round-up: 2/03
reading/watching recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m reading/watching/listening to
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
And some things to read:
What I’m reading:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m watching:
Griselda (it’s so good)
Quotations:
It can be an act of charity to your audience to simply name your politics in language that other people will understand. People love the idea of a no-labels political party (for some reason), but there’s a reason why labels exist: they’re a quick way to telegraph, to the other human beings that you are democratically deliberating with, where you’re coming from.
If I was going to be happy as a chronically ill person, I realized I was going to have to disappoint a whole lot of people in my life. Most people in my life probably.
It’s still very much treated as an individual issue, especially in treatment. If we can just shift the thought patterns, or shift the chemistry, then it’ll all be fine. So you see the same things as you do with a lot of disorders—medication, cognitive behavioral therapy. Which is all kind of based on this idea that an eating disorder is a false consciousness in your mind, something that’s telling you that it’s much more important than it is. Which, is, to use an overused word, a form of gaslighting, because of course being thin is being valued by our society. You’re being told over and over again—made to feel more confident, given more attention—that being thin is important, and then you have a doctor saying, “it’s all in your head.” And that also makes the medical world treat eating disorder patients as enemies of each other, vectors of illness that can spread, as opposed to seeing female friendship as a possible antidote.
We live in an incredibly cruel, fucked up world that’s largely motored by these racist and misogynistic beauty standards. And so what would happen if we were able to admit that eating disorders might be one of the most rational coping mechanisms and responses to the messages you’ve received? They’re still incredibly harmful and help uphold a standard we shouldn’t believe in, but they’re based in a kind of logical response to the world.
Our expectations of a romantic relationship have never been greater. Marriage used to be heavily influenced by economic and social considerations with an acceptance that love, desire, and eroticism were likely sought elsewhere. Today, we want one person to give us security, stability, and predictability whilst also providing spontaneity, novelty, and adventure. This is a paradox. We are now asking one person to give us what several once did. And often, it’s not working out for us.
In The Art of Loving (1956) Erich Fromm describes too much togetherness as a symbiotic relationship. He suggests this is an immature form of love, more akin to that of child and parent. This type of relationship has since been called a ‘fusing’ or ‘enmeshment’. When it happens, partners surrender something of their own personality or desires to become a dual, blended being. They may feel unsure whether an opinion really belongs to them, or find it hard to express their feelings if they don’t fit with the shared narrative. This immature love may sound like, ‘I just feel my partner is a part of me’ or, ‘I don’t know who I’d be without them’. This is not #couplegoals.
Mature love requires each person to retain their individual self whilst creating a union together. Accepting your partner as separate entity to you, with their own desires, motivations, and opinions, requires some vulnerability. For inherent in the idea that they are separate, is the understanding that they exist outside of your control. This also demands that you acknowledge some of their emotional needs may be filled in some other place by some other person. Depending on your attachment type, that could be tough. But maybe the old proverbs serve us well again: ‘If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours.’
If you buy into the theory of separateness being necessary for desire, it follows that you should consider how well you are expressing your individuality within your relationship. Do you have hobbies and friends that are yours alone? Do you pursue and talk about your passions? Do you take time away from your partnership with the idea of letting in some air to fan the fire?
Love is something we do, not something we feel, love is a verb, not a noun, love is an action, a decision, a willful forward movement.
We don’t all start off on an equal playing field and pretending we do isn’t just dishonest, it’s actively harmful because we then blame inequities on the individual and not the system.
I was (of course) struck by the literary allusions. particularly that of our heroine. With how much attention Collins gave to her names, Katniss’s last name Everdeen has to be a play on another female literary heroine, Bathsheba Everdene from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. Though unusual for the time, Bathsheba is the primary caretaker for the land she inherits and manages to keep things afloat through grit, determination, and knowing who to rely on. And much like Bathsheba, Katniss is fiercely independent, though her story comes to revolve largely around the romantic entanglements she has with multiple men in her life. It almost feels as though Collins is acknowledging that much like within the landscape of Victorian fiction in which a marriage plot was the only plot available to literary heroines, the young adult realm demands a love story angle, even if that is not the primary intention of the novel. I like this reading for myself because the love triangle is the one part of the story that irked me on my reread. It felt forced, and maybe naming her heroine “Everdeen” is a reminder that women’s stories have long been forced into the mold of a romantic trajectory.
I have a pretty strong stomach for horror, and blood and all that stuff, because I grew up making those movies. And my wife can’t see a single one. She can’t even see even somebody upset before she goes to sleep, because she’ll be up all night. And I was like, ‘Well, why don’t you build that muscle?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t want to build that muscle. Why do I have to build that muscle?’1 And I think it’s probably true that [younger people] are building muscles about criticism and they’re becoming inured to it, and somehow surviving a different way.
Humans dominate cityscapes, but forests? In forests, we’re just another animal.
They’d started off so giddy in their own love bubble that they didn’t think about other aspects that made them who they are. They thought their political viewpoints, their religious beliefs and their financial attitudes didn’t really matter. They assumed that their love would conquer all.
I asked them what being in love means to them and they said “not being able to live without each other”. I pointed out that this means being infatuated with one another and has little to do with the love that is required for a long term, fulfilling relationship. This was a great surprise to them as it is for many couples I work with.
I explained that many couples feel this state of what I call submerged into the coupledom state especially at the beginning of their relationship. They were still there after four years.
There exists a pervasive notion in our society that if two people love each other enough, they form one entity that can conquer all regardless of context, day to day interactions or fundamental differences. An entity that is static and would not change over time.
They came to appreciate being two separate entities - like a log and a spark – and created space in the relationship for the fire to have the chance to breathe, and to truly flourish.
I think a lot of the promises of inclusion are crumbling, and people are unsure what to do. I hope that this will radicalize us all toward demanding an end to this world and [demanding] one [where] we can all survive.
One of the main things that has changed in the last ten years is TikTok. That has been a huge space for sex education to grow, and yet, it is not a sex-positive platform. People have to spell it “SEGGS” and use all sorts of euphemisms. I think about doing sex education in a context that is not built for it, and is built to make it more difficult, and I get so frustrated. And then I think about 100 years ago when it was against the law to talk about birth control, and we found a way to do it anyway, and I feel hopeful. That to me is the nature of sex education. People are starving for factual knowledge to help them experience their own sexual and reproductive health in a positive, non-scary way, and there will always be people who will get the questions, and find out the truth, and then share the truth.
The science taught me three essential characteristics of couples who sustain a connection over the long term, and none of them were the characteristics you might guess.
I’m happy to give away the ending right here at the start. The three characteristics of partnerships that sustain a strong sexual connection are:
-They are friends—or, to put it more precisely, they trust and admire each other.
-They prioritize sex—that is, they decide that it matters for their relationship.
-Instead of accepting other people’s opinions about how they’re supposed to do sex in their partnership, they prioritize what’s genuinely true for them and what works in their unique relationship.
And what do they do, these friends who prioritize sex and prioritize each other over any prefabricated notions of what sex is supposed to be?
They co-create a context that makes it easier to access pleasure.
That’s it.
Tweets:
Yeah.
Sigh.
Me.
That’s all for today!
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee, you can do that here.
-Despy Boutris
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It didn’t surprise me to learn that Alexandra Hedison is a cancer.