The Mandelbear's Musings

I'm not really sure how to go about this. And it's getting late. So I'm going to take the easy way out...

REDACTED: That was bloody stupid of me, wasn't it? Bears can be clumsy sometimes. I'm leaving this in place for the sake of the comments, which I found very valuable, but if you want me to remove yours just let me know.

This post should have been sent in email or a private message. I'm really sorry about any damage I caused with it, and will try to be more careful and less clumsy in the future. In particular, I need to stop posting about what I think is going on in other people's heads -- I'm extremely bad at it.

I will, however, stand by what I think is the point I ought to have been making, which is that when somebody has demonstrated that they don't have full control of what's going on in their own head, it will take more than a few weeks of good intentions to get it back. It may take a year or two of hard work.

And that I think such a person's friends would be doing them a service to remind them of that fact.

This is largely a continuation of the discussion I started in Friendship and love a long while ago. You should probably go read it soon. It was getting long, had been in the queue for altogether too long, and I had a particular reason for posting it when I did. But it wasn't the end of the story by any means. This post has been in the queue even longer by now, and it looks as though there will still be more to say. But Valentine's Day seemed like a good excuse to finally post it.

Unlike F&L, which was mainly about the emotion of love and what the word means, this post is about talking about love, and in particular talking about it between friends. I don't have a whole lot of experience in this department -- in fact, I'm so far out of my depth that I can't touch bottom -- so if you have anything to add or to correct in this one, please do. It could probably also stand a thorough going-over to see whether I still believe anything I say in it. It won't get it.

So, is it love? Should we talk about it?

You know, if you have to ask either question, the answer is probably "yes." Well, if I have to ask either question--I don't know how it is for you.

The first one is pretty easy, at least with my definition of love as an emotional relationship worth taking seriously. If the question comes up at all, you're taking the relationship seriously enough to call it "love", at least to a first approximation. It probably won't come up unless one of you has recognized some of the symptoms of falling in love (the subject of a future post, perhaps). How do you refine that approximation? Ask your friend for help.

(As an aside, I think that missing your friend -- thinking about them when they're not around, wondering whether they'll call, feeling happy when they do -- is a good indication that that there's enough of an emotional connection to be worth at least talking about and clarifying.)

You'll notice I'm assuming that you are friends. If not, start by becoming friends, unless all you're looking for is a whirlwind romance that's likely to end quickly and perhaps painfully. I don't have any advice for you in that case.

The second one is even easier, especially if your friend has just started the conversation. You need to talk about it.

I'm also assuming that one of you is a geek.

I'm using "geek" here to mean someone a lot like me: someone not very in touch with their feelings. We geeks tend to be shy, inexperienced, and socially awkward, though there are exceptions and some of us hide a core of deep shyness under a veneer of superficial friendliness. We have trouble expressing ourselves in social situations and especially in relationships. We tend to be very analytical (as you can see), and prefer to overanalyze social situations rather than diving in and going on intuition. We either don't have much in the way of intuition, or don't trust it. We can't "read" other people, and have to rely on analysis again to figure out what the other person in a conversation is thinking or feeling. We don't understand people very well.

I could also have used the term "loner", as I did a few weeks months ago. Perhaps even "introvert". No matter. If you see yourself or your friend in that description, I'm talking to you.

If neither of you fits very much of this description, go for it, and have fun. I probably can't help you much except to say "be friends first." If you're in touch with your feelings but tend to have trouble expressing them, you can probably proceed as if you're a geek; that's pretty much where I am these days -- a recovering geek who's trying to figure out this whole "being human" thing.

The remaining three cases might be better analyzed by thinking about which end of the conversation you're on: are you a geek trying to talk to your friend about your love for them, or are you a non-geek trying to talk to a geek about your love for them? Or, in the third case, are you a geek with a friend who says they love you? Are you a geek in love, in love with a geek, or a loved geek?

We'll take those in reverse order, which also turns out to be in order of increasing difficulty. Did I mention that we geeks tend to be analytical?

Are you a loved geek?

This one is easy, because your friend has already done the hard part and started the conversation. You're loved. Cool!

Now you have to take a good look at your feelings, which isn't exactly easy, but let's face it: you've been given a broad hint about where to start looking. It may take a while to figure it out, but that's OK. The main things to remember are that you're friends, and friends like to talk to one another, and you're a geek, and geeks like to figure things out. It may be a very different conversation than you're used to, and a very different problem from any you've solved before. Nothing wrong with that.

It's not that simple, of course. This may be a completely new experience. Even if you've had people fall in love with you before it probably came out of nowhere, from someone you thought of as "just a good friend". You're going to have to totally re-think that relationship.

If the person who asked is not a geek -- and they probably aren't, considering -- this is probably as new and weird an experience for them as it is for you. Maybe weirder. They may not realize that you're totally unlike anyone they've ever fallen in love with before.

You need to recognize that they probably haven't thought it through -- they're going on intuition. They may be terribly disappointed if you don't immediately say that you love them back, or if where you'd like to see the relationship going is different from where they see it going.

Tough. This might take a while.

You're going to have to figure out what you mean by love. We geeks don't always have "falling in love" as a guide -- if you didn't hear bells and choirs of angels when your friend said "I love you", don't worry. I'd been married to Colleen for years before I had anything approximating that feeling.

I've also had the fascinating experience of falling in love without realizing it at first, and taking even longer to figure out just who I had fallen in love with. It's going to be hard for your friend to understand just how unsure you are of your feelings. Talk it over.

Are you in love with a geek?

(I'm assuming you're the non-geek in this conversation. Otherwise it reduces to the next case.)

If you're waiting for your geek to start the conversation, to say they love you, don't hold your breath. Seriously: even if they know they love you back, they're probably too shy to say anything. And they probably don't know. You may be dead certain that they love you, but they aren't likely to have even thought about it until you speak up.

Don't hint, either. They won't notice. They can't read people the way you can. You're going to have to be direct.

Bear in mind that this is probably going to be at least as weird an experience for you as it is for them. Maybe weirder -- it's entirely possible that your geek has had relationships with non-geeks before. You probably haven't.

If you're comfortable saying "I love you" to someone you've fallen in love with, you're probably used to getting an instant response: either a quick "Oh, I love you too!" or an equally quick and hopefully gentle rejection. You're probably not used to bafflement, stunned silence, or outright fear. You've probably never heard someone say "I have no idea what that means." Brace yourself.

The geek you've fallen in love with might well find that they love you without having "fallen in love" at all. Or they might not have any idea what love is -- the prevailing cultural myths and assumptions about love don't apply to them. Figuring it all out is going to take time. Maybe months. Maybe longer.

Hang on to your friendship. That's your lifeline, your connection. Work with your friend on figuring out what your relationship is, and where it wants to go. Don't get too hung up on whether you both call it "love" -- that's not the important thing. The important thing is to figure out what you both want. I'll get back to that.

Are you a geek in love?

If you have to start the conversation -- if you love your friend but they haven't said anything about loving you -- things may get a little complicated. Maybe not -- it's possible that they love you too, and simply were too shy to say so. In that case, the game's over: you both win. Keep talking.

(There are lots of reasons why your friend might not have said anything. Maybe they're a geek too, and simply hadn't noticed or hadn't thought about the possibility. Or maybe, especially if they're not a geek, you simply didn't fit the "person in love" pattern they're used to. They don't realize that the "falling in love" part may be optional for you, or that you've gotten good at hiding your emotions, sometimes even from yourself. But it doesn't matter: you're talking.)

It's also possible that your friend doesn't love you, or hadn't thought about the possibility, or simply has such a different idea of love that they can't wrap their head around your version. It's important to remember that, in that case, you still have your friendship. And what's more, you're talking about your friendship.

Of course, that means you have to start talking. That's the hard part. It's also the part of this discussion where I have the least experience.

My friend pocketnaomi occasionally speaks of "my habit of throwing my heart over a wall and jumping after it" -- and of sometimes having to haul it back by main force and worry about how many pieces got left behind. She's very shy, but she isn't a geek -- she knows where she wants her heart to go.

My own experience is more like having my heart dive off a cliff and wait at the bottom -- sometimes whimpering plaintively, sometimes making silly faces at me where I can't see it but everybody else can -- until I finally figure out where it went and summon the courage to dive after it. My main worry is whether I'll land on top of it and squash it flat.

Usually my friend throws me a rope; jumping off on my own would be scary. I think the biggest fear is whether saying something about love would damage the ongoing friendship. All I can say is that it probably wouldn't. It never has, when someone said it to me, or when I've said it to someone else.

Hmm. I think there's a lot to say here, but in the near-total absence of any recent experience, I'm probably not the one to be giving advice.

I do know this: you can't start exploring without starting the journey. If you don't start, you're always going to wonder where it would have taken you.

What do we talk about?

Mostly, you have to talk about what your relationship is, and where you want it to go, not what to call it.

Yes, one of you might feel more strongly connected than the other. One of you might even be willing to call that connection "love", while the other continues to insist that's it's merely deep friendship. One of you might have fallen in love, or noticed the symptoms, while the other hasn't even considered it as a possibility. Very likely, speaking from my own experience. But how can one really tell? Is it a difference of emotion, or of committment, or merely of personal terminology?

You have to ask questions like "What do you mean by {love, romance, friendship}?" "What do you want out of this relationship?" If you're starting the conversation, you should have at least preliminary answers ready.

Again, this is something that I have no recent experience with, though I can speculate. More later, perhaps.

The River winds back and forth across the wide, unmarked valley between Love and Friendship. Which side you're closest to at any given moment is less important than who's beside you on the journey. When you get down to it the River posts, like the song that inspired their name, are mostly about love and friendship.

Some people can draw a bright line between their emotions, and know with absolute certainty "I love X, but Y is just a close friend." They may even be able to say "I love Z, but Z is not my friend." I've never been able to do that. Even now, after 32+ years of marriage and my new-found insight into my feelings, I still can't do that. Sometimes it's very hard for me to tell whether somebody is an acquaintance or a friend; a close friend or someone I love. I'm not sure it matters that much to me. It matters, but I'll get back to that.

What I call "love" has always grown out of deep, close friendship.

Take another look at the second verse of The River:

When you're cold and alone in high hills of spent passion
Or lost in dark valleys of grief and despair
Remember clear water runs down to the river
And follow your friendship to lead you back there.

It's a river so deep that we can't see the bottom,
A river so long we can't walk to the end;
We'll journey together beside the clear water;
As deep and as long as the love of a friend.

Unlike the people who, apparently, associate "love" primarily with the intense but comparatively transient experience of falling in love, I've never been tempted to confuse the two -- I had what I call love first.

I've never fallen in love with a stranger, or with someone I hardly knew. I've never had the feeling that I'd found My One True Love, and would be happy forever if only she loved me back. I've never had the feeling that this one person was essential to my happiness, or that I could never be happy with anyone else. I've been desperately lonely, to be sure, but never desperately in love.

Because love, for me, is based on friendship, I've never had to worry about losing it. We may get closer or farther apart, but the friendship remains. I've never had to worry about rejection: I may be disappointed if a relationship doesn't go as far as I'd like it to go, but the friendship remains.

This is probably going to get long, but it's too important to cut. Deal with it.

I'll tell you a story:

Colleen and I were friends for a long time. She first spotted me the year I started grad school, as she was sitting with friends in the Stanford coffeehouse. We met now and then; went for walks together, met at events of various sorts, had long talks. At some point we started sleeping together. It was some time after that, that I felt comfortable saying "I love you." I'd never been in love before, you see. It really didn't feel that much different from being best friends. I'm not sure it does even now, after our love and friendship have deepened. There is a difference, but it's hard for me to say exactly what it is.

In effect, Colleen and I started our marriage, after a year of living together and four years of friendship, with the kind of love usually associated with "old married" couples: with friendship, trust, and a confident delight in one another's company. Yes, we've had disagreements, sometimes loudly enough to alarm the kids. But our friendship is solid enough to survive the occasional disagreement.

Even up to a couple of years after our marriage, I don't think I had any real certainty that what I was feeling could properly be called "love". There was never a moment of epiphany, no bells or choirs of angels, no desperate longing. But we'd been living together, sharing our lives, our fortunes, our kitchen, our roof and our bed, for most of a year, and I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my best and dearest friend, and that was enough no matter what you call it.

I told her so, and we became formally engaged, exactly 33 years ago today: October 11th, 1975. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

So, does it matter what you call it?

Oddly enough, it does matter. It matters very much. I'm not sure exactly why, but I'll give you what I have at the moment.

Certainly, it matters to other people. Across the huge semantic gulf that separates me from most other people, even with the necessary disclaimers and qualifiers required to bridge that gulf, saying "I love you" sends a strong, if uncomfortably ambiguous, signal.

And it matters to me, even if I'm not certain what it means. Mostly, I think, using the word "love" says that the emotional component of the relationship is serious enough to be taken seriously.

That's it, really. When love comes into a relationship, on your end of the conversation or on mine, it means that the emotional component of that relationship is strong enough to matter. Something that's worth talking about. Working on. Caring about. Nurturing. Fighting for, maybe. Enjoying and celebrating, certainly. Committing to, perhaps.

That's it?

Almost certainly not, but it's what I can think of at the moment. Oh, sure, there's a lot more. But it all seem to come out of taking the emotional relationship seriously enough to want it to continue, and deepen. (Disclaimer: I'm new to this game. I could be totally wrong about all this.)

Let's take sex, for example. It's not called "making love" for nothing. But what's the difference between casual, recreational sex and sex with someone you love, if not that you're taking it, and its place in your relationship, seriously? You care about one another. It makes you feel closer, more connected, more joyful. If you're just starting out, taking it seriously means that you've taken the time and the care to talk about it and what it will do to your relationship.

Or look at the potentially difficult topics of platonic love and romantic friendship. See how simple they become when you realize that love is "just" a deeper and more emotionally-connected form of friendship?

I'm not sure I believe this analysis myself. Next week I'll probably think of some fatal flaw; I'm sure this won't be my last post exploring this topic. And certainly what I mean by "love" seems to be a lot different from what other people mean by it. Can we still communicate? I hope so. I'll get back to that.

But what about falling in love?

Yes, there's limerence, that "falling-in-love feeling" -- I'm getting a little better at recognizing it now. I don't think I felt it when Colleen and I were courting; but I've felt it several times since. Falling in love, repeatedly, with the person you're already married to is simply delightful, and saves a great deal of emotional wear-and-tear -- and tears, for that matter. I've fallen in love a couple of times with other women, fairly recently; that's a subject for another post, perhaps.

It's entirely possible that I wasn't really capable of falling in love thirty years ago: I've gone through some huge emotional changes since then. Or perhaps I was simply a lot less in touch with my emotions.

But I hadn't felt it before I fell in with Colleen. I've never fallen in "love at first sight", or fallen in love with anyone but a friend. Maybe that disqualifies me from having an opinion worth listening to on the subject. Or maybe it qualifies me by making me more objective. Here it is, anyway, for what it's worth:

At best, limerence is an indication that the potential for love is there. New Relationship Energy (NRE), the delightful feeling of starting a new relationship, is also a hint at best. At worst they're powerful drugs that you can easily get addicted to. When the effect wears off you might find yourself in the arms of your best friend and lover, amazed that you never understood what love really is. That's if you're lucky. Or you may find yourself in the bed of a stranger, wondering what in blazes possessed you. You may find yourself unable to pull yourself out of a horrible, abusive relationship because, every once in a while, you get another fix.

(Colleen's comment is that, of course, she fell in love with me at first sight. She had the good sense, rather than tell me immediately and risk almost certain rejection, to patiently cultivate my friendship until it was safe to tell me. That works.)

It's best to be friends first.

So here we are, back again, with friendship. I recommend it.

To be honest, I have no way of knowing whether a long-term relationship would work without at least one partner falling in love with the other. I think it would, but it would probably take a long time to even be recognized as something beyond "mere" friendship.

I'm pretty sure a long-term relationship won't last without friendship. And I think it needs a strong enough emotional bond that both parties are comfortable calling it "love" and committing to working with their friend to keep it going.

Life is a war, and nobody gets out of it alive. The best you can hope to manage is an honorable defeat.

The River winds back and forth across the wide, unmarked valley between Love and Friendship. Which side you're closest to at any given moment is less important than who's beside you on the journey.

So now that (in their terminology) I've chosen not to be a Landmark user, what now?

(Just as an aside, the "perfect and absolute blank" map from The Hunting of the Snark is still particularly appropriate: it has no landmarks.)

In this post, I'm not going to discuss what was useful to me in L (I've done that, at least in a sketchy way, in this post), and I'm not going to discuss why it's neither ethical nor safe for me to continue to try and get more tools from them -- that's covered pretty well here.

... and where I go from here.

Last week I wrote a song called "The River". It was all about love, friendship, and flow.

That is what I want to work on. It's going to be a process, a journey down that river. It's going to pull in things from the Tao Te Ching, The Art of Loving, The Art of Computer Programming, and who knows what else.

If you choose to walk with me, I'll be glad of the company. I think I can promise you some interesting discussions and perhaps some interesting scenery, if nothing else.

Thank you, friends. All of you.

(Final aside: future posts on this topic in this journey will not be friends-locked unless absolutely necessary; they may be cut-tagged if they get long. They will not mention L by name. You'll find them under the tag river; the next one will probably be a refined version of this one without the back-references.)

Questions? Comments?