Little Red Heart
My friend R and I have known each other more than twenty five years. We had a secret club in third grade, and she picked out my senior prom dress, and I got to give a toast at her wedding. A few weeks ago we had a great conversation which, if conversations had titles, would have been called All the Ways My Life Turned Out Differently Than I Thought It Would. But that is not the subject of this post. Though it would be a good one.The subject of this post is Ayn Rand and My Lovelife.
In high school R, in appropriate high school fashion, read Atlas Shrugged and became possessed with its commanding truth. It sounded like bullshit to me so I read the book just to argue with her in a more informed manner. Mostly I hated how all of the antagonists were ugly and stupid, which seemed like a real literary copout to me. Make your antagonists attractive and smart and still ideologically wrong, and that’s going to be a lot more convincing. But again, I digress.
R and I boiled our argument down to this: she was a capitalist and I was a communist. It was a gross oversimplification, but fun for the purpose of high school style deep conversation. R would say Self interest brings out the best in everyone and I would say (the only thing I remember word for word from that stupid book): From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
And you know? I’m an adult now and I’m no communist. But I might be a Relationship Communist. And I’ve recently realized that this leads to confusion when I enter relationships with a certain set of assumptions that, lo and behold, is not shared - because not everyone is a member of the party.
Relationship Communism, for example, takes as given: Two people each motivated by self interest and occasionally cooking dinner together does not make for a good relationship.
It’s clear to me that if you’re going to bother being in a relationship, you’re making your basic unit of decision making bigger than just yourself. Sometimes this leads to elegant win / win scenarios in which everyone gets what they want, and with good company too. And sometimes this means that one person is in the position of being able to give more. So that person gives more.
And yes, I get that if the same person is always the giving one, if the other person seems to be manufacturing need, if the giving person seems to be losing all sense of self identity and self preservation, this is a terrible system. But there’s a wide middle ground there where both people recognize that it can’t be fifty-fifty all the time, or even overall, and neither person finds this terrifying.
So here’s where this has been tripping me up. I’ve been lucky enough in the past few years to fall firmly on the ability side of the equation a good part of the time. I’m mobile and I’m solvent and I’m not generally an emotional wreck. So I find myself saying things like Ok, Canada works for me. Or at least, Ok, driving down there weekends works for me. And these decisions feel like nobrainers. They feel like what I can do for the greater good, and they feel like adventure.
But to the other person – the one who hasn’t read the party literature – these things seem like Sacrifices. And Sacrifices are a sign of something bigger than we’re ready for. And Sacrifices come with strings.
I feel like I’m making tacit promises I can’t keep, Operaman said about five minutes before we broke up. Like what? I wanted to ask, but it would have come out too indignant. Cause I don’t even count on you being around tomorrow. And hey, how about that.
I wasn’t looking for any promises that accounts would be settled sooner or later. Rather what I think we both would have found reassuring was an understanding that as long as we both felt good about things, we would each do what we could. So I never minded driving down there. It was easy and it meant we could spend time together.
And this past weekend was full and fun and wonderful, and was exactly the sort of weekend I have when it’s all about me and no one else: I snowshoed on Mt Hood, went to Quaker meeting, watched a Packers game in a packed bar, and hiked at the coast. And I missed him, the whole fucking time. This self interest thing is bullshit.
posted by tortaluga @ 10:40 AM
5 Comments:
I think the danger isn't so much when one person's giving is interpreted by the other as sacrifice, as it is when one person's giving feels like loss to the giver. That's a sign of a quickly sinking ship.
When someone is nervous about how much their partner is giving - and interpreting it as sacrifice - I don't think that's so much the cause as it is a symptom of other problems. But those are tired thoughts after a long day, so they may not be worth much.
Ayn Rand I'll leave alone... for now.
yeah, the causes and symptoms get all mixed up at this point. as a friend pointed out to me (via a times article on why people vote for a person vs. why they think they vote for that person), most of our reasoning is assigned in retrospect, and without much accuracy.
it still makes us feel better, though. without it i'd have to deal with the fact that a guy i really liked just didn't like me back.
Fair enough. And it's a hard pill to swallow. But it's the messy world we live in. I sometimes wonder (or at least right now I'm wondering) if the cultural expectation of monogamy we all wear isn't partially to blame for our difficulty to love. It's so final when you're supposed to be looking for the end love. We're forced skeptics; the emotional distance necessary.
What if our culture valued the attempt. What if we celebrated the jumping in and loving hard, regardless of how it ended. What if it were the couples that for some curious reason didn't at some point leap back apart, the couples that strangely stayed together that were the inexplicable exceptions. Not failures... just not the expectation. Instead we were expected at some point to swim apart and find another to explore, to dive into. Would the feeling of parting be different?
How much of our hurt is cultural? How much of it the absurd expectations we drape across our heart futures? How much hurt is necessary, how much imagined?
i certainly agree that culturally we have unreasonable expectations of what a relationship can provide. isn’t there some great vonnegut essay about how we used to get all different things from a whole community of people, and now we try to get all these things from just one person?
i’m all for monogomy, though, and the idea that you sign up for good. i think it’s hard and i think that’s the point. i think a lot of the crazy fabulous part only comes out on the other side of really hard shit.
I don't know. That's a tough stance to take. I don't want all the good in my life to be entrenched in the difficult. I think there's something to be said for the simple; that often what's best is what's easy. Though not easy as in lazy so much as easy as in centered, balanced. Ready.
I'm not so sure it's the storm that makes the calm.
I'm all for monogamy too, it's the 'signing up for good' part that I have my concerns about.
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