December 8th, 2006

When I was younger—my teen years and early twenties, mostly—there was an attitude among me and my friends that it was "cool" and somehow "funny" to have a girlfriend, or even associate with a girl, who was "nuts". Well, that 1980s word "nuts" eventually gave way to something more soft and 1990s like "she has issues" and I don't mention this because I think it is good or funny or admirable or even normal. Growing up bored and white in the suburbs just meant that you had to invent your own perverse forms of trouble, and that's what we were trying to do by seeking out the crazy girls with emotional baggage. Pardon the term, but we were after the girl that we could say to each other, "she's fucked in the head, man!" There was a small amount of desire in us to unscramble a messed up chick's brains, but a large amount of trophyism: Who dates the looniest of the loony tunes?

That in itself may have been "fucked in the head", but we were young and stupid. And nearly all of us were quite successful at finding what we sought.

Example:

Caring what people—even our most-loathed enemies—think about us is sheer destructive vanity. It is not an admirable quality ... it is madness and an impossibility ... and a senseless waste of time and energy. And, worst of all, it scorches the people closest to us. But lookie what I found: I found someone who would instantly jump to defend herself by saying (viciously), "No. I need to know what men are thinking of me. They could attack and rape and kill me at any moment, so I can't afford to assume they are all safe."

That sort of Dangerthink (TM) used to stop me dead in my tracks: Just mention how I was a member of the dangerous, violent, murderous, emotionally stunted but physically ham-handed, and looming underclass known as Men (at least, that's how she saw us), and I fell into a humiliated, guilty, zombie-trance stupor, feeling I was defenseless from the charge. She presented the "reminder" that I was "part of the problem" and then I deflated into a hang-dog, grinning, ineffectual cold wet fish.

And there were flashes of defensive heroism in which I tried to drag myself out of the ugly black danger-spiral by countering with a heartfelt sentiment:

"But but but ... I didn't do any of those horrible things ..."

But those words could always be hammered back down with this assertion:

"No matter how well behaved you might act, you are still rotten to the core and ready to devolve into a monster at any moment. Just because you've shown no dangerous behaviour in the past does not mean you are safe ... it just means that you might be building up a really bad head of steam that would do even more damage when you explode."

And if I got flustered at that point, raising my voice or maybe just raising an eyebrow, I proved the point about how potentially dangerous I was.

Yikes. "She's got issues, man!" Except everyone else in my now-disbanded group was too busy wrestling with his own relationship demons to listen.

And, besides, I eventually came to believe it about myself. It took years—years—to unwrinkle myself. I now defend myself much more militantly, and that makes me a tad quick to bark when people tread on my emotional toes. You may call that baggage, I call it learning the hard way.

OK, so all of this goes back to the idea that when we need to know what the other person is thinking about us, we are causing great harm, sometimes bodily, to our nearest and dearest, just as that person's need for safety from men did to me. That was an example of me being on the receiving end. I have, like just about every other living breathing human, been on the sending end of that too. Maybe not that extreme that I need to destroy my partner's personality to try and satisfy ghostly fears about how safe (in any sense of the word) I am, but I have made people around me suffer for the sake of "optics".

I think back on the original impetus, which started out as seeking the unusual, the insane, the eccentric. I realise that it changed over time into something I thought was more altruistic (though I was just fooling myself): I wanted to help.

See, I wanted to fix all her problems of how she looks to others, but—good grief!—only so I could look better in her eyes. I wanted her to think kindly of me. I cared what she thought of me so much that I wanted to make her feel safe about what people thought of her.

Gad, it was doomed.

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