Friday, February 4, 2011

T & A part one

That title is not a perverse attempt to pull in Google hits. The letters are merely two that I choose to stand for two ex-girlfriends I coincidentally ran into both during the last little while and interesting lessons came out of both meetings. (Okay, me being me, I’m not entirely innocent here.) I'm going to write about T this morning and A this afternoon.

T and I met on the street and had coffee. We talked about her. Or, to be more precise, she talked about herself and I listened sympathetically.

And we did so with good reason. She has not had an easy life. She has children to care for and one of those children in particular needs a lot of care and she married a man whose strength is not caring and giving. That was what she talked about and I was happy to let her talk about it.

At the risk of seeming vain, I think I did my part of listening sympathetically and, as we say in the trade, “validating her feelings” rather well. This last simply means showing that you do understand that life is tough for her rather than, as we normally do, following up her story with one of your own or giving advice about what we think she ought to do or challenging her about the facts of her story. (That, I suppose, is what diaries, blogs and novels are for.)

Anyway, she was feeling much better after the hour we spent together and she surprised me by suddenly apologizing for something. She said, “When I think of you I feel guilty because you did everything for me in our relationship and I did nothing for you.”

Readers, being smarter than I am, will immediately see that there is a close connection between that apology and the first part of our conversation. I didn’t see the connection until later.

At the time I reacted instinctively. I told her she has more important things to worry about. I told her she had done lots of things for me and gave a couple of examples, but only a couple because, well I'll get to that. I told her she fell in love with me and that was an extraordinary gift. And I told her that it is a gift when women let you do nice things for them and that one of the things that set her far above some other women is that she was willing to let me do nice things for her and was willing to let herself respond to those nice things. All of which was true and all of which was entirely beside the point.

It was entirely beside the point because—as considerable reflection has hammered home—she was absolutely right. She didn’t give a lot. I couldn't think of many examples of her giving to me because there weren't many examples. I didn’t give an extraordinary amount myself—no more than what is due when someone loves you and lets you love them—but she gave a lot less than I did. The thing is, she wasn’t a very giving person.

I suspect she still isn’t. She is a very moral woman and the root of her caring for her children is certainly her morality. It was that morality that attracted me to her in the first place. It was a highly unusual thing for me at the time, most of the women I was involved with in those much younger years were chosen for qualities other than morality. (It was a surprise to find out that this very moral woman was, in fact, much better at the things that I had originally sought in other women who weren't so moral but that is a story I'll keep to myself.)

Her morality did not extend to being giving. She is driven by a strong sense of right and wrong. She always has been and always will be. It is only because she is now in a situation where regular giving is required by her moral beliefs that she has a keen appreciation of it in me.

Giving emotionally and physically is a habit. You don’t sit there and think, “Well, this is a situation that requires giving so I’ll do it.” You never have the time to think that through. Giving is a lot like swearing or not swearing. You get to be that way either because you train yourself to do it or, far more likely, because your mother did. Whatever the reason, it gets to be a habit and habits are the sort of thing morality sneers at. T was driven to acquire the habit of taking care of her child at great cost to herself and that is admirable but it would be better (and she would have been much happier) if she had developed the habit of giving much earlier in life.

(A big problem with being driven by morality is that you are always acting out of a sense of obligation or to avoid censure. And this is true even if the obligation is only to your own sense of who you are or if the censure you fear is your own. The truly giving person just does what is their habit and that is why the moral person will sneer a bit. Habits don't require much "moral" effort and, therefore, don't seem like much of an achievement. They are, however, a far greater achievement than any morality.)

Part of the reason T didn't develop the habit of giving earlier is because in our culture we credit women with giving automatically. We just take it as a given that women are giving and, not unrelated, we take it as a given that men aren't. To be honest, I’ve never seen much evidence of it. I’ve known women who were giving of course but the phenomenon of women in general being especially giving is nonsense.

Being giving is one of those qualities that women automatically get credit for and for what I suspect are largely competitive reasons, they often live up to it on the surface. It’s a lot like neatness that way. Because women are supposed to be neat, neatness is expected of women and women usually are publicly neat. But really getting to know a woman is often a matter of really getting to know a secret slob. Women are also often very giving on the surface because it is expected of them but a really giving woman is a very rare commodity indeed.

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