I wouldn't want you to think there was anything truly exceptional about A. She is a human being and therefore deserving respect but she is not unusual. You know women (and men) just like her and you know more than one. I start with the warning not to think her exceptional because people who hear about her without knowing her often think she must be exceptional.
When I met her again a while ago, what struck me most about her was how little she's changed. It's hard to explain this because, as others have said, "Most people don't change, so what?"
I guess the thing is that I think she ought to have changed.
What distinguishes A is competitiveness. When we met she immediately launched into a recital of her life's events during the twenty years since we last met. The whole point of the story was to make it clear to me that she had succeeded. The story didn't come out slowly as it had with T and it didn't come out mournfully and I didn't have to read between the lines as I had with T. There was a need in her to tell me this story that was bursting to get out from the second we met.
The odd thing is that the story she told was entirely of failures. Much of it was about her failed marriage. It was told with a clear need not just to justify herself but also to make it clear that it wasn't her fault it had failed and to make it clear that she was better off now that she was out of it.
There is nothing unusual about this attitude for there are no true undefeated champions. The more competitive you are, the more likely you are to have losses. If you haven't lost yet, don't worry you will. There is an old joke about bikers, there are the ones who have crashed and the ones who will crash.
I think that is one of the things that marks people like A: they are very keen to make it clear that their defeats are not really defeats. But we all have been harmed. When Charles Ryder meets Julia Mottram on the ship he tells her that she has grown softer. She tells him that he has gotten harder. And there you have the two responses displayed. T, whom I wrote about yesterday, has responded to her defeats by getting softer. A, like Charles, has made herself harder.
If, as I had done with T. I had set out to come up with examples of good things she had done in the past and had only been able to come up with a couple, A would have jumped right on that. She would have pointed out that there were only a few. It's not defensiveness but rather what defensiveness will develop into if you push it. Being defensive is, after all, still a form of softeness.
Agone
Thinking about A, I actually wrote a a line about how competitiveness can seem like virtue. Then it struck that that was wrong because competitiveness is virtue. The Greeks, who invented the concept of virtue after all, thought of it in exactly those terms. Virtue was excellence and if you wanted to see virtue you went to see people in agone or competition to see it.
And here we hit one of those things about the Greeks that is both unlike us but also very much more like us than we might like to admit. For the Greeks admired Achilles. You may think you do too but Achilles was a thug and a creep of the first order. If you don't believe me, go read about the real Achilles.
Between us and the Greeks lie the middle ages and the middle ages admired Hector, the man Achilles killed, as greater than Achilles. Hector did everything he was supposed to. He was loyal to family and his city. His death at Achilles hand was a foregone conclusion and it is obvious from the outset of the Iliad that Achilles is faster and stronger than Hector and, what is more, the gods, or fortune, are firmly on his side. And Hector is dutiful onto death even in the face of this.
The obvious reason for the admiration of the middle ages is the parallel with Christ who was dutiful unto death, even death on a cross. We can see a kind of virtue that leads to defeat; a kind of virtue that wins by losing. The Greeks could not. For them sacrifice was pointless and humility was not a virtue but a vice. The closest they could come was the tragedies of Sophocles and the death of Hector where there is a sort of horror in defeat of a great person but the Greeks could never say that Hector was greater than the man who killed him.
But we shouldn't be so quick to think we are better. An Achilles like figure occurs in a lot of our dramas. Think of JR on Dallas or Victor on The Young and the Restless. These guys keep winning and while we don't exactly side with them, we tend to diminish the people who keep getting defeated. Joe Frazier is a better man that Muhammad Ali but it is Ali who got praised because he won.
The best revenge
And that is the odd thing about A. It's very hard not to compete with her. I've learned the hard way not to try and explain her to other women because they get so wrapped up in competing with her spectre that they don't really listen. Even women who don't know A get competitive when they hear about her.
And the thing is you can't not compete. I know that from the very outset of our encounter, she was looking for the victory to take home. She was looking for the take home point that would give her a sense of triumph. I knew this from the second I saw her and have known for twenty years that we would inevitably meet one day and that this would happen.
With a competitive person you can tell yourself that you won't compete back but that is nonsense. You will. As Lenin said, You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you. The competitive person will push and they will make you fight back. The Greeks had this much right, you can't just let that happen and pretend it doesn't affect you. It does.
A would sneer at Natasha Vargas-Cooper. She'd say, life is a series of tests so get used to it. Don't run a round bemoaning the fact that some things are tests because they are and you will only fail by complaining. And she is right: life is a series of tests. I've known for twenty years that I would run into A again and that it would be a test.
So what to do? I'm repeating myself here but there is an old piece of advice that says the best revenge is living well. The point is to not let ourselves get dragged down to the level of the person who hurt us. I think the right way to respond to competitive people is a slight variation on that. The key is to compete for the right things. A competitive person will always try to get you to compete with them on their terms. They want you to compete on the same ground they are striving to be good at. That might be a good thing or it might not.
Yesterday I wrote about T and her admission that she had not been very giving. A could be very giving but only provided she felt she was competing. At the very beginning of our relationship, when she saw herself as competing with other women before her, she was very giving. Oddly enough, at the very end, when it was important to regain a sense of her own status, she was also very giving. In the middle when she was secure and comfortable knowing I was committed to her, she was a selfish jerk most of the time.
Again, there is nothing exceptional in that. A lot of women and men are like that all the time and just about all of us are like that sometimes. But if we are going to compete, and we should compete, we should compete for the things that really matter. Store up treasure in heaven. Life isn't like professional boxing, there is room for more than one champion and you can be one of them.
When I met her again a while ago, what struck me most about her was how little she's changed. It's hard to explain this because, as others have said, "Most people don't change, so what?"
I guess the thing is that I think she ought to have changed.
What distinguishes A is competitiveness. When we met she immediately launched into a recital of her life's events during the twenty years since we last met. The whole point of the story was to make it clear to me that she had succeeded. The story didn't come out slowly as it had with T and it didn't come out mournfully and I didn't have to read between the lines as I had with T. There was a need in her to tell me this story that was bursting to get out from the second we met.
The odd thing is that the story she told was entirely of failures. Much of it was about her failed marriage. It was told with a clear need not just to justify herself but also to make it clear that it wasn't her fault it had failed and to make it clear that she was better off now that she was out of it.
There is nothing unusual about this attitude for there are no true undefeated champions. The more competitive you are, the more likely you are to have losses. If you haven't lost yet, don't worry you will. There is an old joke about bikers, there are the ones who have crashed and the ones who will crash.
I think that is one of the things that marks people like A: they are very keen to make it clear that their defeats are not really defeats. But we all have been harmed. When Charles Ryder meets Julia Mottram on the ship he tells her that she has grown softer. She tells him that he has gotten harder. And there you have the two responses displayed. T, whom I wrote about yesterday, has responded to her defeats by getting softer. A, like Charles, has made herself harder.
If, as I had done with T. I had set out to come up with examples of good things she had done in the past and had only been able to come up with a couple, A would have jumped right on that. She would have pointed out that there were only a few. It's not defensiveness but rather what defensiveness will develop into if you push it. Being defensive is, after all, still a form of softeness.
Agone
Thinking about A, I actually wrote a a line about how competitiveness can seem like virtue. Then it struck that that was wrong because competitiveness is virtue. The Greeks, who invented the concept of virtue after all, thought of it in exactly those terms. Virtue was excellence and if you wanted to see virtue you went to see people in agone or competition to see it.
And here we hit one of those things about the Greeks that is both unlike us but also very much more like us than we might like to admit. For the Greeks admired Achilles. You may think you do too but Achilles was a thug and a creep of the first order. If you don't believe me, go read about the real Achilles.
Between us and the Greeks lie the middle ages and the middle ages admired Hector, the man Achilles killed, as greater than Achilles. Hector did everything he was supposed to. He was loyal to family and his city. His death at Achilles hand was a foregone conclusion and it is obvious from the outset of the Iliad that Achilles is faster and stronger than Hector and, what is more, the gods, or fortune, are firmly on his side. And Hector is dutiful onto death even in the face of this.
The obvious reason for the admiration of the middle ages is the parallel with Christ who was dutiful unto death, even death on a cross. We can see a kind of virtue that leads to defeat; a kind of virtue that wins by losing. The Greeks could not. For them sacrifice was pointless and humility was not a virtue but a vice. The closest they could come was the tragedies of Sophocles and the death of Hector where there is a sort of horror in defeat of a great person but the Greeks could never say that Hector was greater than the man who killed him.
But we shouldn't be so quick to think we are better. An Achilles like figure occurs in a lot of our dramas. Think of JR on Dallas or Victor on The Young and the Restless. These guys keep winning and while we don't exactly side with them, we tend to diminish the people who keep getting defeated. Joe Frazier is a better man that Muhammad Ali but it is Ali who got praised because he won.
The best revenge
And that is the odd thing about A. It's very hard not to compete with her. I've learned the hard way not to try and explain her to other women because they get so wrapped up in competing with her spectre that they don't really listen. Even women who don't know A get competitive when they hear about her.
And the thing is you can't not compete. I know that from the very outset of our encounter, she was looking for the victory to take home. She was looking for the take home point that would give her a sense of triumph. I knew this from the second I saw her and have known for twenty years that we would inevitably meet one day and that this would happen.
With a competitive person you can tell yourself that you won't compete back but that is nonsense. You will. As Lenin said, You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you. The competitive person will push and they will make you fight back. The Greeks had this much right, you can't just let that happen and pretend it doesn't affect you. It does.
A would sneer at Natasha Vargas-Cooper. She'd say, life is a series of tests so get used to it. Don't run a round bemoaning the fact that some things are tests because they are and you will only fail by complaining. And she is right: life is a series of tests. I've known for twenty years that I would run into A again and that it would be a test.
So what to do? I'm repeating myself here but there is an old piece of advice that says the best revenge is living well. The point is to not let ourselves get dragged down to the level of the person who hurt us. I think the right way to respond to competitive people is a slight variation on that. The key is to compete for the right things. A competitive person will always try to get you to compete with them on their terms. They want you to compete on the same ground they are striving to be good at. That might be a good thing or it might not.
Yesterday I wrote about T and her admission that she had not been very giving. A could be very giving but only provided she felt she was competing. At the very beginning of our relationship, when she saw herself as competing with other women before her, she was very giving. Oddly enough, at the very end, when it was important to regain a sense of her own status, she was also very giving. In the middle when she was secure and comfortable knowing I was committed to her, she was a selfish jerk most of the time.
Again, there is nothing exceptional in that. A lot of women and men are like that all the time and just about all of us are like that sometimes. But if we are going to compete, and we should compete, we should compete for the things that really matter. Store up treasure in heaven. Life isn't like professional boxing, there is room for more than one champion and you can be one of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment