Some thoughts on love

I've been spending a fair amount of my recent spare time pondering love--what it is, the experience of it and what the "state of love" address might sound like if we were at all serious about its place in the human experience. There are a number of routes of conservation to consider in this topic, but one that I return to in perpetuity is the many ways fear comes hand-in-hand with love or at least the possibility of it.

We fear rejection of unrequited affections. We fear the withdrawal or abandonment that we risk when accepting love offered by others. Love makes us want to expose the parts of ourselves that we fear others may abuse, reject or find incomprehensible.

It is, in many ways, a smart thing to resist. If you've got a reasonably strong defensive drive, keeping love out makes good sense. This doesn't mean being an outright asshole or a hermit, but it can cut a great many things out of our lives because we don't want to accept the risks, hard work and even directly negative aspects of being love.

All of these fears connect to a lack of trust in ourselves. If you feel reasonably secure in your sense of self, it may still hurt when others reject you or your ideas--but you don't see it as the final judgement of who you are. Relationships which involve love, however, are occasions where we can dig down to those deepest parts of ourselves, including the never totally excised vulnerabilities that are intrinsic to our human state.

Such relationships are opportunities to know ourselves and others in ways that we cannot do on our own or "out-of-love" members of a relationship. Being alone and having relationships that don't include love are certainly good in their own ways. I think, however, it is easy to lull ourselves into a sense of security by avoiding love. The real truth is those deepest insecurities reside with us whether or not we open ourselves up to the opportunities to know others in a loving way where we can acknowledge our fears.

If a whole life is spent without taking the risk of love, it is also spent without the connections that can help us find some kind of acceptance of the fragility of being human.

Here's just a short clip of one of the many thinkers whose ideas are helping me ponder love these days:

I don't need marketers to tell me what's beautiful--and I don't think you do either.

Let me preface this whole post by saying that I am glad to see the continuing and growing of conversations about appreciating beauty in a range of body sizes and that I don't think we should just ignore the representations made in mass media and marketing. 

With all that in mind: I don't give a fuck about "body diversity" in the modeling industry. Why? Because I'm already too pissed at advertising. I don't think it really matters if every high fashion house's advertising campaign and every Target flyer in your Sunday paper could capture over the course of the year the breadth and depth of diversity in human bodies--at the end of the day, they are only doing it to sell you shit you don't need! 

As long as our definitions of beauty and value to come from people that are trying to sell us something, they are probably going to continue to suck. Sure, capitalism has learned some tricks: maybe it is better to run a campaign on self-worth than degradation to get people to buy your product. Still, the change only comes about because something sells better.

I don't want my conception of beauty to be defined by marketers who see my successful understanding of "beauty" in the amount of dollars I spend on their brand. If we care about the messages people are getting from clothing advertising, we need to establish and critique the basic framework of marketing. Marketing doesn't exist to tell us the truth or to help us find alternative options: marketing exists to help those doing the marketing. 

You don't need marketing to tell you what's beautiful. Yet, many young people grow up with a large part of their understanding of the world being framed by what marketing tells them. So, I am happy people are criticizing the lack of body diversity in modeling, but we need to follow up on those critiques with action with young people. This means talking straightforwardly and frankly about where our aesthetic values come from and how the worth of another person never comes from their aesthetic presentation to us.

Let's stop buying the bullshit of beauty marketing and start enriching our own lives with a new concept of the value of beauty that doesn't include dollar signs.

A pause

I had a few different things I thought about writing about over the course of the week. Yesterday, a high school classmate of mine died. It is a case of feel sad, but also like I'm not entitled to feel sad at all. I feel angry and sad while also feeling removed, separated from what is happening at home. I tried writing out some of the ideas from earlier in the week, but it's just not happening. I'm planning on a new post next Sunday.

Until then--M

Adulthood in vitamins and mugs

After the last two posts on expectations in my more idealized view, I've been ruminating on my current experience of expectations on an individual level. Specifically, I have been thinking about the sensations of feeling like a "real adult." I've reached that point in life where I work full-time, exercise regularly, take a multivitamin (almost) every morning--but, I've even got a coffee cup emblazoned with my work logo. There are a number of things that go into feeling one has reached "adulthood"--whatever the fuck it is, actually. I think the real sensations that are worth seeking and developing are more nuanced than any category of "adult".

Being an adult really just comes down to your expectations about what an "adult" is/does. There's no real definition beyond arbitrary line drawing that doesn't account for individual variety. In my case, a lot of what I thought being an adult would be was based on expectations I formed from the "adults" in my childhood. These people who were older than me, supposedly in charge, were my main frame of reference. They continue to hold sway over my subconscious expectations, but the more time I spend thing about those expectations and their origins, the more I come to have my own definition of adulthood.

None of these outward markers really define for me the responsibility and autonomy that I am seeking. Additionally, I am not seeking some title to put behind my name like a Ph.D--I don't need a certificate of adulthood. The attributes I want for myself are ones that I want to be developing for the rest of my life. For example, while I don't think remembering to take my multivitamin makes me an adult, being able to carryout the long-term self-care activities demonstrates to me a new phase of my intrinsic motivations. I hope that I can continue expanding on these small forms of self-care and self-knowledge.

These adult-status items are not unimportant in terms of being able to work on these more existential aspects. Having a job give me financial freedom to experiment with my own self-efficacy in all parts of my life. There are a great many things that the world tells us are "what adults do" can be part of the process of knowing ourselves, but they are not determining factors.

Am I an adult? Depends on who you ask, but personally I couldn't care less. I do care that I am becoming more response-able, efficacious, self-confident, self-aware and free from superficial expectations. I'm not over all the Midwest farm girl hopes that were held for me, but I am getting better at recognizing that they were never held by my hands. The harder step, for me, is knowing this person I am becoming and struggling to communicate that process to those who want to see my "adulthood" as aimed at some kind of stasis.

It can be a challenge to express to another person your own infinite process of becoming; I certainly don't think it can ever be fully communicated. There will likely still be times that I have to present myself to world at-large as a checked-off list of "adult to-do" items. But, for myself, I can live with ambiguity of being a life-long child with growing to be done.

I know what I need: pass the junk food please

H.T. to A. for the inspiration for the following. It's in very rough form, but I wanted to get it out there to be able to reflect on it more in the future. 

Say your not one of the so-called "expecationless" I was critiquing last week. You have your expectations, you know what you want--but, we don't always get what we want. Life is not a vending machine or, if it is, it's one of those that can eat all your quarters and still give you a dozen pulverized granola bars instead of a Mars bar.

Success in relationships is not about just coming up with a list of demands, presenting them to another person and saying "Take it or leave it." Certainly, there are some things you should not compromise on--your health, your safety and your emotional well-being. Beyond the basic decency and respect I desire from all human beings, what is reasonable to expect from those I foster personal relationships with?

By the time we get into our 20's, most of us have known at least one person we would call "demanding" in relationships. These are the people who boarder on deranged when their significant other fails to communicate with them at least twice every hour or who threatens to never speak to their friend again after the person cancels on hangout despite seeing that person multiple times in the week. We don't criticize these people for knowing what we want or being able to state clearly their desires. Instead, we see an inconsistency between this person's perception and the reality of the world around them--which is at once a part objective experience of the limitations of the world and part the work of a shared subjective experience.

To what degree any of us gets to know "reality" is a philosophical question I'd rather not get bogged down in right now, but I will go ahead an lay out my own belief about truth-development between two people. There are a number of limitations on any of our expectations, and those limitations can be misunderstood on two main levels. Our unrealistic/unhealthy expectations may develop from an internal perception about the external limits which does not match up with the demands of external world. Alternatively, these unmeetable expectations may develop from a internal perception of the other person's ability/desires that does not match with the other's actual internal experience.

For example, consider a person "A" who is mad at their partner "B" for not returning a call or text message while "B" is at work. I think, for most of us, this is a pretty clear unrealistic demand. However, the problem with the expectation runs deeper than the instance of annoyance. First, let's state the expectation as something more basic: partners should communicate openly and without avoidance. Nothing expressly wrong with expecting open, direct communication from your partner. There is a move, however, between this more basic expectation to "checklist" item or demand that the partner should be answering messages or calls while at work. I think that move has to do more with each person's perception

It could be this A's perception is out of sync with the external limits that are part of B's life: most workplaces don't appreciate their employees taking personal calls when they should be working. However, this probably has more to do with a mismatch between the separate perspectives of A and B and the one they think they are sharing. Whether its jealousy, insecurity or something else, an emotional state or subconscious psychological issue maybe causing them to see a skewed version of what's going on. They may comprehend consciously that others cannot be expected to answer at every moment of the day, but their perception of the world through insecurity may cause them to negate that as the reason B does not respond to their attempts at communication.

So, the message is sent by A and B does not respond until their lunch break. If A is frustrated by this because of the more external misunderstanding, it can probably be resolved with ease. Maybe A has a job where you can take time for personal calls during the day without issue. The fundamental expectation "partners should communicate openly and without avoidance" still remains true for both partners, and can be upheld through communication about what is an isn't possible due to the constraints of A and B's pragmatic work-life demands.

If the issue lies in the more complex, subjective aspect of experience, the expectation may remain true, but is impossible to carry out because the partners are not seeing the same situation. While B sees waiting until an appropriate break or the end of the day to respond as fulfilling "partners should communicate openly and without avoidance," A may be incapable of even considering the pragmatics of the situation due to skewed interpretation of the situation. If A has a jealous tendency, they will shut out reality and reform what information they receive to fit an vision where B must be hiding something when they do not respond instantly.

This is one example, and likely not a good one at that. But I hope it outlines some of the basic ideas. I think we all spend a great deal of our lives trying to understand our own perception of our lives. It is another effort to try to understand the perceptions of others and yet a further move to try and pursue a truth-seeking process with another. It demands empathy, self-knowledge and an ability to critique all of the lenses that lay over our expectations.

I don't mean to make this sound like, "Why the fuck isn't everyone doing these things?" Not at all. It is fucking hard to examine not just our expectations but also the ways some of the deepest parts of ourselves and our experiences will affect how we judge others' fulfillment of those expectations. And, I don't think its an achievable expectation to think we can remove all of these lenses. Self-knowledge is a life-long pursuit, and it is a beautiful thing to be able to embark on that process with friends, family, lovers, pets and yourself. However, the more we can be honest with ourselves and those we embark upon meaningful relationships with, the more we can see the world for what it is--not what we wish it to be.

There is not vending machine, no quarters to insert for a specified outcome: it may even turn out what you thought you were hungry for isn't even available from any letter/number combination. We may know we are hungry for something, we may even know that we want something nourishing, but any number of experiences may keep us from knowing what is nourishing. Emphatic understanding of expectations, ourselves and others are a dynamic flow that join together to help bring us closer to knowing the full truth of what we are seeking and how to find fulfillment.