What juggling has taught me about relationships

[pozorvlak]

I used to think that relationships were like teapots. Not, as wormwood_pearl suggested to me when I first mentioned this to her, because good things come out of them: nor because they start out hot and gradually cool down. No, I thought relationships were like teapots because when you first get one, it's perfect and whole, but then you drop it, and it gets

Comments

[mrkgnao]

Hee hee! Love the teapot analogy!

Alternatively you could always walk around on cottonwool so that, when you inevitably drop your teapot, it won't be damaged in the fall.

Or perhaps you ought to start out with a really shite teapot you absolutely hate so that, again, when you inevitably drop it, you don't give a fuck.

Hmmm...maybe not.

On the other hand, not having quite your background, I have no familiarity with the esoteric art of the teapot so another response might be "entirely unnecessary and archaic items used for ritualising an ultimately exceptionally simple process."

[pozorvlak]

No, teapots are good - you get more tea out of a bag, for one thing. And they allow you to drink loose-leaf tea without getting a mouth full of leaves. They could be improved, though - I've long thought that vacuum-walled teapots should exist.

I love the icon, by the way.

[susannahf]

http://www.cookware-online.co.uk/ishop/930/shopscr2386.html

Not sure if it is vacuum-walled, but it does solve the stewing situation that I suspect would occur.

[pozorvlak]

It says "double-walled" - even an air gap would help, I suppose, on the double-glazing principle.

[johnckirk]

I think that sounds reasonable. In a general sense, it's sometimes tempting to think "I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self not to do X", but if I never did X then I wouldn't have learnt why it was such a bad idea. (There's a quote along those lines from the film "13 going on 30" which I'll transcribe one of these days.)

Mind you, with the disclaimer that I'm not a juggler, I think there's a key difference between juggling and relationships: balls don't mind getting dropped. For instance, taking the Bertie Wooster approach I could go around proposing marriage to each of my (single) female acquaintances, and then use the results to figure out which of them would actually want to marry me. (Step 2 in that plan would involve getting a Jeeves-ish fellow to help extricate me from any unwanted engagements.) The snag is that this would upset the ladies who aren't interested in marrying me, so it would be a bit selfish to use them for training

[totherme]

You never start juggling expecting to drop - that's pointless. You start juggling expecting to juggle, and if you happen to drop you start again, expecting to juggle.

I think a similar principle can probably be applied to any circumstance in which there's a fear of failure...

[pozorvlak]

One partner corresponds to an attempt at juggling a pattern, and breaking up is equivalent to dropping balls. Doing something stupid is equivalent to throwing a ball to the wrong place, or fumbling a catch or something - it's possible to recover if you know what you're doing, but if it's beyond your coping abilities then you'll end up dropping, possibly a few throws later after the problem has grown in magnitude. Sometimes, for example if you're using bouncing balls or your club lands just right, you can drop a prop and it will bounce up again and you can carry on juggling it and it looks totally cool - this would correspond to breaking up and getting back together again. The situation's usually pretty dicey for a while, though

[susannahf]

(Almost) all analogies break at some point. The simpler (and more understandable) the analogy, the easier it is to break. It doesn't make it a bad analogy.

[sebastienne]

i like this :)

[totherme]

:)

[bronxelf_ag001]

I'm definitely of the teapot school of thought. The juggling analogy sounds like something that's an exercise in disappointment, frustration and futility.

But I think that which one works for you is entirely dependent upon who you are and who the other people are in the relationship.

[pozorvlak]

On the contrary, the teapot analogy is much more depressing, since it implies that once the slightest thing goes wrong there's effectively nothing you can do about it, and that things will only get worse from then on. And given that we're all human and we all screw up, it essentially means that all relationships are doomed. The best you can hope for is that next time round, you won't make this mistake.

I think it's possibly significant that I formulated the juggling analogy later, when I'd had more practice at relationships. I think it's also significant that the relationships I've had since have been generally less screwed-up than the ones that came before :-)

[bronxelf_ag001]

IME, the teapot is entirely true. I think that after a certain amount of drops, there's no putting it back together functionally again. At least for me there isn't.

Yes, people screw up. But people who screw up badly and consistently need to Go Away.

And the juggling analogy assumes all people are like balls. They're not. Some are like balls with big spikes. Some are like glass spheres. Some are like iron shots.

They don't all juggle the same way and some get more damaged than others when you drop them.

On another mitten, Im obviously *not* a romantic. I think most people waste too much time on relationships that don't work. But since it's their time and not mine... *shrug*

[pozorvlak]

Not sure if I was entirely clear: dropping doesn't have the same meaning in the two models. In the teapot model, dropping corresponds to screwing up in some way, whereas in the juggling model, dropping corresponds to the end of the relationship. Screwing up corresponds to fumbling a catch or throwing a ball to the wrong place - things that, if left uncorrected, can lead you to drop, but might be recoverable. Both models have the feature that some problems, or succession of problems, can be unfixable, or at least beyond your current abilities to fix. And I think you've just shown how to extend the model elegantly to cover different partners' qualities or lack thereof :-)

[By the way, the hardest things to juggle aren't heavy or fragile, but unbalancedLeaving that aside, this is one of the great things about blogging. I've had the juggling analogy in my head for at least a couple of years, and the teapot analogy for about five or six years, basically unchanged - I write about them here, get feedback from lots of people, am forced to