April 16, 2005

• Saturday Ramble

  
  

  Not sure where I’m going with this, nor where it will end– and that’s usually the product of having too many ideas in my head, but not a single one which seems to have any concreteness. OK, so my head is less than perfectly functional– and perhaps a tad-bit hung over from the frantic IRS debacle that was yesterday. It always confuses the frak out of me how someone who barely makes a living can end up owing $1000s while someone making $300,000 ends up with a bill for $803.65, thank you, come again. An acquaintaince of mine’s husband is Michael Dell’s accountant– and whereas Mike pays millions of dollars in taxes, as a percentage of gross income he pays less than I do. But I have gone in a completely different direction from my intended one.

  
  

  The “thought seed” that got me to put on some tunes and sit down at the keyboard was this: If you are genuinely a “people person,” it seems to me that it is pretty much impossible to have a solid relationship with anyone who is even slightly insecure or jealous.

  
  

  Of course, I need to frame what I mean by “people person.” I don’t necessarily mean extravert– I mean someone who is genuinely compassionate, caring and oriented to people and their plights, out of a genuine feeling of love for human beings. You care, you have a kind heart, if someone is in pain or struggling, you stop and lend a hand and an ear, just “because” that is what drives your sense of “rightness,” as a human being. I am an introvert, but I am also a “people person.” I would gladly live in a 400-sq foot efficiency apartment with just a bed, a table and two chairs as long as I had people in my life.

  
  

  It took me a while to understand that this is actually very threatening to many people. A light bulb went on, about 10 years ago– thanks to a couple of tiny “incidents.” I was sitting in my therapist’s office flipping through a copy of Psychology Today and ran across a short “sidebar” type article theorizing on the underlying psychology of why women (one reason, anyway) often choose “bad boys.” There was a sentence that I remember to this day: “Ultimately, they want to be treated nicely by guys who aren’t nice, thus gaining ‘proof’ of their loveability.” Regardless of whether there’s any truth there, it planted a seed relevant to a second event which happened a few short weeks later when the woman I was dating at the time said “We need to talk.”

  
  

  Fortunately, Jeri was a fairly evolved young woman (she also had the distinction of being the only woman I have ever dated who was younger than I) so we had a decent talk that ended with us becoming “just friends.” Her reasoning was “I don’t think I know how to be around someone who’s nice all the time.” At the time, I felt really hurt, but I later realized that it wasn’t meant as a slam, or insult, or criticism– but (using her words, as best I remember) as a statement that “because I was nice, polite, compassionate and helpful to everyone, she didn’t feel ‘special enough’ or ‘better than’ everyone else and that was too scary for her.”

  
  

  This was a strange eye opener for me. I’d always (and still do) appreciated women saying that they didn’t like “nice guys” from the “Mr. Milquetoast” perspective– let’s face it, only abusive people want to live with a doormat. But this was a different angle altogether. The underlying message seemed to echo the article: “I want you to treat me like a queen, but basically I’d feel better if you were kinda shitty to everyone else.”

  
  

  It made me sit down and ponder the demise of my recently ended marriage; and the dynamics that led to said demise. My ex was hugely insecure. To such a degree that there were even couples we “couldn’t see” because the wives were (a) attractive, and (b) had been divorced to get where they were now, thus they “could do it again.”

  
  

  There’s one popular school of thought that when you get into a committed relationship, you are “supposed to” give up your same-sex friends. And whereas I have no intention of criticizing those for whom that works, for my money there is something profoundly arrogant about the thought that “a person”– whether you’re male or female– has the ”resources” to be the answer to every need your partner will have in an opposite-sex person, for all eternity. And please understand, this comes from a romantic idealist, who fully hopes that the whole “soulmate-one-and-only-myth” IS true. Please, please, please….. 

  
  

  In retrospect, I realized that the vast majority of the underlying meltdown of my marriage happened on account of this “people-person” vs. insecurity issue. Because, indeed, I did have deep compassion and understanding for my ex’s feelings and point of view– and definitely wasn’t trying to be some PigDogSexistMale– I took whatever steps were needed to not make her feel unhappy. Which effectively was a gradual “isolation” of the people-person essence inside me. I could not in good conscience persist with behavior that made her unhappy. That’s reasonable, right? Reasonable, perhaps– but is it psychologically healthy? What happens if the life of the relationship hangs on one person having to bury a core part of their self-identity in the back yard? I certainly wasn’t going to “sell out” by becoming a jerkweed, so people would like me less. The alternative id, stop interacting with the people who threaten your partner. Part of the unravelling of the marriage was that I allowed myself to become suicidally depressed, on account of feeling completely isolated from the ”psychic nourishment” I get from people. And no, I’m not a psychic vampire, thank you!

  
  

  There’s a weird catch-22 between that popular psycho-buzzword “compromise” and that other psycho-buzzword concept “living in your Authentic Truth.” And I grant you, my marriage was an “extreme” situation. But it’s an undertone I have picked up on later, underrunning subsequent relationships, and also other people’s relationships. But it’s difficult for me to pick up– perhaps because I have never any urges to want to “control” someone who I am with, in terms of who they see, or what they do. Some have suggested that I simply “must not have been in love,” but I’m not willing to invent anything in that one. To me, love that involves a need (however subtle) to control your partner smacks of being “transactional” in nature, and I don’t like that.

  
  

  Anyway when the undercurrent of someone trying to control me comes up, I guess I don’t relate, and thus don’t quite “feel” what’s going on. But, being very sensitive to people’s feelings and needs, I’m very quick to “amputate” the “offending” parts of me. With– of course, DUH!– the inevitable result that I often end up feeling worse about myself in someone’s company, than when I am by myself. Which is patently stupid, and does no favors for me, or for the person I happen to be with.

  
  

  I have swung completely the other way, too. When A and I started seeing each other, she made it very plain that the only way she’d be in a relationship was with the understanding that– at any given time– she wanted the freedom to “love more than one.” Having come from the extreme “opposite” viewpoint, I fairly willingly went along with that idea, seeing it as a “solution” to the insecurity/jealousy issue, without really taking a “time out” to consider whether an open/polyamorous situation was in synch with my values. Of course, the truth seldom ends up looking much like the ideal– some people have double standards designed to cover their own sets of issues, but only applying “on paper” to anyone else.

  
  

  OK. So now I have rambled at some length, without drawing any conclusions. Maybe there are no conclusions to be drawn here, merely discussion to be opened. Maybe the “conclusion” lies elsewhere– namely in the way we humans tend to misinterpret what “compatibility” really means. I have certainly been guilty of that. My personal experience is that “having done the same things” has very little to do with compatibility. Even “wanting the same things” is no guarantee of anything. There’s a quote I use (courtesy of my dear friend J) a lot: “A shared love for hitchhiking doesn’t amount to squat if you’re standing in Denver, and one of you wants to go to Boston, and the other to LA.” Indeed.

  
  

  I think we misinterpret what is “meaningful” and what is “coincidental.” And it happens mostly through miscommunication. Or through incomplete communication. A friend of mine who was a couples counselor for 20 years used to share many stories of miscommunication, and how fatal they can be. You know, you think you’ve found something perfect because you both like sex four times a week, in the mornings. (oversimplistic example) You say “Wow, we’re sexually compatible!” But things go tragically wrong, because you fail to uncover that one person likes slow, languid dreamy trancendent lovemaking, and the other likes it hard and fast with leather, chains and pain.

  
  

  Are we afraid of being “too picky?” Are we afraid to ask the most important questions, for fear that the answer will be wrong? So we run towards commitments with “yes” answers to five “10-point questions” but avoid asking the “100-point question” to which the answer might be no? And guess what? Now we’ve slammed head-first back into the “compromise” vs. “authentic truth” issue. Where does one begin, and the other end? When is “close enough” enough?

  
  

  Do we end up missing out on life, because we’re too busy asking questions? Or do we end up missing out on life, because we failed to ask questions?

  
  

  One thing I do observe, as part of human suffering, is our fear of exposure. The more “private” something is to us, the more closely we “guard” it, because it is the most important thing we have. And so, we are the least likely to expose what is most important to us…. and the resultant pile of pain and anguish is a large mountain, indeed.

  
  

  Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend!

  
  

  P.S.: Have I mentioned how much I dislike the new xanga photo server?

  
  

  ..

  • 2:40 pm
  • 9 Comments