lucy wightman

Something Joe Biden said in the VP debate last night got me thinking on the seemingly unrelated topic of personal relationships, one we’ve taken up here in the past —  specifically , I’m thinking in terms of whether or not men and women can be just friends in any real way.

Biden said something to the effect that the reason he has been able to form lasting, productive relationships with other politicians over the years is because he never questions his colleagues’ motives, only their judgments. Not that I take what any politician says about his or her own track record as gospel truth, but I think there really is something special about relationships that actually stick to such a maxim. Questioning a judgment rather than motive: keeps the relationship focussed on a common goal and grants respect for the person with whom you disagree; asks the participants to put aside the tendency to let beliefs determine the facts; asks us to just relax enough to let things be as they really are and not what we fear them to be. Only then can common ground be established.

How does a belief determine the outcome? If person A believes that outcome X is inevitable regarding person B, whatever person B has to say is seen in light of that conviction. Person B’s motives, real or imagined, are now construed by person A such that all interpretations support the belief in the outcome — belief in  X precludes any possibility of Y or Z or any given alternate. In short, the belief becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The attention shifts to facets that orbit outcome X and, even if we don’t recognize it, become the selection criteria and ultimately the perceived root cause for the effects that amount to the outcome.  There is, in fact, nothing endemic to the situation that determines outcome X, except a prejudiced belief that it is the only one possible.

Politics, as with personal relationships, work best when the possibilities remain open and respect is paid. So instead of looking for some universal incompatibility that keeps men and women from becoming friends in general, perhaps it makes more sense to look at the individual beliefs that make up any given attempt at a friendship. Instead of asking can men and women be friends, try asking if you and some specific person with similar motives, hopes, aspirations, strengths, and frailties can be. It’s too easy to think that one can’t be friends with so and so because of the color of their skin or their political ideas or their taste in music or their gender; it depends on the particulars.

All of these attributes denote differences and it’s not my intent to say that we should ignore these differences. Rather, I’m suggesting that we ask ourselves if these differences present obstacles that cannot be overcome. Is there any merit in asking others to support our failures to overcome them? I think we can all agree that  loudly proclaiming, “I hate niggers” is an utterance that is well beyond our threshold of tolerance. That’s a blatant example of bigotry. While we can understand it as the utterance of a small mind that is ruled by fear, nevertheless, we wouldn’t condone it. 

Yet we barely bat an eye lash when a woman proclaims, “I hate men.” We don’t just condone it, we start looking for examples of how it’s true and rush in to validate the claim with fierce nods and sympathetic coos. We — men included — accept that men are idiots and deserve to be hated and lo and behold we start acting in a way that supports the belief. The media reinforces the idea in that men are portrayed as morons everywhere we look in today’s pop culture. It’s made to be funny and a lot of it is, but can you really shake hands with the devil and then say you’re just kidding?

And how has that become an acceptable practice? We rationalize the practice in a very weird way. We say, “hey, I’m not interested in being politically correct.” And that’s a dodge. That’s just a case of Manny being Manny, and as we’ve seen in the particular case of Manny, it’s sometimes really for the best that Manny go be Manny someplace far, far away. Go Bay!

So they left little gaps and imperfections, deliberate lacunae that kept things alive for another day. To them, comprehensiveness was tantamount to suffocation. Aesthetically and literally, Navajos always left themselves an out.

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I have this friend — well, she’s not really a friend. More like a would-be friend who can never quite overcome the hurdles or risks inherent in getting close to me. She sends me notes at 3:30 in the morning, while I’m asleep, saying how she’d like to be closer. She even goes so far as to suggest some things we could do together, like drink beer and count the red cars on Route 495. I respond that I’d like that, especially the beer part, and I brag a little that I can count all the way up to a butt-ton, and yes, without a doubt, we should do that… But then, presumably in the light of day, she recognizes that nothing I say or do (including drinking beer and counting red cars, even a butt-ton of them) conforms to her idea of what a person she could be friends with would do and say, and she then starts sending emails that include subtle hints of how perhaps I should seek professional help. This strikes me as odd. She wants to be friends with me but only with the new and improved version of me she thinks could emerge after a round or three of behavioral modifications. How crazy is that? Does she really think I’m that desperate for a friend? She’s nice and all but I’d never be friends with someone who couldn’t accept me the way I am. But then something within compels me to take a long hard look at exactly who I am and what it could be in my personality that makes me such an anathema to “normal” folk and how maybe, just maybe, a ‘script or two and/or some professionally guided “soul-searching” could do me a world of good.

But in the end, I reject that and reason that maybe it has nothing to do with me at all. It could be her. Maybe she is split between two worlds where what she truly wants and what others approve of her wanting are at odds, and she’s having trouble resolving it? Maybe she has low self-esteem and assumes that anyone who wants to be close with her has got to be crazy. I really don’t know. I do know that it makes me sad now when I think of her, especially at 3:30 AM and I’ve been drinking beer and a red car goes zooming by; I wonder if she saw the same car twenty minutes ago and, like me, is wondering where it’s headed. In that imagined space, my hand makes dialing motions over the cover of the phone that has stored in its memory banks every digit of her number but the last, which she withheld, perhaps on the grounds that red cars only ever get into trouble.

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you — all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress.

Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?  — FN, 1882