Walking a Tightrope

Every relationship has rules. There's a sort of standard set of them (monogamy, financial sharing, modicum of care) that is the basic template for modern, American relationships. Individual couples work out the details of their particular relationship and apply variations of these rules, or chuck them completely and start from a blank slate, building as necessary.

Many relationships break down when the rules aren't followed. Many others break down because the rules were never explicitly defined, and so one party or another violates them unknowingly or someone starts pushing for a defined set of rules which is often casually referred to as "labeling" the relationship and the other person freaks the fuck out because defined rules mean they have to follow them, too, and not having any rules to follow is so nice.

I've got very little problem chucking the basic template and building from scratch. Most things in my life are negotiable. I don't have a great many strong convictions about anything (although, to be fair, the few things I do have strong convictions about are pretty much iron-clad and you will never get me to negotiate on them) so I'm willing to compromise a great deal.

What I have a hard time dealing with is uncertainty, or operating without a defined set of rules. I am a person that needs to know where the lines are, and why they are there, and how important each one is. This is equally so that I don't unintentionally cross any boundaries, and so that if I do cross a line, I know what the likely outcome will be. I like to rebel with purpose, you see. If I'm going to set something on fire, I will be very careful to pick the thing that will produce the exact impact I'm going for.

I really do weigh things that carefully; it's the natural consequence of being a worrier. I calculate risk with an internal scale that is so finely calilbrated it distinguishes between 6 hours of sleep and 5.5 hours of sleep; between a margarita and a manhattan; between $20 and $25; between "I love you" and "I am in love with you."

But all this calculation depends on data, on having the information necessary to weigh risk, and so in relationships with undefined rules, I have no data on which to make decisions. This is how I get hurt. When I don't know what I'm leaping into, I tense and hit the ground hard and shatter. When I can see, I can relax and roll with the punches.

Maybe what I'm supposed to be learning right now is how to roll with punches while blind. Maybe what I'm supposed to be learning right now is the value of the undefined, the freeing nature of letting go of risk calculation, the joy of floating even if there's a 100-foot waterfall just up ahead pulling you inexorably toward the precipice.

Mostly it feels like walking a tightrope without a net, and falling every other step. I'm not ready for this. I need some rules to work with, I need some data on which to make decisions. I need to calculate whether the tightrope is worth walking.

Traveling Light

I bought myself a plane ticket to Spain for my birthday. I leave tomorrow. I intend to spend the dawn of my 28th year on earth in misty mountain solitude, listening to medieval chants and wandering around the oldest still-functioning monastery in Europe.

After that, I'm going to Barcelona to party.

I am refusing to take a suitcase on this trip (not such a strange thing, for me) but I am also resistant to even taking a backpacking pack. It's too big. I'm packing a duffel bag for this trip, the kind of bag one takes on a long weekend. A "weekender," the fashion people would call it. It's fake red leather, and my mother spotted it on the free table at Value Village Thrift Store two months ago and brought it home for me. It has no rips and no holes and the strap is still attached and the stitches are firm and the zipper works, so I'm not sure why it was on the free table, but it has a good home, now. This is a bag I will love.

I have my little duffel loaded up with clothes: underwear, cardigans, a cocktail dress. A toiletry bag. A current converter. I'll add a pair of fancy flats later tonight.

I have a backpack, too, a carry on, the backpack that has been on every single trip I've taken since I was fourteen and went to Oceania for three weeks. This backpack has been around the world. It's been to Australia and New Zealand, it's been to Spain before, it was with me when I got stranded in Morocco, it's been to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, and it's held water and sandwiches while I hiked in the Schwarzwald. It's met my daughter's father. It's climbed Mayan ruins on the Yucatan, seen waterfalls in the Andes, gone to street parties outside of Santo Domingo. This backpack has been to New York City more times than I can count, seen the redwoods of Big Basin State Park in California, wandered around downtown Detroit. It's been to St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Into this backpack I will put my camera bag, laden with camera and lenses and lens filters and cleaning cloths and memory cards and a battery charger and a card reader. I will put my tiny pink computer, and its charger. I'll put my phone and its charger. I'll put in two books and a wallet and a passport and three packs of American Spirit cigarettes, in the yellow box, and a lighter. The lighter will also be yellow.

I've had butterflies in my stomach for days now, anticipating this trip. My insides are quivering in anticipation of being unattached for seven entire, glorious days. My wanderlust is ferocious, voracious, and stems primarily from a desire to have no attachments at all. My daydreams are always about taking off into the sunset and leaving everything behind. My fondest, most impossible wish is to start over, completely, from scratch. I want to disappear with my duffel and my backpack and never come back, never look back, reinvent everything about myself.

I can't do that. Having babies really puts a damper on your ability to disappear without a trace. Well, unless you're my baby's father.

(Heh.)

So, I take the next best thing: Whenever I can, I go somehwere alone. Like tomorrow.

I have many vices. Cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, pretty dresses, vintage hats, ridiculous high-heeled shoes, loud music, driving too fast. Some of these are probably even full-blown addictions. But of all my vices, and all my addictions, this is most certainly the worst. This is the one that could cause me to abandon everything, hit rock bottom, sever every tie. It would be so easy since the addiction is to rootlessness, restlessness, the ability to move on whenever the urge hits, to put one's life in two small bags and go, onward, forward, sideways, backwards, it doesn't matter as long as you're moving.

The addiction, you see, is to this fluttery feeling I get before stepping off into the unknown. I am addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the limitless vistas of possibility. This feeling is better than any drug, than any drink, than any touch. This feeling is better than any love. This combination of knowing everything theoretically and nothing concretely and being able to see everything and nothing all at once is better than anything else you can name. I would chase this feeling endlessly if I could. I would step off every cliff, climb every mountain, turn down every blind alley to find it again.

If I could. If only I could.

Rejection is a Lesson

I think the hardest lesson in compassion is this: accepting that not everyone will want you. And, that's ok.

My struggles with trust and intimacy remain ongoing, and probably will for the rest of my life. These are not things that you ever stop really wrestling with, once you've started. Maybe they'll simmer on the backburner more often as years go by and I become more comfortable with the terrifying notion of letting someone else in on my life, but they'll still need to be revisited. I know this, I've known this, I was prepared for this.

What I was not fully prepared for was rejection. In my hubris and megalomania, I glossed over the fact that other people are people and will have feelings and ideas of their own, and needs and wants of their own, and I am not guaranteed to be something that anyone else either desires or needs. In  fact, odds are I will not be someone that even most people want or need in their life.

It makes perfect sense, when I see it in black-and-white like that.

But still, but still, but still.

When you're struggling through just the idea of letting your guard down, it's really hard to do it and then be rejected. It's really hard to let someone in only to have them walk right back out. It hurts. A lot.

But hurt is not a reason to lash out. Sadness is not a reason to stop exercising compassion. Other people get to do what they need to do, and be with the people they need to be with, in order to make their own lives better, in order to round out their own internal spaces. Other people, also, get to build airy light palaces in their hearts and minds and populate those glass castles with the people that bring them the most joy.

And I don't get to assert that I have to be one of those people, simply because I want to be.

And if I want to bring someone deep into the heart of my airy light glass castle, but they'd prefer I remain in the outer ring of theirs, I don't get to smash things because I'm not getting my way. Compassion is being there for people in the ways that they want, and the ways that they need, at the times of their choosing. I get to make my choices, yes, but others get to make their own, and if there's a mismatch or a disconnect, compassion demands that we continue to do what we have done, even if we wanted more.

Rejection is the right of every person. Every person is self-determining. And no matter how much it aches, respect for those determinations is the heart of compassion. Self-determination is not an excuse for wretched self-centeredness.

My palace is dimmed, but I'll find another way to light it up. And in the meantime, I will not throw stones. I will practice compassion.

Moments, Liminal

I don't often read advice columns. I am fascinated by people, and their problems, and their neuroses, and so reading advice columns seems like a natural thing for me to do, but I don't often do it. I find them inherently condescending, primarily, and that makes them difficult for me to read.

It's probably a good thing that I don't read them often; as was pointed out to me recently in disparaging tones, the last thing I need is to become further steeped in pop psychology and dime-store theories. All the good intentions and compassion in the world will be for naught if I start to believe too strongly in my own cleverness.

But sometimes, the tag line is too good, too close to home, too grabbing for me to ignore. Tag lines like "Must I Choose: My Muse or My Wife?" are more or less guaranteed to get me reading.

I'm not male, and my personality is not really set up for clear-cut dichotomies, but this is a thing that I have often struggled with. I require, for better or worse, a great deal of stimulation. I need people, different people, different perspectives, new ideas. I crave them. I crave the interaction that is exchanging thoughts with someone, and I crave variety in that enterprise.

My ex-husband had a less charitable view of this desire of mine; he told me that I required a lot of attention. That is probably true, although not, I think, entirely in the way he meant it. I am not someone that requires the full attention of another person at all times. I crave copious quantities of solitude as desperately as I crave new ideas and interactions. I need time to recharge and regroup, to integrate the sum total of those new ideas gleaned from new interactions into my cosmology and adjust as necessary. But I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy the attention of the people that I love, or admire, or respect. Who doesn't enjoy attention, honestly?

But the thrust of this man's problem is that while he very much wants to be a good husband to his wife, he finds he is consistently projecting desire onto other women and using the resultant emotional reactions as inspiration. He is creating muses for himself. And he is afraid he is hurting his wife in this process.

I very much want to be a good partner, but I require a lot of stimulation. No one person is ever going to be enough for me. And that can be hurtful. Jealousy is an ugly, wily, slippery thing, and it can rear its poisonous head and kill even the heartiest love dead.

Most of the columnist's advice I found unhelpful and unnessecarily downing. But there was one line, one line in the whole response, that sent the hamsters in my brain madly turning their wheels: "I also think it might be useful for you to read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Why do I think that? Not sure."

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Don't know why, just do it. Perhaps the columnist knows more than he is telling, or perhaps he intuitively knows something he can't verbalize, or perhaps it was just a random stab in the dark because this guy really likes the concept of liminality. I don't know. But that was the best bit of advice I have ever seen in an advice column in my life.

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Just do it.

A liminal moment is a threshhold, it is the state of being betwixt and between two concretely defined states. Liminal moments occur in all strata of human organization, from individuals to the world at large. The term was originally coined in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in the classic anthropological tome Rites of Passage. I studied van Gennep; I remember being fascinated by the concept seven years ago.

Because the columnist did not see fit to elucidate his reasons for recommending reading about liminality, I can only guess what he was trying to impart. But I know, very clearly, what I got out of reminding myself about the concept of liminality.

I am spending my life searching out liminal moments. If I could, I would live entirely in the threshhold, in the state betwixt and between all definite things. It is in those moments, and that state, that creativity is most abundant. It is in those spaces where all stability and order have passed away and new orders and structures have not yet been erected that inspiration is clearest. I have spent my life, and I will continue to spend my life, seeking permanent liminality.

New people and new interactions and new ideas are merely vehicles for finding those things that force me into liminality, so that I do reorder my cosmology. All that attention is fodder for the productive use of my solitude.

Some part of me, the heedless, reckless, wild part wants to say that art is that which is a catalyst for liminal moments. Art is that which sends you careening into the space betwixt and between the ordinary structures of the world. Anything else is mere craft, no matter how well constructed.

And I want to create art. I want to live in the empty space between letters, in the pause of the comma and not in the words surrounding it.

On Generosity

There was an interesting, albeit tantalizing short, column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled The Generous Marriage. The social value of generosity is well known and well-documented, but a new study about the value of generosity in intimate relationships was just released, and the column touches briefly on most of the conclusions therein.

Those conclusions are exactly what you'd expect. There are no surprises here: couples that both rank highly on the generosity scale are far, far more likely to both report being very happy in their relationship.

Duh, right?

But as the researchers point out, it's hard to be generous with a romantic partner. The lead researcher for the study had this to say about the difficulty of generous romanticism:

"In marriage we are expected to do our fair share when it comes to housework, child care and being faithful, but generosity is going above and beyond the ordinary expectations with small acts of service and making an extra effort to be affectionate."

And he's right: that's hard. There is so much expectation about what a partnership between two people is that you can get lost in all of that and never ever go above and beyond. And that would certainly make me feel unloved. But I would submit that generosity, true generosity, is making those extra efforts without expectation of return. Much like altruism, generosity requires a negating of the self to be genuine, real, and have the intended effect.

And I realized: my generosity is not genuine. When I do nice things for people, I want them to do nice things for me in return. Perhaps that's fair, but generosity is not about fairness. It's about the above and beyond.

I've been being a bad Buddhist. I have not been being truly generous.

I think that what I need to find true generosity in my soul is first a much, much greater sense of self-sufficiency. I need to be much more self-contained. I need to be much less of a selfish mess, in other words. I've not been doing so great at my resolution not to be selfish in my messiness. I think it's not possible not to be selfish when you're a personal mess on the inside.

So, I need to clean up. I need to not be a mess. I need to be able to satisfy all my own needs. I need to identify what those are, and which of the things I'm currently classifying as needs are actually wants, and having them satisfied would fall into someone being generous with me.

But mostly, I need to be more self-contained and self-sufficient. I need to need less. I need to make do with my own internal resources. No one owes me their time or attention or energy. It is nice to get, sometimes. It's nice to be cared about, and it's nice when people are generous with me. But it's not to be expected. It's not my due.

And I think, perhaps, this is the greatest personal breakthrough I've had in years, because it rather neatly resolves the tension I've always struggled with between being open and generous and being cold and closed off. I can be open and generous, truly generous, without needing anything, or becoming needy. In fact, the only way to truly be generous is to not be needy.

New resolution: clean up my insides. Scrub my soul. Neat, tidy, self-contained. And then, truly generous with the people I meet.

Don't Settle, or, There's Enough Happiness To Go Around

Today, a friend of mine dug up a three-and-a-half-year-old piece from the Atlantic called "Marry Him!: The Case for Mr. Good Enough." I have a vague recollection of there being some kind of stir around it back in 2008, but in the early part of 2008 I was heavily pregnant and also completely in love, so I wasn't really paying much attention to tomes with dating or marriage advice.

Today, a single mama with a case of the lonelies, I read through the whole thing. Actually, I've read through the whole thing three times now (my boss really loves me today, guys) because the first time was full of so much emotional reaction that I had to read it a second time to get a rational read on it, and the second time was so full of incredulity at the terrible analytic capacity and also the extreme sense of over-privilege on display that I had to read it a third time to make sure I wasn't emotionally over-reacting again.

It's HORRIFYING. Really, truly horrifying.

The basic premise of the piece is that if you're looking to create a stable family unit, you don't need grand passion in your choice of partner. And on its face, that's a true and valid statement. A stable family unit is not the primary goal of most people out there looking for a life partner, though. The author takes issue with this fact, reflecting on her own dating experiences and those of her friends, and finally coming to the conclusion that a stable family unit is the goal that everyone OUGHT to have. Those that have made the trade off of passion for stability and complain about it now are lucky to have made the choices they did, and the author can't believe that it took her own self so long to figure out what she ought to want.

And that's where everything she says just breaks down and becomes the kind of drivel that I hate to read but can't stop myself from compulsively looking at.

Moral prescriptives about what people ought to want are always fraught with logical inconsistencies and mental acrobatics. Ms. Gottlieb is no exception. She starts with the realization that she's not happy. She then constructs an argument for why she'd be happier if she'd made other choices earlier in her life. The whole thing is the study of an acute case of Frost syndrome, in which "the road less traveled" is held up as some sort of saving grace.

But some of the ways in which she attempts to justify her position are interesting to me, a single mother in my 20s (rather than my 40s) who is also single, and also gets powerful lonely on occasion. The subtext of many of the most offensive statements in the piece make it clear that I am not the target audience for this piece. And I can't help but feel that perhaps if I could infuse some of my own perspective into Ms. Gottlieb's thought processes, I might be able to help her out a bit.

For starters, what is a stable family unit? Why is a stable family unit irrevocably and for all time a man, a woman, and two point three children living in a house with a white picket fence and a rose garden and a dog? On paper, I'm a single mother, but I live in a house with my parents (both my biological parents, in their 25th year of marriage), my biological child (concieved in a foreign country and born out of wedlock and with no legal father) and the two adult children of my oldest sister, who is actually my half sister (the product of my father's first marriage). No dog, no white picket fence. We're pretty stable, despite the tensions that sometimes erupt. I would even go so far as to call us a stable family unit. And my daughter certainly gets the advantage of all that stability and also all that attention.

The idea that two married, hetero-sexual people raising a child is the only thing that qualifies as a stable family unit is tied to the statistics about the children of single parents (specifically single mothers) that exist out there, and I'll be the first to admit that such statistics sound dismal. But I have always questioned those statistics, and not just because statistics can be manipulated to show just about anything. No, I've never been fully convinced that the relationship between single-parent households and under performance at school or behavior problems wasn't completely spurious. Because here's a little secret: most single-parent households are also POOR.

Yeah, shocking, I know. But true. And poverty carries it with a whole host of issues that might affect things like school performance and behavior a whole lot more than not having a daddy. Like, hunger. It's really hard to concentrate when you're hungry. Also, malnutrition in infants can and does lead to diminished mental capacity, period. And I've never seen a study that controlled completely for the variables that come with poverty when trumpeting the ills of single parenthood.

I'm pretty sure Ms. Gottlieb doesn't have to worry about poverty. So I think she can probably settle down a little on the desire to find a husband so that she can create a stable family unit. I'm pretty sure she can do that just fine on her own. Isn't that empowering?

But I don't really think that this woman wants to find a husband so desperately so that she can create a stable family unit. I think she's lonely.

And hey, I have a lot of sympathy for that condition. I suffer from it myself.

But here's what I don't get: she also acknowledges that most of her married friends are ALSO LONELY. SO, she's single and lonely, and her married friends are married and lonely, and it's better to be married and lonely because it's easier to manage kids when you've got a partner to help you out.

SO, a stable family unit is not actually one that's best for the kids, it's the one that minimizes stress on the parents. And sure, as someone that has a lot of help with her daughter in the form of the very non-traditional stable family unit I enjoy, I'll be the first to say that help with kids is a godsend. But again I say unto you: Help with kids doesn't come only in the form of a husband that watches them while you eat lunch and takes the trash out. (Seriously, these are her desired traits in a mate.) You've got lots of single parent friends, you imply. Why don't you all get together and crowd-source the kid watching while you go on dates and have lives?

Because the thing this woman says that offends me the most is this: "With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs."

Why don't you still do some of those things? You can. I promise.

You don't give up your life to have a child. You don't have to, and the kid will be a better person for you being an interesting, complete, well-rounded person than they will by you being a slave to them. They will be a better person even if they spend a weekend at "Auntie Em's" house now and again, or spend a week with Grandma while you go to Colombia. Really, I promise. It's not child abuse to get away from your kid now and again.

The rest of Gottlieb's dating advice, and exhortations to settle, spring from a complete misunderstanding of the difference between "lust" and "romance." Yeah, that biker that runs guns in his spare time probably gets your motor running in a way that the mild-mannered accountant with allergies to everything under the sun doesn't. But your choice is not dichotomous. Life is not black and white. And the lust you feel for the biker is not "romance." It's ADRENALINE.

Romance comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. For that matter, lust comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. And while you may not fall in love with everyone you fall in lust with, to go from that to the idea that you don't need any sexual attraction to your partner is a leap of logic that I can't even really quite follow. Yes, it's a cliche that long-married people don't have a lot of sex, but to turn that into the support for the argument that marrying someone you never want to have sex with is a good idea is just a little... off. To put it mildly.

So Gottlieb takes her own loneliness, her own frustrations with her (self-chosen, I must say) single parenthood, and turns that into a prescriptive for women everywhere. Marry a man so you don't do what I did? Settle for a man that's good enough so you don't choose to go to a sperm bank so you can have kids? Settle for Mr. Right Now so that you can be lonely with someone later on? I don't really get it.

Here's a better idea: be happy. Stop comparing your life to the lives of your friends and appreciate your life for what it is. Has it ever occured to you that you and everyone you know are unhappy because you're all desperately trying to impress each other instead of enjoying yourselves? Stop competing for happiness, because happiness isn't a pie that the world will run out of. There is more than enough happiness for everyone, more and much more than enough to go around, and you can be happy and they can be happy and I can be happy and we can all be happy. Even if we're lonely sometimes, even if it's hard sometimes, we can be happy. And if we took the road less traveled, there would still be dark places and you, Ms. Gottlieb, would have written a piece called, "Don't Marry Him!: The Case For Holding Out For Mr. Right."

Some people are never happy, and I'm sorry for that. But playing to the insecurities of single women, and exhorting young women to "settle" simply to avoid a fate that in your case actually looks pretty rosy from where I sit, is a pretty awful thing to do. Your life is wonderful. Deal with it.

Fairy Tales.

I still believe in fairy tales.

Ridiculous, non? Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. You'd think my history of incredibly poor decision-making would have cured me of that particular childish desire years and years and years ago.

But, the truth is, I still believe in happily-ever-after. I still believe in forever and sunsets and growing old and grand gestures and the power of love and romance and all that other 10-year-old girl stuff.

And I want a fairy tale. I want happily ever after. I want a relationship that's going to last forever, or at the very least, the rest of my lifetime.

My Prince Charming appreciates my cooking, and is perfectly willing to do the dishes. He'll indulge my ridiculous desire for low-key drama because he loves me. In return, I'll put up with whatever childishness he's still holding on to, because let's be honest, we're all little children somewhere in our emotional selves. Somewhere there's that one thing that everyone else outgrew that we just didn't. That one idea that was implanted by deep social conditioning that most people manage to expunge, but we just didn't. That one that took root real deep and isn't getting ripped out anytime soon because it's become part of the foundation of our identity.

There are so many of these messages that not everyone gets stuck with the same one. Some people get indoctrinated with gender roles, that men work and women cook and that's love. Some people get indoctrinated with holidays, that birthdays and Valentine's Day and the like are the real measure of love. Some get stuck with ideas about what good sex is, or what good sex is not. Some get materialism in full force, the "white-picket-fence" syndrome.

These are all pieces of baggage that individuals bring to relationships.

Me? I get stuck with commitment. Somehow, somewhere, I picked up this idea of committing and committing fully and that as long as two people meet as themselves and remain fully committed, they can work out anything. You ever seen that movie with Heather Graham? In a way, I'm like her. I'd really like to believe that if I ever get married again, I could get a tattoo for a wedding ring. I'd really like to find someone that understands that about me.

I guess you could say that "I'm looking for baggage that goes with mine."

And maybe that's really the key to a good relationship. We all have these little bits of social more lodged in the crevices of our brains; so much gets thrown at us that something sticks, no matter how rational and above it you like to think yourself.

So the key is finding someone whose bits of accumulated peer-induced flotsam match up with your own.

Not real helpful as a revelation, is it? No. I thought not.