The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World
A deeply reflective primer on creating meaningful connections, rebuilding abundant communities, and living in a way that engages our full humanity in an age of unprecedented anxiety and loneliness—from the author of The Tech-Wise Family.
Distance works in time as well as space. Frequency of contact indicates closeness, so contacting someone often can be a transgression. Rather than 'getting to know you better,' they can maintain the same distance as the circumstances when you first met. Thus, many foreigners say they can't make friends with Japanese.
Much use of silence. Large private self vs. small public self. The same act, such as posting one's photo & real name online, falls into the public #self of Westerners but the private self of Japanese.
Most Japanese are undemonstrative of emotions & affection. Standing close or touching them can easily be taken as a sexual or presumptuous invasion of their private realm.
Japanese feel personal space palpably. They make a cutting #gesture when passing someone closely.
With Sprinkles on Top offers a positive and empowering resource for talking about and working through sexual differences. With empathy and understanding, Dr. Goerlich addresses hopes and fears on both sides of a desire divide and provides shame-free guidance for relationships of different shapes and orientations.
That was a good watch. Heartwarming. Reminded me of why I want to get out of the urban life and home; and migrate somewhere quiet, tuned with nature, and a small town. When will that ever happen?
Regardless, this is a good reminder and inspiration. While fiction and too perfect, I believe it does happen, we just have to get out there and find it.
Finding out that I have spent my life scripting things to say just to make other people happy and make social interactions go "smoothly" at the cost of my own mental health, personal integrity, and self-identity is an masked Autistic experience.
"This man fucked me like he meant it. And oh God, put me out of my misery now please: if this man turns out not to mean it, I will shatter."
NEW blog, in which I fall face-first into a man, and @stuart_cb manages to capture that exact scared/soft feeling you get when you think you really like someone...
⭐ The Superintendents from the 3 school districts in the El Paso region are attending this weekend's benefit!
🎓 We are eager to continue our work with school systems in an effort to engage students about important issues like consent, healthy relationships, and teen dating violence!
I'm watching a show in which the mother advises her daughter not to ask a guy out because men don't like it if a girl is too forward. In our year of the plague 2023.
<ahem>
Women (who date men): Were you ever given this advice? Did you listen? How in your experience does it hold up?
Men (who date women): Have you ever been asked out by a woman? How did you react? Are you turned off if a "girl is to forward"?
Lyft driver last night decided to tell me his life story. The guy was more than a bit unhinged, so I just let him talk.
Veteran, tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Starts talking about his domestic violence towards his ex-wife and children, laughing about how he had only jokingly threatened to break his children's legs, and when he stabbed his wife in the arm with a wire, it wasn't really a stabbing.
"I told the judge, if I had wanted to stab her, she'd be dead."
Complains in great detail about all the money she took from him, his prison time for the assault, and describes with glee hiding his assets in his vintage car. "New chrome, new hood, new tires - bitch wasn't gonna see that money!"
Continues on about how his new girl came from Iraq and knows what a war zone is like. Brags that he'll send her back if she doesn't marry him. Turns out he's never seen her in person, but has sent her over $7k through some online hookup site that charges per message. Goes off on how he helped her move from Canada to Chicago (we're in California), and complains about how each time he sends her money to come out west, she never shows up.
"I've bought the tux, the wedding dress - it's all ready to go - it's that or Iraq."
Note that all of this was punctuated with constant bouts of chuckling and provided completely unprompted - I said maybe three words the entire trip.
Why do I relate this story? First, it was watching bad karma in action, both the fuck around and find out phases wrapped up in a tidy taxi ride.
But I found myself wondering what he was like as a child... he was clearly struggling in the smarts department, but he had a natural friendliness that belied the horrible shit coming out of his mouth. It got me thinking to what this guy might have been like had the army not put a gun in his hand and sent him overseas to kill. He was in his forties, but his mind was that of a violent teenager - almost as if it had been frozen at the point in time when he was deployed.
I speak about this because I've seen the same pattern in other vets I've known, including some I went to high school with (1st Gulf War vets). Something gets permanently broken in them, keeping them in a state of constant angry adolescence that takes childish glee in abuse, cruelty and savagery as a way to normalize their experience.
And then they come home, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake as they try to integrate to a peacetime existence, unable to grow up, Peter Pan with a gun in hand.
I wish someone had made this clear to my friends who joined up. There's more than one of them who's too dangerous to be a friend to now.