12:48 Relationship Constancy
I have (developed?) an amazing-grade level of relationship constancy over the past two decades. I really value people, love, intimacy, openness, honesty, and forthrightness, people in ownership, of themselves, their feelings, choices, and expressions, and I value utility, being of utility, others mutually benefiting from / with me, and me with them. I know that I won’t get to keep you all, and I know a majority of people will intelligently, and wisely, see me for who and what I am / can be to them, and get to be kindly or usefully kept in their stables when that serves them (or indeed us), and also as kindly discarded, when there is discord of some sort, preventing that.
And I very much embrace all that, as long as you don’t feel the need to have some big anxious-ambivalent scrape with me about it, to draw more of your pain out of my energy pool to get a larger slice of my attention onto the tasks of feeding your ego or reconnecting the relationship for you in some way that feeds you more and reconfigures me as a better provider for you. Because I might be overjoyed to play a larger part in your life under other circumstances, with prompting that asks rather than tasks me to, and offers me the kindness, compassion, and love of making my own choices, from what feeds me and feels lovely to me, but absent that, I have learned the need for protection and boundaries of my own, to maintain my needs for very highly mutualistic, dual-skilled and dual-tooled love pairings, or, in the not yet very common (but so delicious) n-tuple-bonded relationship, n-tuple-skilled and -tooled relationship, where all parties bring gear to the potluck, and make one hell of a meal together.
This means I get to do my own work on me, and have you as my witnesses and mentors, lovers and partners, creative, multi-faceted professionals of a zillion walks of life, and happy, wise amateurs — all rolling into and out of my weird or wonderful lufe, wherever it takes me, to the extent that serves both, and never draw into my earlier predisposition for overfunctionality at my own expense, being tasked to take ownership of you and doing all your self-work for you, as all relationships will take responsibility for themselves exactly to the degree they self-develop, when you and I join our bags in it, and do whatever kinds of maintenance and development on them that feeds us.
This can be called many things, and a wounded person might pick “isn’t that convenient?” over an impressed other person’s “isn’t that zen?”. I personally find it rather beautiful that I don’t need to dump all my own baggage onto you with an attached note saying “plz fix, kthx”, as the under-resourced, scared and abandoned kid I once might have been, or felt, or certainly acted, before I grew into whom and what I am today. I can be in these life-spanning relations today under the north star I described above, pull my weight and own my stuff, and let you join me in the work you want to take active part in and that I trust you for, and that’s worth a lot.
I can gently put you down and walk away too, when we don’t cooperate or hear or treat each other well, and don’t need to battle it out with you or keep a you-shaped grudge to harm myself on after I’ve let you go.
And it all seems to come down to having a well-developed sense of relationship constancy. I know that I am amazing, and don’t fear losing you, as I trust you to be an amazing, intelligent, self-serving, self-interestedindividual who picks the best of tools and makes all the best choices for you, and if I am not one among them, it sounds like you help keep the investment in what we be to each other healthily in integrity better without me, and under pretty much every other circumstance, of COURSE we’ll get to keep reaping the benefits of having each other in our lives, whatever that works out to.
You might not feel me all the time, as my attention wanders wherever it goes — and I won’t always have yours, but I also couldn’t possibly sustain if we all always pair-bonded everything and got engaged in every moment of all things always. That relationship even seems too all-consuming for ONE person to be in with themselves, to be perfectly frank, let alone two or more people. I’d hate to be that enmeshed, even with just myself. We all need to limit our attention, focus, energy, and other precious resources to what we can chew on, and detach from the rest to not shut down from overwhelm.
I really like this way of being an adult in my own life and in that of others, and have yet to take on the responsibility of another person who can not do that for themselves and should not be held to that, like an infant, who won’t get there until decades later, or maybe never will, if they are really unlucky. Maybe I will at some point take on that journey, maybe not. I really don’t know, today. I needed to build my current life, first, to have all this for my own growth and healing.
Relationship constancy, and its deep rooted ties to delayed reward and gratification, trust, and gratitude, is seriously amazeballs things. I very much recommend developing them. It’s a long haul practice, probably full of loss and grief, but also precious gems. Some of the losses show up again, much later in life, as a happy smile that meets yours on a plane aftet you lift down your luggage from the luggage rack, and have the power to carry the heft of it yourself, or join hands for a bit, sharing the weight. And that is a pretty sweet discovery, too.
And I very much embrace all that, as long as you don’t feel the need to have some big anxious-ambivalent scrape with me about it, to draw more of your pain out of my energy pool to get a larger slice of my attention onto the tasks of feeding your ego or reconnecting the relationship for you in some way that feeds you more and reconfigures me as a better provider for you. Because I might be overjoyed to play a larger part in your life under other circumstances, with prompting that asks rather than tasks me to, and offers me the kindness, compassion, and love of making my own choices, from what feeds me and feels lovely to me, but absent that, I have learned the need for protection and boundaries of my own, to maintain my needs for very highly mutualistic, dual-skilled and dual-tooled love pairings, or, in the not yet very common (but so delicious) n-tuple-bonded relationship, n-tuple-skilled and -tooled relationship, where all parties bring gear to the potluck, and make one hell of a meal together.
This means I get to do my own work on me, and have you as my witnesses and mentors, lovers and partners, creative, multi-faceted professionals of a zillion walks of life, and happy, wise amateurs — all rolling into and out of my weird or wonderful lufe, wherever it takes me, to the extent that serves both, and never draw into my earlier predisposition for overfunctionality at my own expense, being tasked to take ownership of you and doing all your self-work for you, as all relationships will take responsibility for themselves exactly to the degree they self-develop, when you and I join our bags in it, and do whatever kinds of maintenance and development on them that feeds us.
This can be called many things, and a wounded person might pick “isn’t that convenient?” over an impressed other person’s “isn’t that zen?”. I personally find it rather beautiful that I don’t need to dump all my own baggage onto you with an attached note saying “plz fix, kthx”, as the under-resourced, scared and abandoned kid I once might have been, or felt, or certainly acted, before I grew into whom and what I am today. I can be in these life-spanning relations today under the north star I described above, pull my weight and own my stuff, and let you join me in the work you want to take active part in and that I trust you for, and that’s worth a lot.
I can gently put you down and walk away too, when we don’t cooperate or hear or treat each other well, and don’t need to battle it out with you or keep a you-shaped grudge to harm myself on after I’ve let you go.
And it all seems to come down to having a well-developed sense of relationship constancy. I know that I am amazing, and don’t fear losing you, as I trust you to be an amazing, intelligent, self-serving, self-interestedindividual who picks the best of tools and makes all the best choices for you, and if I am not one among them, it sounds like you help keep the investment in what we be to each other healthily in integrity better without me, and under pretty much every other circumstance, of COURSE we’ll get to keep reaping the benefits of having each other in our lives, whatever that works out to.
You might not feel me all the time, as my attention wanders wherever it goes — and I won’t always have yours, but I also couldn’t possibly sustain if we all always pair-bonded everything and got engaged in every moment of all things always. That relationship even seems too all-consuming for ONE person to be in with themselves, to be perfectly frank, let alone two or more people. I’d hate to be that enmeshed, even with just myself. We all need to limit our attention, focus, energy, and other precious resources to what we can chew on, and detach from the rest to not shut down from overwhelm.
I really like this way of being an adult in my own life and in that of others, and have yet to take on the responsibility of another person who can not do that for themselves and should not be held to that, like an infant, who won’t get there until decades later, or maybe never will, if they are really unlucky. Maybe I will at some point take on that journey, maybe not. I really don’t know, today. I needed to build my current life, first, to have all this for my own growth and healing.
Relationship constancy, and its deep rooted ties to delayed reward and gratification, trust, and gratitude, is seriously amazeballs things. I very much recommend developing them. It’s a long haul practice, probably full of loss and grief, but also precious gems. Some of the losses show up again, much later in life, as a happy smile that meets yours on a plane aftet you lift down your luggage from the luggage rack, and have the power to carry the heft of it yourself, or join hands for a bit, sharing the weight. And that is a pretty sweet discovery, too.
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