Edition #161: To Be Loved, or To Be Understood?

That is the question. Plus, pastries in Mexico City, little joys for 2024, and how to choose your life partner.

Mar 14, 2024

Buenos dias from Mexico City! I’m here for just over a week and it is my first time visiting. Did you know about the insane pastry game in Mexico City? I did not, but have been thus far delighted by the selection and quality of pastries available. The air here is currently very polluted and my lungs have been struggling. The good news is you can get an inhaler for $5 at the pharmacy, no doctor’s visit required. The small miracles of non-American healthcare systems!

The past few weeks have been a chaotic assortment of getting my Costa Rica vehicle up to code, packing up my life and hitting the road again, and rehabbing my injured knee. For the rest of March, I’ll be oscillating between the US and Mexico, including a highly anticipated trip in which I will attend my niece’s 8th birthday party. I cannot wait.

Enjoy today’s edition, proof that I’m not entirely over the personal essay.

A Note From the Editor

In a small room in midtown Manhattan, our group of nine gathered each Wednesday evening for an intro to creative writing class. We were an eclectic assortment of adults with different backgrounds, careers, and personalities, but the one thing we had in common was our novice in the craft. Over the course of ten weeks, each of us would have the two chances to workshop our short stories.

The first time getting a piece of creative writing workshopped is nerve-wracking. Everyone in the class reads your work beforehand, then discusses it aloud for 10-15 minutes while you sit in silence. Given our status as newer writers, our work wasn’t all that good yet. Neither were the critiques. “I didn’t like the main character,” or “I didn’t really get it,” were among the sentiments expressed in those early workshops. Three years later, in an online playwriting class, a different instructor informed my small cohort that negative critiques were not allowed during scene workshopping. I understood the intent, but didn't necessarily agree with it.

The most perfect approach came during my second, more advanced creative writing class. Our teacher sent out an essay about how to be most useful in a workshop setting. The directive was not to critique blindly by pointing out random tidbits you didn’t like for the sake of participation, nor was it to say only positive things about the work for the sake of ego-protection. Instead, the first step was to read the story carefully and attempt to understand it.

Some questions you might ask yourself after reading a piece: what was the overall mood of the story? How would you summarize the story in a few sentences? What do you think the author was trying to do? What ideas were they trying to explore? Only then, once you had attempted to understand the work, would you critique it, and your critiques would be oriented towards improving the story based on what you thought the author was trying to do.

I once believed in the eloquent words of Simone Wells; that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Attention, so rarely given in full form, is beautiful and temporary. In the creative writing workshop, we paid hundreds of dollars for the miracle of full attention from a room of people who engaged with our messy, rough pile of words. A gift!

The truer, deeper gift was not purely the attention itself, but those geneorus classmates and teachers who attempted, in earnest, to understand what we were trying to say.

_____

I’ve been dating on and off for most of my adult life. I’ve dated in New York City and Scottsdale, Maui and Los Angeles, Costa Rica and London. I am an expert dater purely for the number of dates I have been on, the number of origin stories I’ve listened to, and the number of text messages I’ve constructed and interpreted.

We all date for different reasons, and my reasons have shifted and evolved over time. At the core, I'm pretty sure we're all seeking partnership because we're simple humans and humans want to be loved (and because of societal pressure, but that's another essay). During the dating process, our minds and hearts come together to build a personal algorithm. This algorithm, complex and deeply rooted, helps us decide whether we think we might be able to love this person and be loved by them in return. We collect data in the socially accepted format of Getting To Know You Questions, asking things like:

What do you do for work? Do you like your job?
Where did you grow up?
What’s your family like? Are you close to them?
What do you do for fun?
Who are your closest friends? How did you meet them? What are they like?

These questions spur conversations, allowing us to naturally discover more details about the person. Our brain begins to craft a narrative supported by the facts we’ve gathered. We're identifying patterns, we're seizing up, we're doing laps in a warm pool of confirmation bias.

Oliver was a competitive tennis player growing up. He planned to go pro until a knee injury ended his tennis career sophomore year of college. Oliver was never able to impress his father post-tennis career, so he works very hard at his banking job because he's still seeking Daddy's validation a decade later. If you end up with Oliver you will live a life of material comfort, but you won’t see him much and you’ll end up doing most of the parenting. Do you really want an absent partner?

Such is the logical pattern of dating: meet, gather information, gauge feelings, and assess. We are constantly analyzing how this person's actions make us feel. We are measuring this person up to a yardstick of our own making; do they have the qualities we want in a partner? Are they suitable for us? We are the leading role, the casting agent and director, while the other person is simply auditioning for a supporting role.

I often wonder if there is a different way to date and have been attempting to experiment with it recently. Instead of arriving at a situation trying to measure someone against a set of standards I have created, I attempt (keyword!) to observe them as they are, free of my emotions and projections. I try to escape my algorithm.

To do this, I must not be the sole star of the show. The date is not primarily about what this person did and said and how it made me feel; it is also about listening and observing. I've attempted to strengthen my repertoire of Getting To Know You Questions—instead of orienting my questions in such a way that cobbles together a simplified backstory of the person, I try to formulate level 2 questions that relate to their present life, such as:

How have you been feeling these days?
What are some things you do that can always put you in a good mood?
Have you met any interesting people lately? Tell me about them.
What would your ideal day be like, from the time you woke up to the time you went to bed?
What are you most proud of?

This approach to dating, removing the I as the primary driving force, is not instinctual, but it has merit. If I am going to love another person, I want to be able to give them the gift of my most humble attempts to know who they are. I do not want to project onto them, to be disappointed when they do not live up to an idolized version I have created in my mind. I want to see them for who they actually are.

Have you ever been loved by someone who, in retrospect, did not truly understand you? Maybe they loved the idea of you, their mental shape of you. Maybe, as you began to notice the things they loved about you, you inadvertently dialed up those characteristics and concealed others. It feels nice to be loved, but love can become constricting when it is conditional, when the condition requires maintaining a facade, attempting to embody someone else’s idea of who you are.

As much as I want to be loved, what I crave most is to be understood. Without understanding, love can feel lonely and life can feel isolating. But to understand another person is a slow process. It requires silence and deep listening. It requires the repression of natural urges; to shout out loud what we didn’t like about the story, to write someone off for a small comment, to draw conclusions without listening, without seeing. Luckily I’ve been riding that slow-life train for a scant few years now, so I think this approach is possible. At the very least, the intent is alive in my mind: work first to understand.

Cheers my dears and as always, thank you for reading Eat. pastry this weekend, hug a friend, practice listening without immediately responding. Until next time,

Did You Know…Parents in Iceland must adhere to strict baby naming laws?

I had no idea that Iceland has a list of approved names for expecting parents to choose from. If you want to choose a name that isn’t on the list, you can apply to have your desired name added, though the committee can reject your request. Browsing the list of rejected names made me chuckle, especially considering the wild, wild world of celebrity baby names.

Bonus Content (Dancing in the Street)

I imagine Mick Jagger and David Bowie ate a bunch of candy (or did a bunch of blow), called their friend with a hand held VHS, and then shot this music video. You cannot not giggle at least once while watching this. Also, an absolutely iconic Halloween costume idea.

Also, this Tweet hits hard.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Perhaps one did one want to be loved so much as to be understood.“

-1984 by George Orwell

that's so interesting

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