“People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”
Article on sustainable relationships in the NYTimes that focuses on couples, but seems to work for all kinds
the grandmother's role is the soothing role.
that's why granny is liked so much by the children. granny is always disliked by husband and wife, because she interferes.
her own husband, the grandad, hates granny, first of all because he always already hated her when he was younger, which an old much-loved habit, which one cannot give up so easily, and one keeps up this hatred in old age, because what does one have in old age after all, nothing except one's good old tried tested hate.
and the hate grows ever bigger, because the granny has long ago lost her only capital, a beauty which was perhaps present. granny was devalued. grandad, the worn out old duffer, long ago lost the other younger women to other worn out but younger men, who are still able to earn a living.
the younger women won't risk their secure existence at the side of these younger men for an old bugger like him.
so grandad too dies away, more slowly and more drawn-out than his almost-dead wife, but anyhow; dying is dying, lost is lost and gone. and one's own wife will always remind one of the decline from young lad to dirty old man.
terrible, this slow dying. and the husbands and the wives die away together, the husband does get a bit of variety, he watches over his wife like a watchdog outside, he watches over her as she dies, and from the inside the wife watches over the husband, the female summer visitors, her daughter and the housekeeping money, which must not be boozed away. and from the outside the man watches over his wife, the male summer visitors, his daughter and the housekeeping money, so that he can divert some for his boozing. and so they die in mutual dependence. and the daughter can hardly wait, to be allowed to die at last also, and the parents are already going shopping for the daughter's death: sheets and towels and dish clothes and a used refrigerator. then at least she'll stay dead but fresh.
The setting is an idyllic Alpine village where a woman's underwear factory nestles in the woods.
Two factory workers, Brigitte and Paula, dream and talk about finding happiness, a comfortable home and a good man. They realize that their quest will be as hard as work at the factory. Brigitte subordinates her feelings and goes for Heinz, a young, plump, up-and-coming businessman. With Paula, feelings and dreams become confused. She gets pregnant by Erich, the forestry worker. He's handsome, so they marry.
Brigitte gets it right. Paula gets it wrong.Back cover of Women As Lovers, Elfriede Jelinek
Various complex personal / admin issues to deal with, so best not to do this until they're resolved, but a nice passage in a recent NY Times article on touch:
A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”
We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”
Osaka cab viewPrevious research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...
These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia
The pratfall effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby the attractiveness of a person perceived as competent increases if the person commits a blunder. Conversely, the attractiveness of a person perceived as incompetent decreases if the person commits a blunder.Wikipedia....an experiment by Kay Deaux demonstrates that the pratfall effect applies most strongly to males. She found that, although most males in her study preferred the highly competent man who committed a blunder, women showed a tendency to prefer the highly competent nonblunderer, regardless of whether the stimulus person was male or female. Similarly, my colleagues and I found that males with a moderate degree of self-esteem are most likely to prefer the highly competent person who commits a blunder, while males with low self-esteem (who apparently feel little competitiveness with the stimulus person) prefer the highly competent person who doesn't blunder. It should be emphasized that no sizable proportion of people-regardless of their own level of self-esteem-preferred the mediocre person.Elliot Aronson The Social Animal [via here - link contains a longer account of the original experiment]
The major implication intended by this paper is that the personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure, well beyond the purview or control of particular individuals. Linkage of micro and macro levels is thus no luxury, but of central importance to the development of sociological theory. Such linkage generates paradoxes: weak ties, often denounced as generative of alienation are here seen as indispensable to individuals' opportunities and to their integration into communities; strong ties, breeding social cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation. Paradoxes are a welcome antidote to theories which explain everything too neatly.Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties [pdf, 1973]
In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass, which is composed of them.JS Mill On Liberty
People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.Ronald S Burt, Structural Holes and Good Ideas [pdf]
All Peanuts strips now online hereTo any objective observer the situation is clear: here is a somewhat emotionally arrested young man, hungry for sex but unable to separate it from emotion, and so afraid of being abandoned by anyone who loves him that when a woman shows an interest in him - even when it's obviously just physical interest - he clings to her and makes the most absurd promises...Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of B. S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe p65
"Self-sufficiency" is an idea which has done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice.
Anyone who has actually tried to live in total self-sufficiency - there must now be thousands in the recent wave that we helped inspire - knows the mind-numbing labor and loneliness and frustration and real marginless hazard that goes with the attempt. A kind of hysteria...
...self-sufficiency is not to had on any terms, ever. It is a charming woodsy extension of the fatal American mania for privacy....It is a damned lie. There is no discernible self. Ever since there were two organisms life has been a matter of co-evolution, life growing ever more richly on life...
We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that's our only choice.
Back from a few days in Taipei that were 2/3 a lot of fun and 1/3 less so, the latter because of my lingering inability to join the human race and the trouble that this causes with my wife, a matter that, at 38, I really ought to have mastered.
- Function — How does the behaviour impact on the animal's chances of survival and reproduction?
- Causation — What are the stimuli that elicit the response, and how has it been modified by recent learning?
- Development — How does the behaviour change with age, and what early experiences are necessary for the behaviour to be shown?
- Evolutionary history — How does the behaviour compare with similar behaviour in related species, and how might it have arisen through the process of phylogeny?
Four questions for ethologists, Wikipedia
Inside it's good and pink, and it comes with fries, small salad and a drink:
Grandma Nitti's
I went back to England for three weeks and saw some people - groups and individuals - that I hadn't seen for some time, plus I met some new people entirely out of context, no others, places or roles to be influenced by. It was interesting how old patterns remained, and how new ones were so easily established, but only with entirely new people.
For example, there was one friend who I hadn't seen for 11 years. Back then I used to drink a lot, and especially with this guy. Now I know was a little nervous about meeting him again, as there was history and events, and also I'd been traveling and hadn't eaten anything all day. Still, I drank three pints without pausing for breath, and things were much the same as before, albeit overlaid on certain aspects of my more recent default self [better health and posture, less uncertainty about my place in the world, the general palliative effects of recent history and events]. But mainly that newer at-home-alone self was watching, half detached, at the improv performance another part of me was giving, running on sense memories and the cues that this guy was sending out, no doubt also slipping back into an older [i.e. younger] version of himself. If we'd had more time together things would no doubt have settled down to some more nuanced state, but to get the whole thing done in six hours was a shock to the system, an experience of time travel.
The next night I met someone I'd never met before, and remained lucid and ran through all the charming tricks of my current mask. An automatic performance, one that felt no more or less natural than the night before, but overall better, because there was minimal alcohol and no history to either dwell on or consciously avoid. It made me want to go back and meet people I haven't seen since childhood and then test what the automatic feelings and actions would be, but I don't keep in touch with many people from my past, and none from before university.
The next day it all came together, the past and present modes of being , but I ate something wrong, or got too cold, or was given something bad to smoke, and my system rebelled. I had a great time, but everything inside me broke. [Oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened in about the same circumstances two nights ago in a KTV. Everything I've ever learned I had to learn the hard way, many times, and this lesson appears to take some time to master]
The point is that there's no real, authentic self inside me. In addition to all the socially constructed masks that I can adopt without even thinking about it, there's the self-conscious self I slip into when alone and thinking about me, me, me. But that's not the last word, no more real than the others, as it evolves stochastically with events inside and outside. There's nothing to lament in this. Having no one self to hold on to makes dying seem trivial [now, but probably not later] - nothing I can pin down will be lost, just things in the minds of others. I'm not there and never was.
Houellebecq, thinking about something...this film strove to be a vigorous plea against friendship, and more generally against all non-sexual relationships. What in fact could two men talk about, beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or of some common project (overthrowing a government, building a motorway, writing a script for a cartoon, exterminating the Jews)? After a certain age (I am talking about men of a certain level of intelligence, not aged brutes) it's quite obvious that everything has been said and done. How could a project as intrinsically empty as two men spending some time together lead to anything other than boredom, annoyance and, at the end of the day, outright hostility. Whilst between a man and a woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. [....]Houellebecq's one of the few writers I've read as an adult who makes me feel like when I was a teenager and fell in love with certain books, that things I kept secret from even myself were being clearly expressed and I was not alone in the world. Of course, that doesn't make those things healthy or right, only true to myself, which isn't always grand if the self needs more work.
Launching an attack on not only friendship, but all social relations as soon as they are unaccompanied by any physical contact, this film thus constituted - only the magazine Slut Zone had the perspicacity to notice this - an indirect eulogy to bisexuality, if not hermaphroditism. All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks.Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, p60
Colorful profile from 2006 here
Living with a woman is the main workaround for many of my weaknesses, and now that my wife is away for a while I have to consider other ways to avoid being left to my own devices.
I invited some students around today for lunch, and was up half last night prepping beef in red wine so that it could rest a while before being reheated, served. But I think the rest of the weekend I'll see what the devices propose.
One ongoing project is breaking the cat. I came in late to it's relationship with Yuki, and am strictly third in the pecking order. Which isn't so bad, as when guests come over, like today, it's clear that other folk don't even merit a listing. I think the cat [A-Tea] is autistic. He can't relate to people in any meaningful fashion unless they've been hardwired into his system by repeated applications of food.
With Yuki gone he's been moping, and I saw my chance to get ahead by feeding him well with three kinds of good food - quality biscuits and cans, plus fish that I boil myself. He liked the food, but so much so that he was nagging all the time for more, getting me up at 5am, then again at 6.
The face that wakes me
Unintentional [?] humor in the Mishima biography:
I have seen Mishima "lose himself" to the Monkey or the Watusi in the mid-sixties and it was like watching a studied imitation of a dancer; he always looked horrifying sober, though clearly his movements and expressions were intended to create the effect not merely of spontaneity but enthrallment. In any case, he was a bad dancer, uncoordinated and apparently deaf to music. In 1946 and 1947, when he was still a wan, emaciated figure, his jitterbug must have been awesome sight.The studied mask of normalcy. When I decided to move among people I tried to learn their actions and enthusiasms, but it became tiring to keep up, and in any case I was bad at it. The fact was I didn't care what they were doing, but needed society for $ and sex. The life I've made out here is one that's been cobbled together out of necessity from various sub-optimal outcomes, but the whole is more than the sum of the parts.p86
Many times we feel that the world is highly irrational and sub-optimal (i.e. things can be done is a much better way). This is sometimes the case, but maybe less than as it seems. Our eyes are very misleading about it.
The reason is because the hypothetical reality (that is before any decision has been made) contains a huge space of possibilities. The decision and actions people take are usually relatively good among the overall space of possibilities.
But the decisions people take may not be the absolute optimum. That is they are not the very best set of decisions. But they are still very good.
After the fact thinking will start off with what decisions already made, and try to look for alternatives based on this optimized decision. Insofar that the decision was not the absolute optimal it will look like there are better decisions and the decision maker was a fool.
Suppose there are a billion possible compositions one can lead to by various combinations of decisions. Suppose further that we sort them throught a single measure. If the actual decision ranked 100th, it should be a great decision, but starting from there one will see that it is the worst out of hundred possibilities.... [continues...]
People are always looking, making inferences. I wear a hat and sunglasses in an attempt to reduce the information transmitted, keep my head in a book when eating alone.
Years ago, when I lived in London, I saw a 30-something man on a bus who was an all-out loser just to look at him. Bad hair, bad clothes, bad pose, a nervous jitter that marked him out as wholly lacking in confidence and overall just in a bad way, like success in any terms would never come to him, a disappointment to his family and himself, unlikely to maintain relationships with women.
Of course, he could have just been having a bad day, and I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.
The thing is, that underneath the ill-kempt, nervous mess appeared to be a classically handsome man. Good bones and skin that just needed some color, and a full head of thick hair, and he was tall, and broad-shouldered. He could have had makeover and been taught how to stand, hold his face and meet a gaze, and after a weekend of intensive care come out on Monday looking like an alpha-male catch. Only an appearance, but probably enough to kick start real change It was odd to see, or to imagine I saw, how life and his mind had conspired to keep him down.
A few weeks ago I was in a restaurant [with my wife] and at the next table was a plain looking doughy guy, balding, with long hair. He could have cleaned up, but nothing too dramatic. He had no book to shield from assumptions, and he looked bored on a Saturday evening.
I jump to conclusions, it's how I keep myself entertained in the absence of conversations. I'm a plain looking bald guy who either thinks too much or too little, but the social contract has broken down if it doesn't encompass the provision of sex and love to people that nobody wants. And it can never do this, so things keep jittering and shuddering along, the undesirable frustrated until they can make peace with themselves and each other, find their own level and satisfy their needs.
I can never be without a woman for more than a few weeks without starting to go crazy. It's a weakness, but a very human one, and perhaps I make up for it by feeling no need for other friends.
