Thursday, February 03, 2011
A lesson from tragedy
There's a shy man that I've been trying to be real friends with for ages. We'd made significant progress, and things seemed pretty good. Then, tragedy struck, and I tearfully called him for help, and suddenly, we had a radical increase in closeness. When I was talking to him today, teasing him about how he used to be scared of me and thus hard for me to get to know, he blurted out, "It's just that you're usually such a tower of strength, and..." and then caught himself and shifted the subject. This immediately reminded me of something that had puzzled me all my life, from the movie "D.A.R.Y.L."; the android boy can't get close to his foster mother, and someone tells him that it's because he's too perfect, and that he has to screw up to get her to care for him. He does, and then she does.
I think I get it now. It's about vulnerability. People want to feel like you're human, like there's emotional give and take between you, like you might need them rather than being INvulnerable and always able to handle everything... well, some male friendships might lack that, and some women go for men of stone, but I think in general that this is true, because in movies anyone shown as "too perfect" is also shown as obnoxious, rather than admirable like they should be.
The point here, and I do have one, is that this man, this intelligent, modern and evolved man, had an immediate and major emotional escalation with me the moment I showed major vulnerability. I'm warm, friendly and affectionate with people, so it's not like I went from cold to warm... and I just remembered a story about a woman who'd been in some sort of accident or... earthquake?... and walked home in a daze. When she knocked on the door (she didn't have her purse), and her boyfriend saw her, filthy, hair and clothes a wreck, his reaction was to instantly initiate sex with her. When questioned later, he said that she always looked so perfect that he was afraid to mess her up, so somehow her looking like she got dragged behind a truck was a turn-on. Notice the sarcasm? This is still crazy to me, but it's part of the same concept; a perfect appearance is a sort of shield, a mask of invulnerability, and people want to be able to see imperfection in you to enable them to feel comfortable, secure, affectionate, or attracted.
Lesson learned.
