Desperate Entitlement

The February Blues hit me a little harder than usual this year. At the beginning of the month, I learned that one of my aunts, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few years ago, was nearing the end and, the same day, that a coworker I work with very closely was leaving my company. My aunt died a couple of days later and the coworker had her last day this past Friday. It's just a lot of upheaval in the midst of all the other daily and escalating horrors.

Anyway, I have sublimated this depressive energy into this long post about Dating Discourse.

(Before I get into that, however, I do want to provide some links about my aunt, who was a documentary filmmaker. You can view several of her films on YouTube. Appalshop, the community media organization where she spent her career, has made Stranger with a Camera, arguably her most successful film (it went to Sundance in 2001, I believe), available to stream on YouTube for the first time. It had previously required purchase or a license. Shortly after she died, I also watched Long Journey Home from 1987, which I had never seen and really loved. My favorite may be her last film, Portraits and Dreams, which aired on POV on PBS in 2020. It is, tragically, not available to stream right now but if you have the PBS Passport app, you can watch several clips and a preview. I find it and Stranger with a Camera pair well with each other. They both explore the power of images to create narratives and whether that power is used to harm or to uplift depending on who has the camera and what they are trying to do with it. Liz was a lovely and generous person and we are all very proud of her.)

There is something that's been bugging me lately about The Dating Discourse. I mean, there is the fact of its very existence. Given everything going on, I do find this obsessive focus not only on romance but also on "wellness" to be kind of silly. I don't follow many relationship people, but they get put in my feed nonetheless, and even they seem to be growing weary.

However, beyond that, everything is presented as a binary. And kind of adversarial. Are you the problem or are they the problem? The blame cannot be equally distributed or even shared. It must be one or the other. The idea is that, if we could just identify who is the problem, that person could be prevailed upon to be different and then everything would work out fine. And it's almost always the case that it's the other person that's the problem.

But what if that isn't the case? What if both of you are the problem? What if neither of you are the problem? What if things are simply not resolvable?

A lot of this content (and the majority of relationship content) is aimed at people who identify as anxiously attached. Something you see a fair amount is someone like TherapyJeff (and no particular beef with that guy) making an impassioned speech about how "Maybe it’s not your anxious attachment – maybe you’re just dating someone who doesn't provide reassurance, isn't affectionate, blah blah..." Like, the presumed viewer of most of this content is someone who's just so hard on themselves and who is always chasing after people who don't appreciate all the love they have to give. And this makes them so anxious.

And...okay. Maybe! But here's the thing: just because your anxiety is justified doesn’t mean it’s helpful. It doesn't mean it might not be justifiably annoying or overwhelming to your partner or to a random person you've gone on a few dates with. (We have also started using "partner" in an incredibly vague way that could mean someone you are in a serious relationship with or someone you matched with on Hinge.) Maybe they're a jerk who stubbornly refuses to "meet your needs." (Did they actually sign a contract to do so?) But maybe you are asking for too much, too soon or just asking the wrong person. Maybe you are helping create the very push-pull dynamic you decry and then acting really put upon. Look how I suffer!

Just because you’re contributing to an unhealthy dynamic doesn’t mean you deserve to be mistreated. But it's possible for both people to be acting in ways that feel totally justified and that cause the other hurt, pain, and anger. And there might not be any solution to it.

A few years ago, when I was trying to parse how I was contributing to the unhealthy dynamics that developed in my very frustrating romantic life, the obvious answer was anxiety. My anxiety was very justified. These women weren’t responding or would respond only intermittently. They alternated between warm and affectionate and cold and remote. I was confused and miserable. Was I supposed to keep texting them? Was I supposed to fuck off? I had no idea. These situations managed to trigger just about every anxiety, insecurity, and point of sensitivity I had.

But my very justified anxiety led me to act out in ways that likely made things worse, that probably only heightened their ambivalence. (To be clear, I'd mostly just text them.)

So what was I supposed to do?

Nothing. I already had all the information I needed. They were not giving me what I wanted, and I should have refrained from further engagement. This would not have led to a “better” outcome but it would have prevented a disappointing experience from devolving into something more hurtful. There was no magical solution, no one weird trick that would have made everything work out, but instead just the better of a menu of bad options. Sometimes things just suck.

I think this can be hard to see when you're in the thick of it. I don't think I really came to see how futile so-called "protest" behaviors – actions taken in an attempt to get a non-responsive person to re-engage with you – are until I found myself on the other side of them.

Following yet another frustrating experience with an ambivalent person, I focused on dating only people who seemed motivated and engaged. I met someone on Tinder who seemed to fit the bill. She was very direct – she messaged first, she asked me out. She was a very therapy-focused person and mentioned on our first date that she was anxiously attached. I was not only trying to practice going on dates with women who consistently returned my texts, but also trying to practice being a good person to date. I was being responsive and putting in effort and mostly getting the same from her. (Anxiously attached people are famously very communicative and highly motivated.)

We quickly fell into a classic anxious-avoidant dynamic (but with me being the avoidant one this time), despite both of us having a decent amount of self-awareness and therapeutic acumen. I refrained from bailing after a movie night where I accidentally fell asleep in her arms (hated it) and I have no doubt she was, at least early on, not texting me nearly as much as she wanted to. But I was very aware of her desire for greater involvement, and she probably of my desire for greater distance.

It all came to a head when I went on vacation for a week with my family. I had been relieved to get some space from her, despite us hanging out no more than once a week. Upon my return, I had an uncharacteristically packed social calendar and a lot of work stress. She had told me she was also busy with various projects, so we agreed we wouldn’t see each other right away, which I was also relieved about. In the weeks before my departure, she had started displaying much more characteristically anxious behaviors: texting me more and for seemingly no purpose other than attention and validation, no amount of which seemed to satisfy her. (Just like "here is a selfie of me" to which I'd be like "neat!" despite the fact that I had not requested any photos and was at my job. And she would just keep sending more media. Photos, videos. I began to worry I was going to be on the receiving end of an endless stream of unsolicited content forever.) At one point, I set up another date just to get some peace.

Resentment started creeping in, a sense of being subtly manipulated. It felt less like I was in a relationship with her and more like I was being forced into the relationship she was intent on having with me. Like she was trying to make me into the partner she'd like me to be.

I recognized I was probably overreacting (but was I?) and this was still better than getting left on read for days. While my instinct was to bail, I planned on seeing her again after I got back and comparing who she was in reality to the needy, grasping version I had in my head.

That did not end up happening. Instead, a few days after I returned, I received a long text from her saying that she was not actually busy as she had said and that her feelings had been hurt that I had not yet set up a time to see her. She said she hoped we could set up some kind of schedule going forward.

I was like ABSOLUTELY NOT. How, exactly, was it on me that she had lied about her availability? Was I supposed to read her mind and know that she wanted me to make a date I did not even have the bandwidth to make? Could she not have just suggested something herself if seeing me was so important? (I think it was more important that I want to see her.) And to unload all of this on me in the middle of an already stressful work day? She did not help her case by ending the text with “You don’t have to respond right away” as though that were some huge concession. OH THANK YOU FOR THE PERMISSION. It's like dumping a pile of garbage into someone's lap and being all "No pressure to clean it up right now!"

I had wanted to hang in for a while longer, but this text, meant to prompt reassurance or contrition from me, instead just precipitated the ending that was already in sight. My suspicions were confirmed, not dispelled. I wouldn’t say that this behavior made me “justified” in ending it (relationships are totally voluntary and you can peace out if you're not enjoying things) but it did just really annoy me. Among other things, I felt really not considered here, as though I were just some resource to be extracted, as though she were entitled to my time no matter what else was going on. And a schedule? Who did she think she was, my boss? It struck me as unbelievably presumptuous.

People sometimes think they are "setting a boundary" but really they're just issuing a demand and may very well come to discover they don't have the leverage they thought they did. As our boy Wile E. Coyote learned too many times:

I think I was totally justified in being annoyed. She was blaming me for not doing something she had not told me she wanted me to do - and that was beyond my capacity – and trying to ensure she got what she wanted from me without having to explicitly ask.

But she was also justified in being anxious. I was retreating. I was being distant. I was thinking of ending things, even if I was trying to hold off. She was not working herself up over nothing. She was not being hysterical.

But her texting me for reassurance did not get her that reassurance because there was no reassurance to be had. There was no action she could have taken that would have turned me into the person she wanted me to be, the person who would have been eager to see her again despite all that was going on. I had, despite my best efforts, never been that person. I was sorry to be disappointing but I could not give her what she wanted without compromising my own happiness, something I was no longer willing to do.

This behavior could be – and probably was – labeled avoidant. But was I being "avoidant" or was I just unwilling to be corralled into a relationship that didn't suit me?

Something that's gotten a bit lost in our self-help-saturated moment is that you are not entitled to the relationship that you want with someone just because you want it.

Not to sound old-fashioned, but once upon a time we believed in yearning and yearning is predicated on the understanding that you will likely never get what you yearn for. (Exasperated Don Draper voice: "That's what the yearning is for! It stands in for the having!") Instead of this ridiculous notion of yearning as something that places an obligation upon another. We yearned for yearning's sake or to channel it into a poem or a song or a whole Broadway musical, all while the objects of our yearning went about their business being in love with other people or simply being alone. Like, remember when people would opine about how they were not worthy to touch the hem of their beloved's garment? Obviously problematic in certain ways, but I feel the balance between privileging the self and privileging the other in romantic attachment has gotten tilted a little too much towards self. Just Main Character Syndrome run amok.

Just because you are worthy of love does not mean you are entitled to it from the person of your choice. Other people are not objects. They are not consumer goods. They are also seeking love, care, and respect. They also have preferences and desires. They are not vending machines for validation or personal appliances that exist only for your comfort and pleasure. Both they – and you – have agency. (Tell The Bees had a great essay about how avoidants have won dating but the anxiously attached have won the internet and have made content empires out of being aggrieved that someone has the temerity to not want to be their boyfriend.)

In the fall, I read a book, Open to Desire, by one of my favorite writers on American Buddhism, Mark Epstein. I had bought it months or years earlier, but had put off reading it, at least partially because of the title. (I did not take it to any coffee shops.) But it turned out to be just what I needed coming off a completely unremarkable yet still somehow alienating stint on the apps. It crystallizes a lot of what I find vaguely soul-killing about them. The book is, in a way, a defense of desire (the subtitle is "What the Buddha Actually Taught"), since desire is often misunderstood within Buddhism as the cause of all suffering.

As I was writing this, Epstein appeared on a yoga podcast and, to my surprise, they spent the whole hour discussing Open to Desire, which was published more than 20 years ago. The book, and the podcast discussion, focuses on the inherently unsatisfactory nature of desire – that, to some extent, desire is always disappointed. The object of desire can never be fully known or fully possessed. (Epstein gives an example of his own fixation on what was supposedly the best lobster roll in New York City and how the real thing was merely good rather than transcendent. Once acquired, it left him disappointed rather than sated.) And that dissatisfaction can actually block the possibility of real connection. From the podcast discussion:

The preoccupation with one's own dissatisfaction and with one's own need gets in the way of actually experiencing the connection that's possible with another human being.

That's what I was feeling in my brief relationship with the person from Tinder. Like their need or dissatisfaction trumped everything else. Why haven't you set up a date? And I am positive I have probably played this unskillful role for someone else. It's what I find so disheartening about relationships – the objectification in the guise of love. In some cases, I've felt very disregarded, like a toy someone can just pick up and put down as it suits them. In others, like a very closely guarded object, but one that is valued not for itself so much as for what it can provide or how it is seen by others. When I protest this neglect or I fail to perform as expected (being, in Epstein's words, "a non-compliant object"), the person becomes frustrated, angry, or worse.

And most of the complaints I see on social media about dating apps are mostly about other people failing to be compliant objects. It's their stubborn insistence on being subjects with their own needs and desires instead of willing supplicants to yours. On Instagram, I have been fed a video multiple times of a Scottish woman complaining that a man on a dating app, who has admitted he is violently hungover, is immune to her attempts to engage him in a spirited discussion of literature. Sweetie, that ain't his job. If you're not enjoying the conversation on offer, you can just leave. Everything is optional!

There are people who snidely complain on their Tinder profiles that people "shouldn't match if they're not going to message" as though this is a slight against them. Never mind that matching is a mutual and asynchronous act. The person complaining also matched but failed to message, but they do not feel this is some kind of grave insult to the other. Because they, of course, are the center of the universe, and the other person merely an orbiting planet that has failed to make contact as desired.

I get the frustration. I, too, would like to be cherished. But badgering strangers into returning your texts is not going to get you there. According to Epstein (and presumably the Buddha), what we really want are not compliant objects but willing and enthusiastic subjects, despite their inherently elusive nature. We seek not submission but reciprocity. And reciprocity cannot be coaxed, compelled, or coerced. It has to be freely given. If someone isn't giving it, then they're not for you. Best to hit the bricks. After all, you want to be cherished, not tolerated or appeased.

In Open to Desire, Epstein quotes mid-century psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg (who I just learned is 97 but still alive) that captures what, for me, love should be about: "Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom." And people have the freedom to be ambivalent or otherwise engaged. They have the freedom to make choices you don't like. You have the freedom to be hurt by those choices.

The person I mention above was one of the few monogamous people I've dated in the past few years. Poly people, in my experience, are more likely to embrace the spirit of Kernberg's philosophy, whereas monogamy is often (but not always!) rooted in possession and control. For a time on the apps, I identified as "solo poly" (emphasis very much on solo, not the poly), which, for those not versed in these terms, means someone who is open to multiple connections but is not focused on – or is actively uninterested in – cohabitation and marriage with a partner, primary or otherwise. I'm not against either of those things (or exclusivity), per se, but I was very much not open to them at the time and did not like the presumption that that was the goal in every dynamic. I was feeling wounded and discouraged. I didn't want to lead people on or feel pressured to commit to something I was simply not capable of at the time. I also did not want to sit around moping.

My best experiences were with people who were not only ENM but who were also already in at least one and often two committed partnerships. They were about the only people who managed to stay within my very narrow window of tolerance: they were very responsive and communicative, but they also did not really want all that much from me and did not need anything at all. They didn't leave me on read or try to put me on a schedule. Their emotional needs were being met by others who occupied more important roles in their lives than I had any intention of ever occupying. I didn't have to wonder where it was going. For them, I was a passing diversion. For me, they were the dating equivalent of those inflatable tubes they put in gutters at bowling alleys so kids can knock down some pins and not get discouraged. (I think this joke is very funny.)

In Buddhism, loss and disappointment are inevitable, but suffering is optional. It comes when you refuse to acknowledge the loss or the disappointment and instead struggle against it. You keep searching for an elusive solution that will keep loss at bay. You write a long, slightly patronizing text to someone who was already going to break up with you. You send a follow-up to someone who has left you on read for days in the vain hope that it's all just been a misunderstanding. You obsess about healing your anxious attachment in the hopes that will fix things and get you what you want. You assign all this meaning to the things that happen to you that only increase your misery.

There's a moment in Before Sunrise, when Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is talking about getting dumped and how it makes you think about how you've felt about someone you dumped and how humbling and humiliating that is. Like, oh god, someone is thinking about me in that same way.

I had the opposite experience here, but it was still yikes. It made me see very clearly that there was nothing I could have done with these ambivalent women, other than to have saved myself a little misery by bowing out earlier. I'm not sure I would have seen that if I hadn’t experienced being on the other side of things. It really undermines your capacity for self-delusion. Given my tendency to chase after emotionally unavailable people, I hadn't really experienced the other side that much. While probably more avoidant overall, circumstances (that I chose!) meant I have spent most of my romantic life anxious, seeking, and slighted. (I'm so avoidant I only pursue completely unavailable people.) Being on the other side it was like "Oh, yeah, trying to change this is beyond pointless and also very embarrassing."

One thing I came to see was that, while I might always be attracted to people who were more, uh, independent, I was never going to develop the perspective I would need to keep engaging with them by continuing to engage with only them. I was obviously not going to get over my abandonment issues by chasing after people who ignored me. And until I got a handle on those, I was probably going to keep doing (pretty normal, justified) things that would lead these women to retreat or withdraw, which would only cause me more anxiety, lead me to seek reassurance, and trigger more retreat and withdrawal, and on and on until things imploded and I ended up hurt. It was a vicious circle and a pointless, miserable game.

I was not doing anything "wrong" per se, I was not necessarily the problem, but the outcomes spoke for themselves. If you focus solely on whether your actions are justified, you may never stop to consider whether they are simply misguided or self-defeating.

Aside from dating mostly poly people, one thing I worked on – and that, I will admit, has drawn some skepticism – was hanging back a bit more. Not as a means of making the other person insecure or anxious (I do not wish to pay the misery forward), but to get out of that habit of pursuit – of chasing – when pursuit had historically gone so poorly for me. To very deliberately not try to bring about any outcome, but to simply let things unfold. To leave some space for the other person to occupy.

And the people I dated made this much easier, because they were very straightforward, communicative, and busy. I didn't need to do all that much – I could hang back – because they were happy to take their part. I wasn't confused or (very) anxious because I wasn't very invested, the stakes were very low, and I wasn't expected to read anyone's mind. Things went much better. I felt much calmer. I could be different because the environment was different.

And I am hopeful that, should I ever meet another person I really like (typically happens once every five years or so), I can bring some more equanimity into a situation where I am more invested and where the stakes are higher.