Editor’s Note: The title of this piece, which was first published in September 2011, called to me as a perfect to follow this past week’s Aries New Moon, with all those other planets in the sign of “I am.” — Amanda
By Maria Padhila
“Are you a collection of attributes that make you a desirable object, or are you something more?”
This is the question the acupuncturist put to me the other night. Hearing something like that, you can understand why I rarely go to any other doctor, and never to any other therapist anymore.
We talk, often for far more than 50 minutes, before she even gets started with any kind of treatment. And last night, she explained that it was time I made up my mind whether I was going to be real about all this — whether I was going to be a self, and regard myself as a whole.
Both marketing, the field I work in for a living, and the relentless push of social marketing urge us to think of ourselves as collections of attributes. Marketers call it that, right on the form we fill out when people want a product marketed — we begin to make a list of ‘brand attributes’. And people pay a lot of money to uncover these attributes, to find out whether the brand they’re trying to sell is one that people can trust, or that people find exciting, whether it’s homey and comforting or sophisticated and cool. What are your favorite movies? What are the five things you can’t do without? Are you Windows or Mac?
Of course, one’s brand attributes are part of the conveniences without which no one would have a conversation at the PTA or a first date. But what is the whole underneath these lists of features?
A young woman artist was talking with me about her husband and about my design for living. There are things about her that her husband didn’t understand, or that she didn’t feel like she could reveal without upsetting him. She was thinking about what I was doing, and said that it would be good to have someone else to soak up some of her intensity, someone to relieve the coziness of daily life, someone who “wants to have sex standing on our heads once in a while!”
That’s one way to see it. Sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage has been making the rounds talking about monogamy and its discontents recently. (And it’s pretty interesting that he’s being so frank even when he doesn’t have a particular product to shill; I’ve gotten used to hearing from some thinkers and writers only when they’re being forced into promotion mode.) And most of his argument is from this perspective. The New York Times Magazine cover story feature on Savage, for instance, included this:
I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me [the NY Times writer], “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.
…
“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”
I love that he included “being taken for granted” in that list of sins. And “lack of variety,” which I fear I am sometimes guilty of. And “sexual death” — the drama and legitimate gravity dwelling together in that phrase. But in essence, his argument goes that you can keep your solid, secure, marriage, and go outside of it if you have sexual needs to fill. This makes a lot of sense. People don’t always know who they are or what they need sexually going into a marriage. People change. People discover things. On top of that, marriage perhaps shouldn’t be made to bear such a heavy load — it can’t be everything to a relationship or to a person.
It can’t be everything to a whole self, much less two of them. But the approach also has a way of dividing people — not from each other, but in and of themselves. X is my daily life partner, and Y is my kink sex partner, and Z is the partner I take on ski trips.
Yes, it makes sense. It could even do a lot of good if people were honest and open about their needs and gave each other the freedom to get them filled. It’s a good way. But my way is different. I believe I’m having an experience where both men are whole to me. Am I bringing my whole self?
I’m curled up next to Isaac on the couch as we watch a movie. I like to put both arms around his chest and feel how I have to stretch a little to do it, how solid and strong he feels. I like to pet his furry arms and put my face in his crisp short hair. This is part of the collection of his attributes, and these are desirable. This is how I can describe him to you, and make you feel as if you’re part of this scene and that you understand part of the pleasure of being with him. But the whole self that I love is not something I’ll ever be able to evoke. Writers create a part of a character, and readers complete the imaginative leap that makes that character come alive. Isaac is alive. He requires no completion by anyone else.
It’s true that there are things I do and places I go with one man where the other would be bored or bewildered. That’s just part of life — people’s personalities and likes are different. But I don’t have the sense of dividing myself and my life in half, or having separate parts that each person addresses. I don’t think each sees a significantly different me. And each of them is “something more” — a full self, not a collection of attributes.
“You like your alone time, don’t you?” Chris is lying with his head in my lap, as I’m admiring his features, smoothing his eyebrows, stroking his remarkably soft hair. As much as I’m loving being with him, he’s right. I’ve been talking about all the friends he has, how he moves from gathering to gathering, always lightly in touch with some thread of a person in the large, loose web of people he knows. He remembers people’s names. He ends up helping people, often. I’m talking about how I wonder if my remoteness, my apartness, is dull or frustrating to him — especially coming right out of environments where everyone is wide open.
“I do,” I admit. “I’m also too invested in being an outsider.” It’s both a habit from childhood that comes from being unwanted and kept outside of things, and a result of being a writer. Artists tend to be comfortable outside and often stick with it to keep their perspective and powers of observation. Writers and artists spend a lot of time alone. Probably why so many of us drink and go crazy. I guess I’m willing to claim ‘writer’ as part of my Self and not just as another brand attribute, as pretentious as it seems.
I’m used to being alone, and I like it as well, even crave it. Writing is a lonely activity (which accounts for some of my compulsiveness about it — look, if I write in enough places, I’ll get back proof that someone besides me is out there). I run alone, for long stretches of time and distance, at the very least a half-hour, or up to three or four hours. You are very alone running on trails in the woods.
Shortly after I had my daughter, I remember reading about a phenomenon known as ‘touched out’. After holding, cleaning, rocking, and nursing a baby all day, some women can’t abide being touched by a lover. She wants her body back. She wants it all to herself.
I’ve realized that with all my eagerness to be with both of them — and also our daughter — I’ve forgotten to put in some of that time for myself. Once I joked in an email to the editors here that I promised to someday write a column entitled: “I’m Poly and I STILL Masturbate.” Just to stay in keeping with the values of the enterprise, you understand. But the truth there is that yes, each self benefits from a full relationship with that self, whatever the other relationships may be. Giving your sexual self to other people only is a lot like splitting part of yourself off from a marriage. It has little to do with how many orgasms you’re ‘getting’ from other people — or how much of anything you’re getting from others. Other people, whether that means one, two or 12 other people, can give you a lot, but unless you’re bringing a whole self to the relationship and recognizing another whole self, I think you’ll be only partly satisfied.
It’s gotten cold suddenly. Chris is out at work in the cold. Isaac is biking home from work, in this same cold. I’m warm inside, with my daughter. I’ve just finished making dinner, feeding Tobi now and putting the rest aside for when Isaac gets home, and now I’m trying to make some sense of this question. It will be the equinox soon, my birthday, and a year since Isaac gave me the gift of freedom to follow love. I feel I should be farther along in this, should understand more, should have more clarity about what I’m doing. But the equinox impels balance and grace, and I must have been born on that day for a reason — to learn these.