Relationships of Compromise

Politics, social media, and marriage

Dear Reader

We wonder why marriage remains important today when relationships have evolved so much further towards equality (and openness), and away from the sexist origins of this tradition. But, maybe marriage remains important, not in spite of this evolution, but because of it, because it is ever more now a relationship of compromise and negotiation. Perhaps it is important for us to compromise with another, again and again¹.

I have been thinking about politics in much the same way lately. About the way we are yoked together in democracy with others who see the world so differently to ourselves. What role here do trust and truth and being seen play? In a world with so much, what role for intimacy and privacy, too?

Meanwhile, I have also been playing with AI image generation to create quick records of dreams, memories, and other odd thoughts of mine (complete with extra hands and fingers, and the like). My son describes these pictures as my “thought experiments”². So, this is one of my thought experiments. Our psychotherapist riding a horse during couple therapy³. Perhaps it would assist her in finding that aerial view on it all? Also, horses can sense your emotion. For instance, this horse tells me that things might look animated between the couple, but their heart rates are relatively low.

(Speaking of psychotherapists, did you know that my crush, Orna has another series coming out?)

I have also been ruminating on social media. This age we live in where social media keeps increasing our false sense of faith in the powers of compartmentalisation. I am very much done with the over-reliance on compartmentalising. This bit of me is real, this bit is not real. And, there is no need to really understand what is happening to me and how I am impacting others online, because it is something other than real. It is sexual desire, fury, desperation, confusion, attachment and comfort, but in isolation of the humanity of all these experiences.

I think also about the unstoppable desire for community and connection, and how that is being distorted and manipulated by tech companies. It is people losing their minds over the performance of belief, partly, as a result of the commodification of our lives.

But, it is also the widening of the experience of being witness. It is the sudden ability to see a multitude of personal experiences, including that of genocide, and it is stirring something unstoppable in us. We are literally able to see ourselves in them. The age of rationalising war is coming to a close, because the loophole of dehumanisation is disappearing.

I am contemplating what role for trust, for privacy and for truth in all of that.

Habitation

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
                         the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far


we are learning to make fire

- Margaret Atwood

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Telemachus’ Detachment

When I was a child looking

at my parents’ lives, you know

what I thought? I thought

heartbreaking. Now I think

heartbreaking, but also

insane. Also

very funny.

- Louise Glück

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Speaking of Marriage, Undine

That it is possible to carve wet fabric into stone...

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Notes From My Journal

An artist is drawing our portrait and saying, you look like a happy couple. Are you?

I say yes, though we have just spent the night having one of our worst arguments.

But, we are happy. We are full of desire from hot, make-up sex, and also, what are long-term relationships but an endless wave of feelings? At once possible and impossible.

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She said everything and nothing at the same time - my 15-year-old son, describing a conversation.

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I saw a blue-faced honeyeater drinking from my pond.

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Sometimes when we are out walking in the city, we come across one of my husband’s clients in a crowd. Young men and women who smile warmly to him, and to whom he nods discreetly.

There can be no better acknowledgement than that in your therapy - a teenager willing to see you.

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Young women are getting Medusa tattoos, my husband tells me. (The rape victim who becomes a monster and then a deity).

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I am surprised to see this man describe himself as free of inner turmoil, because I have found him to be naturally secretive.

Compartmentalising, the woman says admiringly. Yes, that makes sense, I reply.

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Did you ever try and slow it down?

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Connection and Compromise

What McEurope is lacking the most, or what is hardest to see, is the communal-ism that’s central to European culture.

Thankfully though, McEurope is confined to a few neighborhoods, although they are by far the most visited ones. It’s very easy to get away from them, and once away, you will find that a healthy European culture is almost everywhere else, especially the smaller towns. In spades. That’s why my single suggestion for visiting Europe is to get out of the most visited big cities, which contain the largest number of most visited neighborhoods, and go to some random mid-sized town. Some place like Valence in France⁴, that also, like Paris, has a long history, an ancient and sublime Cathedral, yet hasn’t entirely succumbed to the global forces trying to flatten the world.

There you see the care Europeans still give to living. The care given to being a valued member of something larger than themselves. To being part of a group. To eating well, to relaxing well, to working with a purpose beyond making mint.

The flattening forces sloshing around the world are mostly viewed in economic terms. It’s mostly talked about as big global brands and franchises sweeping across the globe, knocking everything down around it.

There’s a truth to that, although they are symptom of a larger illness, which is ideological and also very American.

It’s the idea of individual liberation. The idea that everyone needs to be emancipated from everything. Everyone needs to find and fly their freak flag. They need to find their true self and be it. Even if that means severing ties with family, friends, church, Nation, anything and everything that came before. Those are provincial, backwards, and holding you back.

That is the purpose of life. To be free. Yet it’s a perverse goal, a broken Telos, that can only be seen as positive if you have an abnormal sense of what it means to be human. To be human is to be social. The ancient Greeks knew it, the Medievalist knew it, and even the early Liberals knew it, but it’s us moderns who’ve somehow forgotten it.

From Chris Arnade Walks the World.

There is a lot in this one to like:

• small community life and what it gets right (I have seen this with my husband, who comes from small town England and who is a natural with participating in ‘village life’ even if it is just the cafe strip in a suburb in your city)

• the importance of having public places where you can ‘hang out’ without being rushed or having to spend a lot of (any) money

• questions about cultural preservation, which sit uncomfortably at times with discussions of xenophobia⁴.

But, what does it say about estrangement, which is something I have also written about a lot in the past? I am working through that at the moment.

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Relationship Processing

We took breaks from our indulgences and left the house once a day to run Rico on the beach. We did a lot of relationship processing, too. Taye has this way of mirroring the questions of my truth back to me, but casually enough where I can actually acknowledge it. I feel like a lot of my friends default to concern when things get rocky, but Taye just stays curious and calm. She doesn’t worry about me. She trusts the timing of things.

I liked this description very much from Anna Fusco in her Unsupervised newsletter. I have a best friend like that, who I can ‘relationship process’ with. Fusco is the artist behind the wonderful “I want everybody to live very close” that I referenced in this newsletter.

Here is Fusco writing about her feelings on Gaza and the charade of separateness, and here, writing about taking her art and life public.. and her housemate riding his bicycle with no pants on.

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Real

Seen today, one of the most striking scenes in 1982’s Poltergeist is not the evil clown doll or the monster tree, but a moment of relaxed affection between the parents. The father—a bald, beer-bellied Craig T. Nelson—cracks jokes and prances for his wife, who wears a frumpy nightgown and smokes a joint and yammers weed thoughts and laughs at her husband’s silly display. Finally, the husband playfully dives onto the bed. Neither character is glamorous in this scene, but their relationship feels frisky and lived-in and charismatic and real.

The house looks real, too. There are toys and magazines scattered around the floor. There are cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked since the recent move. Framed pictures rest against the wall; the parents haven’t gotten around to mounting them yet. The kitchen counters are cluttered and mealtimes are rambunctious and sloppy, as one expects in a house with three children. They’re building a pool in the backyard, but not for appearances: it’s a place for the kids to swim, for the parents to throw parties, and for the father to reacquaint himself with his love of diving.

At the time, this house represented an aspirational ideal of American affluence.

Compare this to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess.

From “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” by RS Benedict in Blood Knife.

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Trust

I really liked this article in The Guardian, “The Denmark Secret: How it Became the World’s Most Trusting Country and Why That Matters” by Zoe Williams. (Noting that this article also acknowledges the homogeneity of Denmark, which can border on xenophobia for some).

Adults who trust each other not to steal babies go on to trust one another around older children playing unsupervised. This is partly thanks to what Jesse Shapins, an environmental urban entrepreneur who moved to Denmark from Colorado, calls “the block typology – a series of apartment buildings built around a common courtyard”. This style has a long history in Denmark, and its social benefits have been boosted over the past 30 years by a lot of municipal investment: tearing down concrete structures, planting trees, giving the public realm a shared, owned atmosphere so people treat and behave in it as they would their private homes. Shapins and his partner have lived all over the US and Europe, but they’re settled now in Copenhagen. “I’ve felt the greatest degree of freedom to allow my child to move and operate on her own,” he says. Shapins’s daughter is eight and has been cycling alone since the age of six. “The built environment is really important – there’s far less dependence on cars, and spaces that are dominated by cars. But I have to acknowledge the social trust.”

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Privacy and Trust

Is location tracking common among Parisian parents? 

I have seen some American parents who have full access to their teenagers’ smartphones and who think it's their right to look at their social media and read their private messages and email. I don't know how common that is in the US, but I've certainly seen it. So it's not just tracking, it's like full surveillance. And I haven't seen that here at all. I mean, I don't know the passwords to my kids’ phones. I'm not the best example of French parenting because I come with all kinds of American biases, but I think my kids are very aware of the French norms and would be horrified if I expected to read their private messages.

From Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s interview in The Cut with Pamela Druckerman, who published Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, remember that one?

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When I am Alone and I Come Across a Man

I need to get away from the man. But I need to do it in a way that doesn’t anger him. This is the tricky bit. Men who lack social awareness or empathy often also lack other skills in emotional management. And usually, what men in these situations actually want is closeness. They’re trying to get closer to me, physically or emotionally, in the only way they know how. That combination of poor emotional skillsets and a desire to get closer is exactly what puts me in danger. 

From Laura Killingbeck in Bikepacking. I took so long to post this in a newsletter that by now you’ve no doubt already read it.. but in case you missed it.

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T-Shirt

We could buy this.

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The Crumbling Away of Untruth

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true”. - Adyashanti

Here is Senator Lidia Thorpe on ABC Radio talking to Rafael Epstein about needing to recognise the Frontier Wars in Australia. I agree with her. Interestingly, she is personally open to acknowledging the stories of settler soldiers and police who died fighting the First Nations People of Australia. Me too. Let’s hear it all.

I read about some of those stories when I read David Marr’s Killing For Country, recently. It’s an incredibly difficult read but I strongly recommend it. The settling of rural Queensland includes an extensive story of brutal violence. And I am not talking all war is hell, I am talking about a terrifying kind of sociopathic killing. I am talking about a strange group of men who got a taste for killing and who found a great deal to like about travelling and making money in the most ungoverned parts of a ‘new country’.

There is much more I could say about their activities - about their tendency to involve young men in their campaign, and about their kidnapping of teenage Aboriginal girls (and sometimes, even younger Aboriginal children). Oh yes, these kinds of men are never far from children, are they?

I could talk about the ways in which they and their armies of young men, haunted by their own barbarianism, often drank themselves to death, and how Australia just happens to have long wrestled with an alcohol problem. I wonder why that is.

But what I want to talk about is even more disturbing, for me. It is that these activities happened very, very close to the ordinary lives of other settlers. Those who had families and churches and trades. Those who had a sense of adventure or who were given a fresh chance, as freed convicts or poor migrants. At least one strand of my family tree are cattle graziers (including sheep farming)⁵, and you will simply never look at another grazing property here the same way again after reading Marr’s book⁶.

You know what happens when a family is that close to terrible things, but doesn’t ever talk about it - what it does to them? Or, worse, when a family covers up the fact that one of their own did such terrible things?

That kind of horror is passed down through the generations as an unnamed pain, which brings me to the need for a truth telling. I agree with Lidia Thorpe, let’s hear all these stories.

I am growing impatient with a certain kind of person in Australia who remains staunchly opposed to truth-telling. If they were someone who never wanted to think about war, one could be frustrated, but kind of empathise. But they are very often the same people for whom war means a great deal. Likewise, if they were someone with only very recent history in this country, you may forgive them a lack of curiosity. But these people are, instead, people whose stories are intricately woven into settlement. And yet, they want silence? But, you are affected by this history, and in many ways, you suffer in it, too.

Besides all that, if there is one thing we know about the telling of trauma, it is that there is no stopping it once the momentum begins. The pain of holding secrets inside becomes greater than the fear of speaking them aloud. It is coming.

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Radical Honesty and Radical Privacy

From an interview with Rachel Finley in hyperbae on her memoir, “Nobody Ever Told Me Anything”:

You discuss your marriage to Blake Anderson and your shared and separate views on fame. As someone who has been on the internet for years, how do you navigate staying true to yourself, while doing your job and maintaining an online presence?

I think there are parts of me I love to share, even the messy things, but there are pieces that need to remain sacred to me because it’s just not personally safe for me to post all of it. I’ve tested what my audience can handle and what makes me feel good to have strangers know and that fluctuates time to time. I like to save pieces of me for the people who I eat with — I like to give them my all. It’s nothing against my followers, I just like the intimacy of a small group. It’s not that I’m two different people in these spaces –  I just have a hard rule of not tasking people or places who have proven “unsafe” to hold you safely, if that makes sense.

In NETMA, you dive deep into your relationships with men as well as your female friendships throughout your journey. Can you talk about the importance of chosen family? Given your childhood experiences, do you think it’s easier or more tempting to make a home out of others, especially when it comes to romantic relationships?

Making a home out of others is definitely something I have to fight hard against because it’s in my nature. I think we also need to dismantle the fears of codependency. I think people throw that word around and demonize it without really understanding it. I like being with the people that I’ve chosen.

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How to Disappear Completely

As if by request, someone has remade Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley for me. I have mentioned previously that I have a penchant for this kind of story.. and I just adore Italian apartments, so this was all delicious for me. If, per chance, you haven’t already seen Ripley then here is my recommendation to you.

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I Saw What I Saw

I want your shield, I want your weapon
Gimme that bulletproof vest
And don't forget, I'm not susceptible to your nonsense

Love this Scottish-Nigerian hip hop group.

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Finally

I am a collection of dismantled almosts. - Anne Sexton.

Keep dismantling, friends, and see you next month.

1. I am re-reading Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love by psychotherapist, Stephanie Dowrick at the moment.

2. AI image generation is terrible, but if we can’t stop it let’s use it for thought experiments.

3. Here is what I loved about our little experience of couples therapy. I am someone who has trouble letting a problem rest until it is figured out and solved. (To pause while problem solving can sometimes feel to me like participating in a state of denial, which is something I have a strong negative reaction to). But, this interrogating of things relentlessly is the antithesis of how issues between people are usually resolved. Couples counselling was a great way to let go and spend a fortnight enjoying time together, knowing we weren’t ignoring it because we had a commitment to come back to it in a fortnight’s time.

4. I am currently collecting articles forcing me to ask uncomfortable questions about the causes of xenophobia. And, I still regularly re-read Zadie Smith’s “Fences: A Brexit Diary”. What did you think of the controversy around her recent New Yorker article?

5. I note that none of my direct relatives are named in the book.

6. Because how did such big tracts of land get to be so empty?