An Essay on Relationships, or Vexatious Rambling

I've been brooding a great deal about love and relationships, and as is usually the case this takes a very moralistic aspect.

One of the great surprises to me when I was no longer a teenager is that admiration, flirting or in my opinion many relationships are not so much a free gift to the other person, as something that one desires for one's self in a particular setting.

Even younger, I already felt that I didn't approve of opportunistic friendship. In other words, a friendship that is not based on real kinship of interests or opinion or character, but rather is built on a an ad hoc frame where one ignores one's external conflicts or internal criticisms as much as one can. The compensation for this pretense being that one can have companionship whenever one wants it, and also prove one's social merit.

But I failed to realize for a while that romantic relationships can also be a great deal like that. (Or all relationships.)

As a teenager I tried to analyze and steer clear of the problems that I saw with adult relationships. I became afraid of entering a relationship where one partner moulds the other partner to fit their conception and warps their character until it becomes unrecognizable. I don't want to make people amoral and greedy through knowing me; and I don't want to lose sight of the best features of my personality either, like a John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Another fear was that of making life miserable for someone by bickering with them 24/7.

Nor do I want to 'use' people as personal props or therapy. If I feel lonely or insecure, these are things I must resolve for myself. While I can imagine nothing nicer than having people around me whom I can care for, and to feel that I improve their existence, I don't want to be exploited, either.

Besides, I think that trust and loyalty are admirable things, most of all if the person who inspires them has earned them. I can't imagine why you would want to be close with someone whom, a few years later, you might despise or hate, or don't really give a darn about.



I have a longterm ideal of friendly relationships, and 'vet' people endlessly before I can put faith in them. I've interacted so little with others that I feel pretty naive, and find that it feels best to form friendships gradually. I keep observing what people say and do, until I can agree to rely on them. Well, actually... as I become older, and taking myself as a case study in fickleness, it's more that I believe that you may rely on particular people to act a certain way. Not necessarily rely on people. And I like a lot of people whom, for instinctual reasons that I might never fully understand, I don't trust. And probably come off as a pretty huge snob generally.

But I think that's an aftereffect of having moved schools when I was little, and returning to find that friendships and acquaintanceships have swiftly changed and that I wasn't the same person any more; and probably many others have experienced the same unmooring and feared that it will reoccur. It's also the effect of having had the very bewildering experience of being greatly liked by some people, and absolutely despised by others. (Like marmite!)

— On a side note: As an adult I also find gendered thinking in many forms a problem that I wouldn't ever want in a relationship. I don't like the idea of seeing men and women as two mighty tribes, still less in diametric terms that very much recalls Alexander Pope's 'bores and the bored.' If I am not in love with someone, I am not going to treat him any differently from how I would treat a brother or a friend or any female acquaintance. It is also not his concern how I dress, how I look, etc. I detest generalizations about the female character as opposed to the male from evolutionary psychology to pop psychology ideas about how women 'never say what they mean, but if they say X they really mean the opposite,' etc. At the same time I like what I consider chivalry, and which is I guess a reflection of the comfortably bourgeois circles I've been in: boys or men considering women and girl acquaintances as mothers or sisters, and treating them kindly as a result with no expectation of anything in return but a feeling of being at ease, but also being generally pleasant to be with regardless of gender. It's gendered thinking, but in a form that I can easily live with. —

Returning to faithful relationships, based on a knowledge of and trust in the other, I don't know, though, how well one can or even needs to understand spouses, partners, etc. Perhaps not much, and it doesn't need to be a harmful mystery. A long time ago my aunt shared an article in the New Yorker about Barack and Michelle Obama, and I thought there was a charm in what Michelle Obama explained: in their relationship, there is constantly something new to discover in the other person.