azurelunatic

Serious question:
Is there some part of you that wants to be punished for loving someone? Of course he will react if you do things he doesn't want. And you know that, because you keep doing things he doesn't want. But it doesn't seem to factor in when you're around him again. So I have to wonder if there is some weird reason you want him to reject you.

If I could answer that, I wouldn't be this frustrated. I don't know why I keep doing things that I know he doesn't like. I've been trying to figure it out. I have not been able to.

I hope, for your sake, that this isn't an attention thing. (Not that I blame you for wanting attention -- everyone's an attention junkie to a degree.) In any case, you deserve better than to be hit spontaneously. Unless that's how you *really* like things.

After thinking about it, and talking it over with him, I think that somewhere in my brain, there's something that just refuses to accept the idea that he doesn't like hugs from friends. I'm good about not touching when I'm wide awake and in full control of myself, and can slow down my thought processes to the point where the checkpoint "Wait: Darkside doesn't do the hug thing, that weirdo" will actually have time to make an impact on my actions, and instead of hugging him, I can make a face at him, or slug him gently in the arm, or do something else other than hugging him.

I've noticed that times I tend to get more huggy are moments when I am more inclined to react or act without thinking: when getting a particularly buggy bit of program to work, for example. Instead grinning, turning to him, and saying, "Thanks for your help", the sped-up version that barges past the internal censors is hug-and-kiss. Or when particularly tired, I'll tend to make more physical contact.

It could well be attention. I'd hope that it wouldn't be, but it might. I'll see if trying to implement extra safeguards against impulsive physical contact with him will do the trick.

When acting naturally with a close friend who I'm physically comfortable with, I'm usually all over them. Touch face, pet hair, give hug, slug arm, tickle, mime knee to groin, occasionally kiss to cheek for moments of extreme fondness or excitement. As Darkside and I are constantly sparring (playing Mercy, bonking over head, slug arm, punch stomach, kick ass, nerve pinch), I suppose I do classify him among people I'm physically comfortable with. Unfortunately, I wrote it as a subset of my normal physically-comfortable friendships, when actually it should be written as an overlapping-in-places but unrelated class.

Hmm. False perception of inheritance. Hmm.

For the record, I'm always tickled to see computer science metaphors describing aspects of the human condition. :)

I'll say something of lots more substance soon... currently distracted by work weirdness.

I find it interesting; that's the best way I have of describing the way my mind works, in many cases. I was introduced to Venn Diagrams early, and found that they were very descriptive, and promptly incorporated them into the way my mind in fact did work.

Being the daughter of a programmer probably did help.

For this, the punch to the stomach was really not the part of his reaction to my careless action that bothered me; we do beat up on each other for fun all the time. That's an integral part of the friendship (and probably, according to my above analysis, a partial root of all the trouble). It wasn't a particularly hard punch; we hit each other harder every day. The component of his reaction that hurt was the expression on his face and the tone in his voice. His reaction probably would have been more hurtful to me had he refrained from touching me at that moment.

But it definitely is worth looking into, with what I think of love, and how much I deserve to have it. I may in fact be self-sabotaging.

It helps, though, in not screwing things entirely up, to have someone like Darkside to be in love with. If he were Shawn, he'd have given me enough rope to hang myself; not only that, but he would have tied it in a noose before handing it to me.

It's entirely novel to love someone who thinks the best of me while having a rather realistic assessment of my various not-so-great quirks, and to think the best of them in return, with a complementary view of their not-so-great side. I haven't experienced anything like this either for a very long time, or forever.

I honestly think that the greatest element involving my sabotage of the relationship is my thinking that I have, that through my sheer clumsiness I have ruined everything -- and finding it to be not so. It may be that I'm testing the boundaries of this. I'll have to think about that one in greater depth.

Well, I suppose if you feel compelled to do destruction-testing of relationships, this one is a relatively good one to start with, since it is declared as non-romantic.

However, it's not a habit I'd be comfortable about forming. "Would you still love me if I did this? How about this?".

I don't think it's so much destruct-testing as the slow unleashing of myself. The self I am around most people is very highly restrained. In destruct-testing, I would go deliberately looking for things that might or might not piss him off, and do them to see if they would.

This, and most of my other griefs with him, seem to be the result of those things getting out that we usually discuss, afterwards, in this fashion: "I'm sorry," I say. "For being human?" he asks. On the occasions when I continue with, "I'm still sorry," he insists that "We're all human. None of us are perfect," and continues with some bit of himself that he perceives that I'm none too thrilled with.

It's the "Do you love me when my clothes are off and the lights are on" procedure, I guess. We've all got those human, not-too-loveable traits, the things that we just keep doing that are a part of us: everybody's irritating little habits. Votania doesn't adhere to my particular order of putting stuff in the dishwasher; she just puts stuff in any old which way. (They still fit in there, and get washed; it's just a little thing that occasionally grumps me if I'm in a bad mood.) Adam forgot to put the seat down on the toilet. I will insist upon cleaning out my nose with Q-tips when blowing it is just not enough.

I do tend to destruct-test the "Hi, this is me!" procedure with brand-new friends. "Hi, I'm a bisexual Wiccan polyamorous sci-fi fan who has in the past had multiple personalities and may have them at the moment. Nice to meet you!" The people who will get scared and run away, I have just destruct-tested out of a friendship. Little by little over time, I show more of the bits of myself that always come out when I'm alone, and come out more or less depending on who else I'm around.

Most relationships that I have get the comfort level, the leashed-ness level, defined fairly early on. There's a standard set of myself that I use in a professional setting, for example, akin to the manners I'd use at a formal resturant, which occasionally do not make an exact match to the manners I'd use at a picnic. Slowly, the boundaries may either relax, or be tightened, but almost always, after a period of settling, they are defined at a general level, and there, unless something happens to disturb things, they stay.

Darkside and I are still slowly getting to know each other, and our boundaries have not yet reached their equilibrium point. Unfortunately, our boundaries have a tendancy to vary in some places, and physical contact is one of them. Some days I may not be huggy at all. Some days, I may be hugging all over the place. Some days, he may not mind. Some days he does mind; sometimes it varies (for either of us) by the minute. Sometimes we give each other advanced warning when our mood shifts; sometimes we don't. It's the times that we don't that we have trouble. When my personalities shift around, I have to learn a whole new set of my own responses, and how I'm likely to interact with him.

I'm going to try to start documenting who I am when I do things that piss him off, and what else has been going on then, to see if I can't get a better idea of how I do what I do, and from there to the why.

In most relationships, where there's an accidental one of those "too much of myself" moments, whether it be informational or otherwise, the incident is logged and rarely, if ever, repeated. Much of the time, with me, and very probably with him, we keep other people at a great enough distance so little oversteps of the boundaries are noted with very little personal impact, a *thunk* "Ok, don't do that again." With Darkside and me, we've gotten close enough so a small motion may wind up with someone's fingers sticking up someone else's nose, and a general confusion as to how, exactly, we got there.

*

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject