcela’s loyalties or her ex-girlfriend’s influence. My fear is that I will deliberately misunderstand the relationship I’m in; or that I’ll find myself too cowardly, too lovesick or too stupid not to impale myself on my love for Marcela.
I don’t think June is wrong to talk to me about respect and boundaries. Inherent in her advice is the protectiveness she feels toward me. Our friends get exasperated with us for ignoring their good ideas, but we can do so because we trust them to continue carrying that torch of protection behind us and to brandish it when we’re in need. Marcela’s communication with her ex reminds me painfully of how much more deeply they know each other, how vast their history is, and how comparably thin and superficial my relationship to Marcela feels by comparison. But this represents a profound truth, which I want to forget, yet do well to remember. Of course I tell myself that in fact the strength of the connection between me and Marcela can in some way elude or exist apart from her recent breakup. I say to myself: If Marcela didn’t talk to her ex so much, only this present experience between us would exist! Yet if I want to really live in the world—not delude myself about it, not hide from it—it’s necessary that I see and suffer from her communication with her ex, because it reminds me that there is no solid delineation between the two relationships. From one perspective, I’m an interloper into a phase of Marcela’s relationship with her ex that hasn’t yet run its course. I’m not remarking on the health or wisdom of remaining close friends after a breakup, or of beginning to date someone else so soon. Very little in love is clean, and often when a romance feels clean, as if we two are alone together in a meadow of our choosing, it’s only because we’ve hidden from ourselves and each other—as June remarked that Marcela should do, in order to be “not the asshole”—the fact of the emotional mess and resounding consequences of other entanglements that we are still, and constantly, living within. Jealousy’s demand, and its bequest, is that we face this reality, which is not only painful but fertile.
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