Tag: power dynamics

I understand how this sounds, but I do not remember always being so aware that love involved another person. The people I’m referring to were, in large part, unconscious instruments for my own development. I still stressed out plenty over the contents of their minds, very quickly forgetting my own. But I was not consistently so interested, maybe, in the real mechanisms of those minds except in so far as they fulfilled or denied my desires, and I understand how that sounds, too. 

The total fulfillment of desires is our primary cultural expectation for relationships, which is a problem given that our desires are often vague, confused, ever changing. I didn’t until recently comprehend that a genuine interest in another person’s mind necessitates interest in the parts that may occasionally run counter to your own desires. This feels a fuller way of knowing someone, more exciting, and hard, too, though curiously with much less of the anxiety that romantic narcissism brought. To empathize with a person’s perspective is, among other things, a relief in that it takes you out of your own. 

Some time ago my best friend shrugged at me over video chat and this has stuck in my mind with the traction of both revelation and agreement: “Seems interesting to explore what it’s like to grow along with someone else,” she said. The emphasis is mine, I believe. 

Almost exactly five years ago I described a burgeoning relationship to Cat as “like when a tornado meets a volcano,” and I thought I was being clever, not just true. She wrote me, recently arrived in China, “Just get here,” and I was grateful to comply. But in those days, making bad decisions provided a brand of certainty: they ensured a failure rate of 100%, a statistic whose fullness at least invited admiration. Being “bad” was a good thing then. Men liked it when you said you weren’t “good at relationships” (as though relationships are a monolith) or “great at monogamy” (when the only real measure is “capable” or “not”). To insist on a low bar was to gain the upper hand, and the idea was you couldn’t be blamed for things later, though that’s never how it worked out. The secret hope was that not showing investment could prevent it; invariably it did not. 

I’ve been spending a longer period than advisable at my mom’s house, waiting for my visa to be processed and for tourist season to end in a beautiful city in a messy country across the world. It was inevitable that I would regress, but the part that most alarmed me was the romantic regression: the anxieties that suddenly returned, the uncertainty, the sureness that it was all hanging by a thread and I was powerless to stop it. Powerlessness cultivates awkwardness, excessive sensitivity, self-obsession that erases all the quality aspects of interest in another mind—you start to see in it only what assuages or exacerbates your worry, not its many other dimensions. I could see it happening and yet not prevent it

—“Every Long Letter Is A Love Letter” by Lucy Morris