Emotional Investment Banking, Fear of Commitment and the Quest for Ass
Ahhh ... expectations.
Every new relationship has 'em. They start out as dreams, as hopes, as desires -- no relationship ever starts without desires. At first you hope that the person you're interested in will be interested in you, too. That gets borne out. Then you hope that there's some substance to the desire, that the interest won't stagnate, that they'll continue to be as exciting and unique and fun as they were at the very beginning of the relationship. Gradually, if it's going to go long-term, these desires get substantiated. They become expectations.
Or, if you're not careful, they become expectations early on in the process, long before they deserve to be, and you end up disappointed. I can't begin to count how many times I've heard half of a bitter breakup say, "He/she just wasn't the person I thought he/she was."
Unfounded expectations are the #1 killer of relationships today. Speculating in a relationship is like buying stock on margin: when you overextend your resources, there's a slim chance you'll make it big, but it's far more likely that you're going to lose your (figurative) shirt when your partner's ass can't cover the checks that your own heart wrote.
There are two tactics, I think, for avoiding the bust that comes from overextending your emotional resources. I'll call them the Careful Investor and the Day Trader.
The Careful Investor evaluates his prospects thoroughly before putting in any emotional capital. Potential relationship material might not even know he's considering them, because he plays his cards close to his chest. He delineates friendships clearly; you always know where you stand on the surface with a Careful Investor, because his words and his body language tell you. He forms a picture of his interest in his mind; maybe he even has a picture of his Ideal Interest, compares the two, and seeks out the one who matches his ideal the best. If he knows what he's doing, he refines this mental image of her down to a very high resolution before he makes his move; maybe in the past, he didn't look closely enough and missed a major incompatibility. He moves only when he feels ready, and most of those moves are calculated to maximize his return on the investment of his time and emotional capital. He's careful with his body language. He's witty and clever. He figures out what his target will find most appealing and approaches her from that angle. And if he's done his homework right, if he knows what he wants, can find that embodied, and isn't fooling himself about who the girl really is, he will get it, and he'll throw body, mind, heart and soul into it. She'll get all of him.
If, that is, he ever approaches anyone at all.
The Day Trader keeps his eyes out for what looks good at the moment. When he sees a likely candidate -- using whatever criteria capture his attention ("Wow, look at those tits!" / "Goddamn, she's smart!" / "Hey, she likes bicycling too!" / etc.) -- he starts to spend his readiest and cheapest resource: time. He flirts. He takes her out to the movies, goes out for coffee with her, whatever will net him two things: details about her and fun. He asks lots of questions. He invites stories and tells some of his own. He finds out what she lives for, what she dreams of, what really winds her clock. He does nice things in good faith, putting himself out perhaps farther than he has to, but not so far that he's going to end up in debt or seriously disappointed if Things Don't Work Out. Maybe he gets laid. At this stage, he's all about a mutually assured good time.
Time goes on, and he starts to see some return on his investment. He sees that his presence makes her happy. He finds himself delighted to have her around just because of who she is and the joy she brings into his life. These arrive as little discoveries, happy explosions of recognition that hey, things are working right! And as his ROI increases, he invests more of himself into the relationship -- reinvesting emotional capital as the dividends come in. He starts thinking about the future when it looks like there's going to be a future to think about, and in the process, he goes on seizing every single day.
Or not; maybe he and she just don't mesh and there's no indication that they would over time. Maybe she's got a nice rack, a tight ass and a head full of helium. Maybe she's bright and exciting in her own right, but the things she's most passionate about just bore him to tears. Maybe one of them has some serious honesty issues -- as a side note, the cruelest thing a Day Trader can do is entice someone to speculate about the future of the relationship, or encourage a partner's existing speculations, when he has none of his own. There's pain, in those cases, when an investment has to be terminated. Nobody's fond of loss. But there's pleasure to offset the pain.
If you couldn't tell, I'm a Day Trader. I've dated Careful Investors in the past; my ex-husband was one of them. He evaluated incompletely and then overinvested; I walked because I wasn't happy with his expectations. I was terrified of getting married, but I went ahead and did it anyway, and it was stupid, stupid, stupid. Eventually I convinced myself to at least try to make the emotional investment that getting married is supposed to mean, and I was miserable. My mistake was going along for the ride long past the point where I knew I should have taken the money and run.
Wanna hear the story of the most successful relationship of my life?
I met Colin at a particularly low point in my life. I was 23, living alone, still being nagged interminably by my ex-husband about getting back together, and trying to get a relationship with John back on track. I went out to #s one Thursday evening for a mailing list meet-and-greet party. That's where I met catch, ran into foxxfire again, and was reintroduced to maddycat. Serret and I were hanging out near the dance floor at one point in the evening, and Colin walked up with the girl he was dating at the time. There were introductions. I didn't pay that much attention -- I'm a boys-with-brains kind of girl, and you can't make much conversation in a crowded club.
Some months later, maddycat called a whole bunch of her friends to help clean up an elderly neighbour's yard before the City of Houston slammed the poor old lady with a bunch of fines and fees. Over the two days of the cleanup, Colin and I got to talking and both started to get intrigued with one another. Still, even after that, we met infrequently, mostly at Sliders for daiquiris and Count Steveula's DJ'ing.
And then there was the anime party. September 23, 2000. I'm not much for dates, but that one is happily graven on my brain forever and ever. There was a Moment. We seized it. We kissed in Thorn's living room like teenagers in the back of a van, ran off to IHOP together, and told each other our life stories -- all our crimes, all our sins, all our disappointments. We went back to my place with Chris, who had driven me there, and while Chris crashed on the daybed, Colin slept in the recliner, or tried to. He stole into my bedroom while I slept, kissed me on the forehead, and left a note: "Call me."
I went over to his place the next night, and stayed there nearly every night for the next few months. I'm sure the cats were very confused and missed me terribly. Spending time with him was such a rush, a neverending high -- in bed, out of bed, it didn't matter. Crises of various kinds erupted. We worked through them together. The realization that I was in love hit me like an eighteen-wheeler full of depleted uranium bricks. It was beautiful.
And it still is.
Wanna hear the story of the most traumatic relationship of my life?
I tried to be a Careful Investor, but did it with the heart and soul of a Day Trader. I was fifteen. You don't know yourself when you're fifteen. You think you know, but you don't. You change as you get older, and so do the people you associate with. But I fell in love with John at fifteen, and kept it under wraps for as long as I possibly could. I watched, I catalogued, and day by day I fell more and more in love with the image I reconstructed and the boy attached to it. Finally I blurted out how I felt, and we got together.
My mistake was keeping the image.
He grew up, he grew different, and I couldn't understand him any more. There was such a discongruity between the real thing and the image I was used to that I was convinced, for a long time, that some substantial version of the image was still there somewhere. I wasted a lot of time trying to dig it back out.
It was in the past, of course, where I'd never be able to get back to it again. So that, technically, was where I overextended as a Careful Investor: I threw everything I had at an incomplete picture, and I lost it all.
One more story and then I'm done.
Not too long ago, I had what I'm 99.9% positive will only be a one-nighter with a close friend. It was really a kind of startling experience, in that I was expecting things I shouldn't have expected -- namely, anything beyond that night. I knew better. But I was still kind of mopey and weird for the next couple of days. Unhappiness preyed on my mind, and over that weekend I figured out why: because part of me wanted a continuation that I wasn't going to get and went into it knowing I wouldn't. The desire, however minor and fleeting, for something utterly unattainable (and abjectly Not the Right Thing) was depressing me no end. It's a point on which Objectivism and Buddhism, for some weird reason, agree. Samsara makes you unhappy. A mental outlook which is not reconciled with reality makes you unhappy, too.
(I imagine he'll read this eventually. If he does, then this is my apology. I'm sorry for being such a stereotypical chick, even if it was only for a very short while.)
So there's some empirical evidence. I'd like to hear your story. Tell me how you love.
Every new relationship has 'em. They start out as dreams, as hopes, as desires -- no relationship ever starts without desires. At first you hope that the person you're interested in will be interested in you, too. That gets borne out. Then you hope that there's some substance to the desire, that the interest won't stagnate, that they'll continue to be as exciting and unique and fun as they were at the very beginning of the relationship. Gradually, if it's going to go long-term, these desires get substantiated. They become expectations.
Or, if you're not careful, they become expectations early on in the process, long before they deserve to be, and you end up disappointed. I can't begin to count how many times I've heard half of a bitter breakup say, "He/she just wasn't the person I thought he/she was."
Unfounded expectations are the #1 killer of relationships today. Speculating in a relationship is like buying stock on margin: when you overextend your resources, there's a slim chance you'll make it big, but it's far more likely that you're going to lose your (figurative) shirt when your partner's ass can't cover the checks that your own heart wrote.
There are two tactics, I think, for avoiding the bust that comes from overextending your emotional resources. I'll call them the Careful Investor and the Day Trader.
The Careful Investor evaluates his prospects thoroughly before putting in any emotional capital. Potential relationship material might not even know he's considering them, because he plays his cards close to his chest. He delineates friendships clearly; you always know where you stand on the surface with a Careful Investor, because his words and his body language tell you. He forms a picture of his interest in his mind; maybe he even has a picture of his Ideal Interest, compares the two, and seeks out the one who matches his ideal the best. If he knows what he's doing, he refines this mental image of her down to a very high resolution before he makes his move; maybe in the past, he didn't look closely enough and missed a major incompatibility. He moves only when he feels ready, and most of those moves are calculated to maximize his return on the investment of his time and emotional capital. He's careful with his body language. He's witty and clever. He figures out what his target will find most appealing and approaches her from that angle. And if he's done his homework right, if he knows what he wants, can find that embodied, and isn't fooling himself about who the girl really is, he will get it, and he'll throw body, mind, heart and soul into it. She'll get all of him.
If, that is, he ever approaches anyone at all.
The Day Trader keeps his eyes out for what looks good at the moment. When he sees a likely candidate -- using whatever criteria capture his attention ("Wow, look at those tits!" / "Goddamn, she's smart!" / "Hey, she likes bicycling too!" / etc.) -- he starts to spend his readiest and cheapest resource: time. He flirts. He takes her out to the movies, goes out for coffee with her, whatever will net him two things: details about her and fun. He asks lots of questions. He invites stories and tells some of his own. He finds out what she lives for, what she dreams of, what really winds her clock. He does nice things in good faith, putting himself out perhaps farther than he has to, but not so far that he's going to end up in debt or seriously disappointed if Things Don't Work Out. Maybe he gets laid. At this stage, he's all about a mutually assured good time.
Time goes on, and he starts to see some return on his investment. He sees that his presence makes her happy. He finds himself delighted to have her around just because of who she is and the joy she brings into his life. These arrive as little discoveries, happy explosions of recognition that hey, things are working right! And as his ROI increases, he invests more of himself into the relationship -- reinvesting emotional capital as the dividends come in. He starts thinking about the future when it looks like there's going to be a future to think about, and in the process, he goes on seizing every single day.
Or not; maybe he and she just don't mesh and there's no indication that they would over time. Maybe she's got a nice rack, a tight ass and a head full of helium. Maybe she's bright and exciting in her own right, but the things she's most passionate about just bore him to tears. Maybe one of them has some serious honesty issues -- as a side note, the cruelest thing a Day Trader can do is entice someone to speculate about the future of the relationship, or encourage a partner's existing speculations, when he has none of his own. There's pain, in those cases, when an investment has to be terminated. Nobody's fond of loss. But there's pleasure to offset the pain.
If you couldn't tell, I'm a Day Trader. I've dated Careful Investors in the past; my ex-husband was one of them. He evaluated incompletely and then overinvested; I walked because I wasn't happy with his expectations. I was terrified of getting married, but I went ahead and did it anyway, and it was stupid, stupid, stupid. Eventually I convinced myself to at least try to make the emotional investment that getting married is supposed to mean, and I was miserable. My mistake was going along for the ride long past the point where I knew I should have taken the money and run.
Wanna hear the story of the most successful relationship of my life?
I met Colin at a particularly low point in my life. I was 23, living alone, still being nagged interminably by my ex-husband about getting back together, and trying to get a relationship with John back on track. I went out to #s one Thursday evening for a mailing list meet-and-greet party. That's where I met catch, ran into foxxfire again, and was reintroduced to maddycat. Serret and I were hanging out near the dance floor at one point in the evening, and Colin walked up with the girl he was dating at the time. There were introductions. I didn't pay that much attention -- I'm a boys-with-brains kind of girl, and you can't make much conversation in a crowded club.
Some months later, maddycat called a whole bunch of her friends to help clean up an elderly neighbour's yard before the City of Houston slammed the poor old lady with a bunch of fines and fees. Over the two days of the cleanup, Colin and I got to talking and both started to get intrigued with one another. Still, even after that, we met infrequently, mostly at Sliders for daiquiris and Count Steveula's DJ'ing.
And then there was the anime party. September 23, 2000. I'm not much for dates, but that one is happily graven on my brain forever and ever. There was a Moment. We seized it. We kissed in Thorn's living room like teenagers in the back of a van, ran off to IHOP together, and told each other our life stories -- all our crimes, all our sins, all our disappointments. We went back to my place with Chris, who had driven me there, and while Chris crashed on the daybed, Colin slept in the recliner, or tried to. He stole into my bedroom while I slept, kissed me on the forehead, and left a note: "Call me."
I went over to his place the next night, and stayed there nearly every night for the next few months. I'm sure the cats were very confused and missed me terribly. Spending time with him was such a rush, a neverending high -- in bed, out of bed, it didn't matter. Crises of various kinds erupted. We worked through them together. The realization that I was in love hit me like an eighteen-wheeler full of depleted uranium bricks. It was beautiful.
And it still is.
Wanna hear the story of the most traumatic relationship of my life?
I tried to be a Careful Investor, but did it with the heart and soul of a Day Trader. I was fifteen. You don't know yourself when you're fifteen. You think you know, but you don't. You change as you get older, and so do the people you associate with. But I fell in love with John at fifteen, and kept it under wraps for as long as I possibly could. I watched, I catalogued, and day by day I fell more and more in love with the image I reconstructed and the boy attached to it. Finally I blurted out how I felt, and we got together.
My mistake was keeping the image.
He grew up, he grew different, and I couldn't understand him any more. There was such a discongruity between the real thing and the image I was used to that I was convinced, for a long time, that some substantial version of the image was still there somewhere. I wasted a lot of time trying to dig it back out.
It was in the past, of course, where I'd never be able to get back to it again. So that, technically, was where I overextended as a Careful Investor: I threw everything I had at an incomplete picture, and I lost it all.
One more story and then I'm done.
Not too long ago, I had what I'm 99.9% positive will only be a one-nighter with a close friend. It was really a kind of startling experience, in that I was expecting things I shouldn't have expected -- namely, anything beyond that night. I knew better. But I was still kind of mopey and weird for the next couple of days. Unhappiness preyed on my mind, and over that weekend I figured out why: because part of me wanted a continuation that I wasn't going to get and went into it knowing I wouldn't. The desire, however minor and fleeting, for something utterly unattainable (and abjectly Not the Right Thing) was depressing me no end. It's a point on which Objectivism and Buddhism, for some weird reason, agree. Samsara makes you unhappy. A mental outlook which is not reconciled with reality makes you unhappy, too.
(I imagine he'll read this eventually. If he does, then this is my apology. I'm sorry for being such a stereotypical chick, even if it was only for a very short while.)
So there's some empirical evidence. I'd like to hear your story. Tell me how you love.