Opinion as Valid Self Expression

I encourage a 'don’t knock it until you try it' attitude about different behaviors (barring causing others non-consensual pain or oppression), yet I feel for those who define themselves as not liking green eggs and ham, even if they haven’t tried them. I don't advocate confusing 'I don't like' with 'I am not', but I do believe opinion can be a valid symbol expression of interior experience, and we need not try everything before we say it's fine for Sam-I-Am, but it's just not Who-I-Am.

Valid self-expression isn't necessarily valid communication of course; but we don’t have to understand a person's opinion and interior experience to believe they should have opinions and expression that works for them and their interior. And while people often hold opinions inadequately reflecting reality (or reality for a large number of other people, or even their own reality), those same opinions may remain adequate for their experience. This is often why trying to change people's mind, their opinion, their effective symbol, is so difficult; people only willingly change symbols when they need a better symbol for their experience, only relinquish ineffective symbols when they know better symbols are already available. Yet when they need them, people tend to find better symbols on their own, and since I believe a person is their own best authority of what symbols express best for them, I also believe it's better to let them discover those symbols on their own.

I do believe dialogue, communication, and the exchange of ideas may help people change their minds for their own interior reasons, but when we protest, lobby, pursue, pester and argue until a person relents and becomes convinced, I wonder how effective and adequate the resulting symbols will be. Teaching application of ideas without internal experiential basis is teaching people to ignore their experience as a valid and meaningful, and teaching internal ideology at the expense of adequate meaningful expression.

While I might not agree with a person's opinion, or even believe there are better, more adequate opinions and opinion symbols for their experience than what they're using, but because I understand our common human need to find adequate symbols of our experience, I don't just defend their possession of the opinion they have, I defend their humanity, defend our common humanity, by affording them the opportunity of self discovery and not convincing them of anything.

More Than Two Ways

I once thought there were only two kinds of female led relationships, the 'bad' female domination of 'fear and tears' and the 'good' female led of 'love and respect'; and I believed only love symbol differentiation and clarification would help the former become the latter. I thought the 'fear and tears' was nearly always an ineffective and love symbol-obstructed, symbol-metastasized, version of the 'love and respect' goal (always beware of standards). However, I've changed my mind because there are an infinite variety of relationship love symbols, female led or not, and while there are always differing levels of accurate and adequate love symbols in any relationship, having different love symbols isn't wrong.

Now I still think many couples aren't really communicating with love symbols, aren't really attaining (enough) intimacy with the love symbols they have, perhaps only interpreting what they can, when they can, as a symbol of love so they can emotionally get by as well as they can. I think this often why many people desire their partner to give them the symbol love they want regardless whether that symbol is functional for their partner, whether that symbol means love for their partner. Of course, no one can silently suffer and sublimate their unhappiness for very long, and if we ask our partner to try, they are sometimes successful in learning a new love symbol, but how long can we ask our partner to try some specific love symbol before we decide love symbol effectiveness with our partner is more important than any particular symbolic expression?

Obviously, a person who instills fear in their partner (through whatever works for them) may have a functional symbol to express or feel whatever it is they seek to, but is it an accurate and adequate love symbol for both of them? A person might functionally feel and express love best when they feel humiliated, or spanked, or helpless, or overruled, or commanded, or other things in varying combinations, but are these accurate and adequate love symbols for both of them? The answers could be yes, and different isn't necessarily wrong. It doesn’t matter what they are doing, it matters what they are meaning by their actions and whether they effectively and adequately understand each other to attain the intimacy they desire.

Perhaps an erotic truth is only the discovery of love symbols so effective, so much a part of who we are, that they bypass much, if not most, perhaps all of a person's conscious awareness, yet a relationship needs functional love symbols for two people. And it may be that relationship compatibility is at some level actually about erotic truth compatibility, but it is certain all couples, must work out what love symbols work for them until they have enough symbols that work well enough for them.

Differentiating Her

I wonder so often how my wife knows what she knows, sees what she sees, does what she does, with such a compact worldview that can eclipse and compact mere difference with wrongness. Not only is individual human experience a progression from a baby's compact experience to mature adulthood and old age, but even the arc of human history has moved from compact early human civilizations to our more differentiated present civilization.

I myself have believed in the salvific power of scientistic differentiation. I grew up in a large family in a rather cluttered house, and I probably learned early on to identify the most important and essential things because only a few things could be wholly and completely mine. I honed my natural simplification impulse towards the essential and aimed like a laser to the heart of the matter, eliminating everything else in the way. Even today I've theorized the reason I like a good story while my wife likes a good biography is because non-fiction compacts disparate aspects into a holistic portrait while fiction creates a holistic picture to highlight a specific differentiated point.

Yet now not only do I wonder how well I have ever differentiated anything if in the process I have been missing some important things, because after all, as my wife points out, no one lives their life on a single differentiated point. We experience things compactly and later differentiate them, and while some people, such as I, find meaning in later attention to categories and labels at the expense of the compact holistic experience, other people actively ignore the differentiating impulse in order to maintain the present experiential meaning, such as my wife. And I'm in love with my wife, and a little in love with how she sees the world, how she knows the things I don’t know; and we've had more than a few laughs over my ironical and comical attempts to understand her better by trying to differentiate the essence of a holistic, compact experiential worldview.

Ultimately any symbol, all symbols no matter how compact or differentiated, can only be appraised by their effectiveness, their adequacy and accuracy to the task and experience at hand.

Anyone with a worldview, philosophy or framework where it is difficult to fully be who they are knows the necessity and power of self permission and self acceptance. If we view ourselves as monstrous in our own minds, we'll need a gatekeeper to give permission for the unaccepted interior to frolic and keep the frolic appropriately contained; any conscientious and self-aware monster knows it needs rules.

Upon discovering my uxorious erotic truth I wondered if I suffered from some psychological inversion where my mother was (too) demanding and (too) overbearing and so after becoming monstrous in trying pleasing her, I later learned in romance to be monstrously pleased when pleasing 'her' monster. I might decide my partner must be a monstrous enough match for me to be pleased; I might try enticing her to more monstrosity; I might encourage her to unchain and release her interior kraken, encourage her to stop differentiating loving me and between loving what I do for her, encourage and entice with the lure of power of being a gatekeeper, my gatekeeper. I'll lure her into celebrating our interior monsters together, into a monster frolicking relationship in which I can be whole with my monstrous self, accepted despite being a monster, have self-worth from the praise of pleasing her, and have the intimacy and surety of her gatekeeping permission.

No, I don't really believe I do this, but I fear some men might and that in my desire to participate in my wife's pursuit of happiness and pleasure, I could. I often hear men discuss 'subspace', this bliss of being female led, as their drug, and well let's face it, every addict needs a dealer helping them to the next level. Yet a parent, a gatekeeper, a dealer, a god, enjoys a love hate relationship with even its most loyal and childlike of junkie worshiping subjects, and such rule is only had by the god-maker's permission. For when parents are only godlike to their children, divinities only monster-like to humans, when symbol confusion leads one to love power exchange instead of loving one's partner, the resulting relationship becomes philosophically untenable if not functionally untenable as well.

While I am comforted by my constant effort to make love symbols clear and transparent from one interior all the way through to the other interior, and avoid symbols that stop at mere power exchange, I also tread with fear and trembling as I differentiate between erotic truth's self discovery and addiction's meaningless abyss.

Compact and Differentiated

Often despite differing worldviews a couple remains compatible with high intimacy and functionality because they differentiate concepts similarly. For example, the way they distinguish the compactness of a 'myth' into the component aspects of 'story', 'philosophy' and 'religion' might be similar, though one person may have a religious worldview and the other an atheistic.

Since my wife's worldview is often more compact than my own, I have learned compact isn’t less intelligent, less modern, or less enlightened, just different, more holistic; while I easily see categories, systems and dynamics, she easily understands the shading of subtlety, inference and the bigger picture. More fascinatingly, my wife will frequently understand a differentiated concept intellectually yet pay it little attention because the concept does not have clear symbolic significance or meaning to her. Thus while my wife understands people might do different things than she for the same interior reasons, those people often remain meaningfully indistinguishable to her from people who do not have the same interior reasons as she.

And this is the point: while symbols can be transparent and meaningful across differing worldviews and even different levels of compactness and differentiation, if a love symbol is not clear enough for your partner to understand it, then the symbol is meaningfully indistinguishable from your not loving your partner at all. Thus good relationship communication isn’t only self expression well enough for you to understand, or even well enough for your partner to understand; good relationship communication is self expression well enough for you to understand your partner.

Quitting Or Winning

Often people believe getting older means settling for less in their relationships, yet I believe that same sense of settling may not be a quitting but a winning where it counts. We are quick to compare and see failure in our relationships before the perfect standard, yet few of us, possibly none of us, actually know anyone successful with this popularly held relationship ideal.

I think in our youth we found the bar already set too high for reality, and in looking for the 'perfect partner', the 'perfect relationship', we lost many opportunities to grow in other perfectly fitting and functional relationships. When we're a little older, we begin to realize 'what works works', with age we're more easily able to see what works, and we're less eager to restart functionality in a new relationship just to try to trading up, but we might also realize learning to live and love with what we have can be a puzzle with its own satisfactions.

Despite a high degree of relationship happiness and functionality, sometimes people want some specific kind, level or symbol of intimacy but discover it's something their partner isn’t able to give, or give easily, or well. Without trading in any of our well earned and learned symbol tools and functional intimacy, we might try channeling this unmet desire or try getting it piecemeal, but in either case we need not see this situation as relationship failure. We've only failed to recognize some standards are unattainable, or that it's perfectly acceptable not to reach the standards created only for aiming purposes. In relationships 'what works works', but as far as standards go perhaps we should remember 'what doesn’t work, doesn’t'.