I found myself explaining today how the process of effective communication, the process of being understood by someone whose understanding I value (most often my wife), is often more significant and meaningful to me than the resulting decision, agreement, action, etc. Many times I won't get what I want, or my suggestion isn't acted upon, yet I'll feel perfectly happy if only I feel I have been understood. Somehow effective symbolization between two people, understanding communication between two interiors, is all I need - but I don’t understand why.
I have mentioned before how I am fascinated by how our interior symbols and framework filter and fashion our world without our knowing or understanding it. Perhaps we have opted for a particular religion, ideology, framework that gives coherence to our past experience, and in doing so shapes our future actions. We even have an assumed framework until we are old enough to choose one, and whether we consciously choose or not, our framework may affect things we are unconscious and unaware of.
I said recently meaning might cohere through the lens of an authoritative framework, or the authority of a framework might arise wherever meaning is found; but it occurs to me we occasionally experience more meaning than our framework can handle. When we have such an ineffable experience, the framework, religion, philosophy, ideology must change to accommodate the new meaning from the new experience. Thus I must rather doubt all meaning comes from the coherence of the framework.
Now it occurs to me if the framework is merely a tool, or set of tools - a toolbox, to help one understand experience symbols, then perhaps it is understandable we might occasionally have an experience our framework tool box is unable to handle. Then we need a new tool, and occasionally in order to maintain coherence of our framework toolbox we need to get rid of some tools or get more tools, sometimes we get so many new tools we might say it's an entirely different framework (tool box) afterward.
Yet the meaning before the framework, that comes from somewhere, and I wonder if this effective symbolization between two people, the understanding and communication between two interiors, might somehow afford me a clue.
January 23, 2010
January 22, 2010
Self Acceptance
I used to be quite religious, and I think now part of the reason I was religious was because I had a hard time accepting human nature, accepting myself or accepting other people; indeed I 'lost my faith' and left religion when I discovered that religion did not and could not, that I could not, make other people be better people, could not make other people want to be better, or even want to be bettered. I had to either accept other people's nature and desire as they were, or at least accept I could do nothing about them, and in this need for acceptance I realized neither the religion nor my faith could fix my inability to accept people as they were, they could only change the relative parts of our human nature, of my human nature, that I could and couldn't accept.
I like to think I have finally gained the acceptance I needed to have, finally learned the acceptance I needed to learn, but any learning I have managed is more due to philosophical exploration than anything else, and the most recent part of my acceptance education I think may have been the original root of my problem: self acceptance.
The key for me was the realization that people not only have different experiences and experience the same things differently (more compactly perhaps or more differentiated), but people also symbolize and represent those experiences differently - and having different experiences or using different symbols doesn't mean people have less learning, knowledge or wisdom, are less aware of the magnitude of their mind, the amazement of existence, or the splendor of their soul. Different is different and not necessarily better or worse, less or more, right or wrong, valid or invalid; to know anything more than people's difference we must need sift their interior, sift their soul, and the only interior and soul we have access to sift is our own.
So I started seeing nearly every instance of what other people do and say, whether or not I liked it or agreed with it, as merely different or similar symbols of their merely different or similar experience, and I began worrying less about other people's interior betterment and paid more attention to my own. And soon, by attentively analyzing my own interior symbols, I began seeing my previously unacceptable interior as merely different, not less, wrong, or invalid.
I am fortunate to have someone who loves and accepts me as I am, uxorious or not, who was unperturbed by my self discoveries, who is so anti-regimented in her assessment of self and others she refuses such establishing phrases ands labels like 'female led'; we just are who we are, have the relationship we have, have the symbols we have. Unsurprisingly, I find I increasingly agree with her. People just are as people are, and likely the most we will ever manage is a minimal mitigation of other people's needless pain and hurtful actions, and though I no longer feel impassioned, angry or inflamed about other people's actions, I definitely continue to feel painful sadness, sometimes acutely and unbearably so, at needless suffering.
I may no longer have religion, but I still believe; I believe in the power and transcending significance we individual humans experience while physically incorporated here on earth. I still have faith, just one less rigid and more accepting.
I like to think I have finally gained the acceptance I needed to have, finally learned the acceptance I needed to learn, but any learning I have managed is more due to philosophical exploration than anything else, and the most recent part of my acceptance education I think may have been the original root of my problem: self acceptance.
The key for me was the realization that people not only have different experiences and experience the same things differently (more compactly perhaps or more differentiated), but people also symbolize and represent those experiences differently - and having different experiences or using different symbols doesn't mean people have less learning, knowledge or wisdom, are less aware of the magnitude of their mind, the amazement of existence, or the splendor of their soul. Different is different and not necessarily better or worse, less or more, right or wrong, valid or invalid; to know anything more than people's difference we must need sift their interior, sift their soul, and the only interior and soul we have access to sift is our own.
So I started seeing nearly every instance of what other people do and say, whether or not I liked it or agreed with it, as merely different or similar symbols of their merely different or similar experience, and I began worrying less about other people's interior betterment and paid more attention to my own. And soon, by attentively analyzing my own interior symbols, I began seeing my previously unacceptable interior as merely different, not less, wrong, or invalid.
I am fortunate to have someone who loves and accepts me as I am, uxorious or not, who was unperturbed by my self discoveries, who is so anti-regimented in her assessment of self and others she refuses such establishing phrases ands labels like 'female led'; we just are who we are, have the relationship we have, have the symbols we have. Unsurprisingly, I find I increasingly agree with her. People just are as people are, and likely the most we will ever manage is a minimal mitigation of other people's needless pain and hurtful actions, and though I no longer feel impassioned, angry or inflamed about other people's actions, I definitely continue to feel painful sadness, sometimes acutely and unbearably so, at needless suffering.
I may no longer have religion, but I still believe; I believe in the power and transcending significance we individual humans experience while physically incorporated here on earth. I still have faith, just one less rigid and more accepting.
January 21, 2010
Uxorious and Numinous
I wonder if the transcendence of being in love is similar to the luminous experience we have when contemplating our death, or our experiential absence such as before we were born, or had we never been born, or the transcendence of a religious experience. In a way it makes sense because all these moments carry the sort of intense meaning and significance that motivate and power our lives. Very few people want to be their partner's new religion because it's not only creepy but inevitably untenable and somewhat dishonest, yet there is something greater than our selves in an intimate relationship. People say the thrill is gone or the magic is gone with good reason, because in a relationship there is a beauty, a je ne sais quoi, an ineffably experienced irruption of meaning when we are at a loss for adequate symbols to express our experience of love even to our own selves.
Yet there are so many men and women who miss out on the transcendence and divinity of love in their relationship, either miss from the beginning because it was never there, or because they merely thought it was, or they confused bodies mating with souls mating (not that there can't be a confluence), or they had this and somewhere on their journey they lost it, lost their way, lost the path, or lost their interior compass. And having been in some of those lost places, I wonder if perhaps female led relationships work, for those people for whom they work, because the female led dynamic becomes a functionally effective symbol for bringing that transcendence of love and romance into transparent, meaningful and significant clarity.
If the focal points of every existence are our numinous experiences, of any moment experienced as meaningfully sacred, then it makes sense that female led relationships can be an effective way of bringing back the thrill, the magic, the meaning and the romance, the transcendence, the power and the glory, of love.
Yet there are so many men and women who miss out on the transcendence and divinity of love in their relationship, either miss from the beginning because it was never there, or because they merely thought it was, or they confused bodies mating with souls mating (not that there can't be a confluence), or they had this and somewhere on their journey they lost it, lost their way, lost the path, or lost their interior compass. And having been in some of those lost places, I wonder if perhaps female led relationships work, for those people for whom they work, because the female led dynamic becomes a functionally effective symbol for bringing that transcendence of love and romance into transparent, meaningful and significant clarity.
If the focal points of every existence are our numinous experiences, of any moment experienced as meaningfully sacred, then it makes sense that female led relationships can be an effective way of bringing back the thrill, the magic, the meaning and the romance, the transcendence, the power and the glory, of love.
January 20, 2010
Desire for Meaning and Authority
I wonder if there's any similarity between how my human desire to know what other people do may hide a yearning for an overarching framework that gives cohesive meaning to events and existence, and my more uxorious desire for my partner's rules rituals and other symbols of structure and authority in our relationship. Clearly my wife is an authority to me and I do find experiential meaning in our relationship and our symbols; and frameworks, philosophies, ideologies, and religions are systems of symbols that carry the weight of authority - even sociological studies surveys and statistics can have the weight of authority, if perhaps slightly less systematic in their symbology.
And this begs the question of how meaning and authority are related, and which came first; meaning might cohere through the lens of authority, or authority might arise wherever meaning is found, or there might be a more dynamic relationship including both of these with our without the addition of (an)other variable(s). And even this doesn't answer the question of why we, in our fundamental and essential humanity, desire this meaning-authority matrix so much we often don’t even recognize when and where it happens around us. At times I wonder if the very point and purpose of our existing is somehow hidden in this somewhere - which is humorous, because although I often arrive naturally at this thought through my own interior process, upon immediate reflection I realize it's not exactly a new thought, or even an uncommon one.
And this begs the question of how meaning and authority are related, and which came first; meaning might cohere through the lens of authority, or authority might arise wherever meaning is found, or there might be a more dynamic relationship including both of these with our without the addition of (an)other variable(s). And even this doesn't answer the question of why we, in our fundamental and essential humanity, desire this meaning-authority matrix so much we often don’t even recognize when and where it happens around us. At times I wonder if the very point and purpose of our existing is somehow hidden in this somewhere - which is humorous, because although I often arrive naturally at this thought through my own interior process, upon immediate reflection I realize it's not exactly a new thought, or even an uncommon one.
January 19, 2010
What Other People Do
Truly this might be titled 'Gendered Sex and Love Symbols pt 4' (part 1, part 2, part 3), for I think there what I've really been wondering about is why any couple achieves their level of compatible complicity in the use of the man's sexual energy, though what I found is that ultimately stereotypes are just too poor a place to begin thinking about anyone's interior relationship decisions. While clearly there have always been women willing to use a man's sexual energy to direct his attention where she wishes, and men willing to have their sexual energy thusly used, the matrix where a couple's interior variables come together is too complex for anything but guesswork and sociological survey statistics. Moreover, I now think why I want to understand people's interior process and this matrix of motives might be more valuable and worthwhile.
To be sure, I do want to understand how men and women might initiate female led relationships (actually any kind of relationship) more easily and of course with more frequent success, and I also want people already in (female led) relationships to learn how to have happier, healthier, stronger relationships. Yet underneath these somewhat altruistic desires I think I just want to know what other people do, and why they do it because I could use such information to strengthen my own relationship, use such information as a form of fuzzy map to move myself forward more precisely. I want to understand how my wife and I reached our level of compatible complicity and how to increase it and our intimacy, and our mutual self-respect, and our love and romance, and accentuate all the other positives, without falling prey to any negatives.
On one hand, I think when faced with a tough or new situation it's perfectly natural to ask what other people do in similar circumstances, but no one has ever collected statistics specifically germane to female led relationship and there is no general consensus, no 'top five ways for the female led to solve the top five female led problems'. And yet on the other hand even if there were (as there are for other relationships) I'm not sure where or when such 'merely informational help' might become the hindering crutch of a template, an obstacle of assumption to achieving the rewards two individual people enjoy when working these things out on their own instead of whole cloth resorting to other people's frameworks and philosophies.
Relationships, all relationships, are comprised of individuals (not statistics) who experience problems and then work together to discover choices and compromises that work for them and meet their individual needs. Thus not only is every (female led) relationship going to be different because people are different and interact differently, but because people experience and value things differently, at different times and in different ways. The 'difference' from or 'similarity' to other couples' solutions isn't what makes their solutions work for them, it's the worth and value they have learned by their experience that makes their solutions work for them; and the value of a fact's worth learned from experience is not easily taught to another person without the engendering experience, nor is it easily found in a (female led) relationship statistic.
To be sure, I do want to understand how men and women might initiate female led relationships (actually any kind of relationship) more easily and of course with more frequent success, and I also want people already in (female led) relationships to learn how to have happier, healthier, stronger relationships. Yet underneath these somewhat altruistic desires I think I just want to know what other people do, and why they do it because I could use such information to strengthen my own relationship, use such information as a form of fuzzy map to move myself forward more precisely. I want to understand how my wife and I reached our level of compatible complicity and how to increase it and our intimacy, and our mutual self-respect, and our love and romance, and accentuate all the other positives, without falling prey to any negatives.
On one hand, I think when faced with a tough or new situation it's perfectly natural to ask what other people do in similar circumstances, but no one has ever collected statistics specifically germane to female led relationship and there is no general consensus, no 'top five ways for the female led to solve the top five female led problems'. And yet on the other hand even if there were (as there are for other relationships) I'm not sure where or when such 'merely informational help' might become the hindering crutch of a template, an obstacle of assumption to achieving the rewards two individual people enjoy when working these things out on their own instead of whole cloth resorting to other people's frameworks and philosophies.
Relationships, all relationships, are comprised of individuals (not statistics) who experience problems and then work together to discover choices and compromises that work for them and meet their individual needs. Thus not only is every (female led) relationship going to be different because people are different and interact differently, but because people experience and value things differently, at different times and in different ways. The 'difference' from or 'similarity' to other couples' solutions isn't what makes their solutions work for them, it's the worth and value they have learned by their experience that makes their solutions work for them; and the value of a fact's worth learned from experience is not easily taught to another person without the engendering experience, nor is it easily found in a (female led) relationship statistic.
January 18, 2010
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 3
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 1
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 2
A man might gain more sex in the short term in the 'tit for tat' paradigm of sex bargaining, however he is still ostensibly, and stereotypically, looking for sex as love symbol in the long term. Thus it seems the love and romance paradigm has more benefits and seems better than the sex bargaining paradigm.
Yet, there are significant caveats with the female led paradigm line of thinking, not the least of which are that even I think I'm too biased in favor of the love and romance paradigm, that sex bargaining might work as a functional love symbol for some individuals, and last on the tip of the iceberg that these stereotypes are so wide and general it's extremely likely most couples, female led or not, have varying degrees of both paradigms and rather than only two ways, there are an infinite number of ways.
Thus, as with what is or isn't kinky, I don’t think there can be a conclusion about 'female led paradigms', other than to say what works for any couple is what works for them, and if it isn't quite working as well as they'd like there are plenty of variables for them to try adjusting.
As far as the stereotypic gendered sex and love symbols becoming reasons for couples to turn to female led relationships, it seems there may be a correlation between those stereotypes and interior reasons but again the stereotypes are so wide it's seems impossible to isolate a clear and common causal pattern.
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 2
A man might gain more sex in the short term in the 'tit for tat' paradigm of sex bargaining, however he is still ostensibly, and stereotypically, looking for sex as love symbol in the long term. Thus it seems the love and romance paradigm has more benefits and seems better than the sex bargaining paradigm.
Yet, there are significant caveats with the female led paradigm line of thinking, not the least of which are that even I think I'm too biased in favor of the love and romance paradigm, that sex bargaining might work as a functional love symbol for some individuals, and last on the tip of the iceberg that these stereotypes are so wide and general it's extremely likely most couples, female led or not, have varying degrees of both paradigms and rather than only two ways, there are an infinite number of ways.
Thus, as with what is or isn't kinky, I don’t think there can be a conclusion about 'female led paradigms', other than to say what works for any couple is what works for them, and if it isn't quite working as well as they'd like there are plenty of variables for them to try adjusting.
As far as the stereotypic gendered sex and love symbols becoming reasons for couples to turn to female led relationships, it seems there may be a correlation between those stereotypes and interior reasons but again the stereotypes are so wide it's seems impossible to isolate a clear and common causal pattern.
January 17, 2010
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 2
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 1
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 3
When a couple already strained over sex symbols turns to a female led relationship, I wonder if a woman no longer uses sex as a tool to obtain comfort and security, or if she simply uses sex differently to obtain the same goal.
It seems to me if the couple has a 'tit for tat' paradigm of sex bargaining, wherein they exchange sex for relationship control, I would argue the woman continues using sex as a tool to gain the stereotypic comfort and stability a woman desires. On the other hand it seems if the relationship paradigm is one of romantic interest, the woman need not concern herself so much with sex-tool facet of capturing and holding the attentions and resources of a willing mate.
I also think in the love and romance model the woman becomes free to more singularly pursue sex as an interior symbol of her sexuality and sex drive rather than needfully continuing to share the sex symbol with its tool capacity.
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 3
When a couple already strained over sex symbols turns to a female led relationship, I wonder if a woman no longer uses sex as a tool to obtain comfort and security, or if she simply uses sex differently to obtain the same goal.
It seems to me if the couple has a 'tit for tat' paradigm of sex bargaining, wherein they exchange sex for relationship control, I would argue the woman continues using sex as a tool to gain the stereotypic comfort and stability a woman desires. On the other hand it seems if the relationship paradigm is one of romantic interest, the woman need not concern herself so much with sex-tool facet of capturing and holding the attentions and resources of a willing mate.
I also think in the love and romance model the woman becomes free to more singularly pursue sex as an interior symbol of her sexuality and sex drive rather than needfully continuing to share the sex symbol with its tool capacity.
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