Tag Archives: relationships

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Friday Favorite: Misunderstanding “I Love You”

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Every Friday, I post a past post that was popular. This post was originally posted on November 20, 2011. Enjoy!

There’s a show on MTV that I catch sometimes. It’s called Friendzone. I don’t know why I watch it when it’s on. It’s half an hour of grueling emotional heartbreak and I never follow it all the way through to the conclusion.

The show follows a new couple of people every episode. These people have best friends of the opposite sex and have always felt something more for said best friends. The show is formulaic. It starts with the protagonist asking their best friend/crush to help them get ready for a “blind date.” The best friend/crush helps out. They go to the location of the “blind date” and then the protagonist reveals his or her feelings for the best friend/crush. It’s grueling.

The show bothers me for a couple of reasons. First, out of all of the contestants from this whole genre of MTV dating-type shows, I feel like I can actually identify with these people. These people are my friends, my peers. These are the people I give advice to when they tell me they have feelings for another one of our friends. I know them.

Second, it makes the assumption that we have no control over love. Love, though, is not an adjective. Sometimes, it is a noun, yes. But most of the time, it is a verb. It’s something we do, not something that does us. The hopeless, star-crossed lovers are a fiction. And that’s not upsetting or cynical. It’s just true. Sometimes you like someone more than that person likes you, and that sucks, but there is no reason to believe that because your feelings are so strong, you and that person are supposed to be together.

Third, it presupposes the only way to show love for someone is romantically. There was a 13th-century Persian mystic poet known as Rumi. He was pretty cool. He was doing things that the romantics and the transcendentalists would do almost 600 years later. One of his greatest works, Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (or The Works of Shams of Tabriz), was written for his friend and master Shams. When you read the poetry contained in the work, you feel Rumi’s love for Shams. The idea that a love for a friend can be spiritual and transcendental, mystical and inexplicable is pretty cool. We don’t have to be having sex with a person or moving toward having sex with a person to be profoundly altered by another human being. I have a couple of close friends who are girls. And we routinely tell each other that we love each other. And it doesn’t mean that we want to sleep with each other. It means that we know each other, support each other, believe in one another.

So after a thirty-minute show on MTV, I am sad. I am sad because these people don’t know that romantic relationships aren’t the end-all be-all of all human relationships and development. It is just one facet of a very complicated awesome web of people.

Have you ever crushed on your best friend?

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Righting Texts

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When friends get in a relationship, one of my favorite things to say to them is that they are in a “honeymoon phase.” That lovey dovey feeling? Not going to last forever. Those feelings aren’t “real” love. And I am completely qualified to say things like that. It’s true.  Because single 21-year-old males are easily the most qualified to make claims like that.

I’m in this class on the psychology of narrative this quarter. And I was reading an essay by Michael White today about the analogies psychologists use to explain human relationships and stories. For a long time, beginning with Freud, the only analogies used by psychologists were that of science – either machines or organisms. These analogies do a lot of things correctly, but they have a major short-coming: they pathologize any deviation from what is considered the norm. If there is a break down in a machine, it stops working. If there is a break down in an organism, it gets sick.

Ironically, as White points out, the biologic and machine analogies are static. A scientific system can only be one way. It does not allow for multiple truths. So when the “honeymoon phase” passes, the assumption is that the objective reality of the issue is that there was always some glaring problem in the relationship.

White thinks we can reject this position by using another analogy. If relationships are seen like a text, then the “honeymoon” phase and the phase after become competing texts. Neither is any more true or any more real than the other. Thus, White suggests, the couple can identify the text they like the most and why and construct a relationship that involves those things.

There is an idea floating around out there that genetics is much more intimately influenced by our choices than we ever thought. Some people think that genes that we activate during our life time are more likely to be passed on to our children. That’s incredible to me. And it seems impossible. That’s how I feel about changing stories, or “texts.” It feels impossible. It feels like someone telling us “Just change your story” is simplistic and overly reductive. And that’s true: it is overly reductive.

You can’t just wake up one morning and decide that you are never going to leave your honeymoon phase. You have to make a commitment to incorporating the story you want into the reality of day-to-day life. But it’s possible.

Your life is not a machine. One messed up thing does not ruin it. That wrong thing is just a story that doesn’t have an end yet. Write (right) it.

 

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Asking for Help is Harder than Asking for a Date

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I like to do things myself.

In high school, I dated this girl for a while. The thing about dating someone regularly in high school is that you always have a built-in date for dances. And that’s nice.

But without fail, my parents would start hounding me about a month and a half before the dance. “How are you going to ask her?” they would ask.

I like to think that I am a creative person, but sometimes I have trouble coming up with original ideas. And at my high school, it was pretty important to ask someone to a dance originally. Fireworks were not necessary but encouraged. If you could figure out how to build a canal for gondola rides, you should do that. That sort of thing.

So a month and a half before the dance, my parents would be like, “When are you going to ask that girlfriend of yours to the dance?” I would respond that I didn’t have an idea, yet. And then they started to give me ideas. A lot of them were great. A lot of them were cute and adorable. But I refused to listen to them because I wanted to use my own ideas.

That was a noble quest, I suppose. Except one year that idea never came. And I waited too long. I asked my girlfriend to the dance one morning before school. That was it. Yawn.

This is a mistake I’ve repeated many times since then. I hate asking for help. Even when I get it into my head to ask for help, I rarely ask the kinds of questions that would benefit me. Instead, I dance around the issue, hoping that the person I’m talking to will magically read my mind. They don’t.

There are people out there with specific knowledge that you can use. These people are probably not in your immediate group of friends. We tend to encircle ourselves with people who are similar to us – single or married, student or businesswoman, parent or childless. They are great friends, certainly, but if we want specific knowledge we need to seek out people who have what we think we want. We need to talk to people who have already been through what we are going through. And then when we talk to them, we need to ask them very specific questions.

That way, we will always creatively ask the girl to the dance on time.