Fool and Cynic, Besties

One of the skills involved in constructing a good life is to love individual people openly but always try to stay realistic with acceptance of the truth that they are unreliable, by nature. Even the most decent and trustworthy are mortal, so loving them means we risk losing them to death, as a baseline. But we also risk having them change in ways we dislike, or having our illusions stripped away and seeing that we had bamboozled ourselves or feeling they had bamboozled us, or any one of a seemingly unlimited number and type of disillusionment, an elaborate taxonomy of disappointment.

I've done a lot of field work here

That we can be surprised that people betray our trust (either explicitly by, say, fucking someone else or intrinsically by, say, telling the same tiresome stories over and over again) is a mark of our denial, certainly, since the preponderance of unassailable evidence is that people will betray our trust over and over and over again. Yet, if we get bitter as a result and become incapable of love, we're just being unrealistic and foolish, since becoming bitter over plain facts is like shaking one's fist at the ocean. On the other hand, being a wide open fool is also unrealistic, especially being in the delusion that this person or that person is "not like the others." It seems we are fickle, ordinary and disappointing by our very nature. Each one of us is in fact *exactly* like all the others, in regard to our ability to be either dysfunctional or boring.

The mathematician points out three things about this image: 1). Reality has to be something, since division by zero is meaningless. 2). If expectation is zero, of course disappointment will be zero and 3). A quotient is proportional to the relative size of numerator and denominator and in fact, the most rational expectation for disappointment would not be zero, but 1, that is, as close to an exact match of expectation and reality as possible. A disappointment value > 1 would signal unrealistically high expectation, and a disappointment value < 1 would signal unrealistically low expectation-- both situations reveal delusional states of mind. Or, with a disappointment of 0, the formula would reveal the modus operandi of an enlightened being.

A friend of mine recently said "I am amazed you are so open to love after what you've been through!" It caught me off guard, in part because I heard an implicit criticism in there. I asked, "Are you actually saying that you think I ought to be more cautious?" and they admitted as much. (Wishing people would say what they mean is as fruitless as wishing they would mean what they say, let alone the insane wish that they will behave congruently with their avowals).

Anyway, of course it's painful in ways from small to heartbreaking when, for whatever reason, a person in whom we have put our trust lets us down. But there's an element of business as usual in it, and it seems to me we could have a more realistic attitude in regard to these occurrences. Exactly how we decide this or that betrayal or disappointment constitutes a deal breaker or violates a non-negotiable boundary we have-- well, that's where a lot of creative skill and adroit spiritual and emotional intelligence comes in.

If one asked say 10,000 people what their non-negotiables are when it comes to how they are treated by a lover or friend or family member, how many would be able to generate a specific and detailed list that was realistically useful? There are of course the obvious ones that most people would say. But the thing is that most betrayals and disappointments are not egregious enough to match the obvious non-negotiable standards we would have. Most of the ordinary hurt that is mutually dealt in a close relationship is banal and grey.

We've all seen couples out in public who quite clearly have a low level, chronic, corrosive mutual contempt for each other, for example. At Target the other day, I heard a woman say to her male companion, "Well, where do you *think* the toothpaste is, like, in the *dental* aisle?" and he had an annoyed look on his face and simply walked away without saying anything. These gritty little snipes seem part of almost any intimate relationship, at times. How serious are they? I think this differs by case, but I know that if a woman treats me like that even once, I might not show up emotionally for weeks.

I suffer from Hypersensitive Empath Disorder (HED, which I made up), so even one such quiet and contemptuous snipe like this can send me looking for a new partner or plotting some incredibly overprotective strategy for myself. I'm not exaggerating. I am hair trigger alert for contempt toward me or my own impulse to dismiss or ridicule a woman. For me, I cannot live in this poisoned water even for a moment. Yet, I see people who splash around in it for years. I am overly tuned to be deeply hurt by teasing, also, and have generally been drawn to kind, gentle, non-bullying or non-teasing women as a result. Yet I also admire and find myself attracted to women who have a cutting sense of humor and keen sense of the absurd, so my partners have had to adroitly direct that satirical or snarky energy everywhere but toward me.

I realize my extreme sensitivity is not a boon. A single remark can send me spinning for days, months, years. I still remember single sentences that women uttered decades ago that cut me to the quick. Part of the step work in recovery is seeking more emotional intelligence and resilience. I've made progress, but I still have naturally very strong boundaries around indignities, even very minor ones. I need my partners and friends to admire me. It's a narcissistic trait, I'm sure. Of course it's also "normal," but a lot of people seem a lot more capable of dishing and receiving snipes, snarks and scoffs than I. "Haha, I know you were only kidding!" I'll say, and then six months later I move to a different state.

This has been convincingly traced to my being the youngest child, with 3 very articulate, witty, sharply observant and intellectually cutting siblings. My emotional nakedness often had me feel like St. Sebastian in the midst of the barrage of penetrating remarks in our daily family life.

In fact, in some ways, I have been better equipped to handle big, dramatic and obvious betrayals like infidelity. I have a set of learned responses to trauma and drama. I have not been as skillful at airing out the petty and banal grievances of daily life. When A and I went to the one and only couples counseling session we did, the counselor asked us to describe how often we fought and over what kinds of issues, and it occurred to us that we never, ever fought. In more than five years, we never had a fight. This is not a boast, but a confession. This is definitely not desirable.

Joni Mitchell wrote in The Last Time I Saw Richard-- all romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe. As foolish as it is to be a wide open romantic, it's equally foolish to be cynical and think that, thereby, one has gained wisdom and protection from human fickleness. There's a lot of room in between for resilient yet realistic skills. At the very least it's only fair that, if we open our chests up and say "here's my heart! be nice!" or if we wrap ourselves in a dark, hard carapace of self-protection, we might accept the necessary consequences of those decisions. Being wide open means being hurt, being armored means never experiencing intimacy and being hurt anyway. It's funny to me that yet another aspect of our lack of skill is that we choose to adopt these extreme positions and then lament the consequences.