Let’s see if I can write this post without breaking any of the blog-type rules I’ve set myself – no overly personal details about me (though I think the Jarvis Cocker/cocaine quip drove a stake through that one’s heart) and no overly personal details about my friends. Hmm.
Yesterday an old friend called in tears – I mean wailing tears, so hard I thought she was laughing at first. She’d done an accidental, very minor stupid thing, and her partner got disproportionately upset, probably because of the chronically annoying position that partner’s life has been in for awhile for various non-my-friend-caused reasons.
(I love that now that I’ve written ‘partner’, people will think for sure I’m talking about a couple of lesbians. Is it a bluff? Or is it a double bluff and I’m talking about two guys? Ha ha ha ha, if only I didn’t wax my facial hair, I could twirl it.)
Anyway – maybe you’ve guessed this is another in my constant repetitions of how we shouldn’t use the people we love the most as punching bags, figuratively as well as literally. It’s the most disconcerting thing when someone you adore starts screaming, starts with the unveiled insults, starts with the bowel-icing passive aggression – one wonders what one did wrong and has an almost impossible time understanding it wasn’t so much a question of that as everything else going on.
Sure people get cranky. Sure they ride the Dragon. Sure sometimes our lovers do things that are just too stupid to laugh at or ignore and rub us the wrong way when we’re already stressed. But can we not try to measure our reactions a little bit? Can’t we be, you know, courtly and a little De Gaulle about it all? You know how polite he was to his wife, despite all the mistresses French politicians are supposed to have and the stress of governing a country populated with veal?
Yeah, so as you can see I have little enough new to add to what I’ve already gone on about this. Just that now, if any of my friends see me doing this, they’re allowed to punch me in the fucking face. Carte blanche.
4 commenti:
We had a conversation waiting to get into cheep beer and wing night about people who put themselves down - which I think is an extension of what you're talking about. We all have to put up with too much shit in this world to be adding to it by calling ourselves stupid when we do something dumb or any of the other ways that people put themselves down without thinking about it. I'm convinced that self-deprecation leads to failure and that we need to support those who we love by NEVER saying ANYTHING negative to them about themselves. Of course there is always the case when someone does something that is annoying or stupid and you can criticize that action but there is a responsibility that we have towards each other to always prop our friends and lovers up and never tear them down.
We're all full of the engrained shit we grew up and the cycle just continues until one of the smart ones works very hard at stopping it.
I agree with you both - people do a good enough job of despising themselves, we don't need to reinforce any negative psychology.
Yeah, the whole point of loving each other is encouragement. And nookie. Encouraging nookie.
Sounds delicious. I miss encouraging nookie.
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