(no subject)

[magistrate]

How many people are socialized into a position where they feel that they have to survive on the scraps of affection left over from other people's "real" relationships?

What are ways of repairing this (broken) social schema?

Comments

[dchan]

Been trying to figure that one out myself. Mostly it involves plugging my fingers in my ears and going "LA LA LA LA MY EMOTIONS DON'T EXIST," which is really just about the LEAST healthy way to go about doing these things.

[magistrate]

Yeah; don't do that. It's not great.

I think that part of the problem is that defining "Real" relationships begins to put gatekeeping on interaction, especially affectionate ones; by affirming/recognizing certain relationships over others, affection can face a sort of rationing. No, you can only hug/kiss a significant other, anything else Is Wrong. No, I'm not that close to someone; I can't ask for a favor. No, se's not Y's friend; se shouldn't ask Y out for coffee, even if it's just coffee. Which leads to a lot of things that just don't get through that gatekeeping, which is not a healthy way for society to operate, imho.

[dchan]

I've always taken a somewhat liberal view of such thing, which has thankfully thus far not caused me any trouble. But I can feel that I'm being socialized in a certain way by society and it's highly confusing to me. Just because a female-presenting person and a guy went out for a dinner and a play, does that mean they went on a date? Should such things be Not Allowed? We had fun together, so I say we should keep doing it. But what if he gets the wrong idea and interprets our funtimes as a precursor to a relationship?

In terms of hugging/kissing non-significant others, I'm afraid that's a nasty artifact of my fear of being touched. I'm working on it, but most of the time such things needs to be on my terms. Same with favors, I hatehatehate feeling indebted to people so I try not to ask, close friend or no, and I'm always trying to leave wide-open escape routes.

The biggest issue that I run across is what happens when you discover the person (/people) you like in a potentially romantic manner are already in romantic relationships with other people. What do you say? Do you even tell them, or would that make them too uncomfortable? Hence my usual response of sticking my fingers in my ears and going "LA LA LA LA MY FEELINGS DON'T EXIST." That way no one will ever know there was any kind of problem and can go on living their lives blissfully unaware of the situation, and I can just go hang out in denial.

The one problem with that is that feelings don't just go away, much as I would like to pretend they don't exist sometimes...

P.S. I don't know if you know this but the coding on the text box on the reply form is kind of borked. It extends past what should be the righthand boundary of the main section and starts overlapping the calendar/tags.