Cat Person

Why "Cat Person"? Odd title. It was a moderately engaging short story. Nothing that happened seemed particularly remarkable. Of course, sometimes the imagined guy is better than the actual guy. What's great is when the actual guy doesn't require any amplification. I've never actually 'dated' women, so...

I've had quite a few encounters of the sort presented in the story: barely lukewarm, slightly more exciting for one than the other, clumsy, lurching moves. I've had worse encounters too. Not dangerous encounters, but ones that were weirder than the New Yorker one. God, there are some very odd people out there.

I'd put the story in the "slice of life" category. Nothing to learn from the experience except that experiences like that happen and they aren't especially instructive.

Reply to Bitter Crank There's a lot of very subtle but very very observant details that I think pertain specifically to 'millennial' dating (as well as millennial ideas floating around about men and women, and dating, and then those ideas are part of the date as well, though background.) The end in particular is a (imo way too obvious) play on the 'nice guy' trope, which is a huge part of gender politics rn. (I mean it goes back, at least, to Freud and the madonna/whore, but the way its presented here smacks of a particular internet-savvy sensibility.)

I have a theory about the title. So, a big part of their courting thing is text-jokes. And one of them is that jokey imagined scenario about his cats. But

[quote=story] She remembered that he’d talked a lot about his cats and yet she hadn’t seen any cats in the house, and she wondered if he’d made them up.[/quote]

If i have it right, 'cat person' is basically 'bullshit, but socially recognizable, identification' which is what's covering up what he actually is which is [ bad thing]. Honestly, I thought they were both kind of bad, in different ways. I feel like him calling her a whore, at the end, is a cheap narrative trick to drain all the ambiguity and frustration and moral failings that they both feel- so that you can sigh and go 'ok, phew, in the end all it meant was that he was bad.' So like: what if the story just ends when she leaves the bar? What if he didn't call her a whore? It changes the entire thing.

I read it. Oddly enough, I can see that exact scenario playing out in real life.

Reply to La Cuentista It's really real right? I've been on both sides of this kind of scenario, and its eerie. But having been on both sides, the story feels a little false to me. Still trying to articulate exactly why.

Reply to Bitter Crank Curious as to how you experienced the ending when you read it? I believe its intended to allow an absolute moral condemnation. i’m wondering if that intent is legible across generational lines

What do you mean by “allow an absolute moral condemnation”?

Reply to La Cuentista One of the common memes or tropes or zeitgeisty thing you see floating around a lot (one which I think has a lot of truth to it) is that the quintessential 'nice guy', who caters to what he believes a woman wants and appears soft and emotional and understanding - that this sort of guy is often sitting atop a volcano of misogynistic rage. The idea is that the 'nice guy' isn't really 'nice', but has this idea that if you do the right things, then you deserve sex and affection. When their routine fails, and they don't get what they think they've earned, the true self emerges. (See also: the moral valence of the term 'Friendzoning')

The way this plays out on social media is that examples of this kind of behavior in texts, on tinder, etc are posted and so a character emerges: The Evil "nice" guy. The story makes implicit use of this cultural awareness in order to communicate to its knowing readership what sort of thing Robert actually is. I I think its true what Robert does in the end is good evidence he's a pretty shitty dude, and the reader should lose any lingering sympathy they might have. But I also feel like the author is 'sealing' off the story in a certain way, by making Robert fit into this stereotypical figure. There's so much going on in the story, it seems like the end basically gives license to not think too much about what's going on.

Does that make sense?

Quoting csalisbury

I feel like him calling her a whore, at the end, is a cheap narrative trick to drain all the ambiguity and frustration and moral failings that they both feel...

My reaction too when I read it some time back. Though the "reveal" can be seen as another layer of pose - him re-framing in a way that socially legitimates the events in a fashion that is now neatly the opposite of sweet and loving. But was it any more authentic if selfhood is essentially always inauthentic to the degree it is self-conscious?

I would slip in that I'm enjoying Joseph Heller's Something Happens if you are into honest literary accounts of the terrible things people think but can't actually say.

But the same basic question applies. Is it possible to be authentic when being aware of how we think or feel must carry with it the sharp sense of the "other" which by implication or suggestion is getting suppressed by us?

That is the real deep question. Are we actually hiding part of ourselves? Or does it just feel like that because acting a part always carries with it whatever it is we are then not doing as its automatic contrast?

It is like that standing on the edge of cliffs or high balconies. The fear you may do exactly what you don't want to do - leap - is what can feel overwhelming.

So the question I have is whether we can ever get through to the "truth" of another person, or ourselves. Because however we actually overtly act, there is then whatever is the antithesis of that by default. The issue is then whether that should be read as the hidden authentic desire - something we've repressed from sight because it is the bad "us" - or merely just another way we could have acted and didn't ... because we are essentially all right as a person ... as a habit of our social conditioning.

Cat Person might strike a chord with its Millennial heightened form - the newer games made possible by online identity. But again, read Heller if you haven't. Very little seems to have changed on that score.

Well, the social dynamics are the same. And I would say the interesting bit is how we understand personal identity.

Anthropology would say that living behind a social mask is far more natural and authentic than the modern Western romantic model of identity would suggest. And also that the erosion of those traditional social categories - like the masculine and feminine - can be troubling if you then expect to find "yourself" in some place beyond all social categories. No such true self can exist.

So the final position I would be arguing for is that we have no sensible choice except to play those available games of social identity as well as we can - for they define where our society is at - while also having a healthy sense of fun about it being a mere (but meaningful) game.

We've got to be able to laugh at our own poses while not being ashamed of the fact that we are also posing.

That works out easily enough in ordinary life, but not so much in the social media world perhaps. Online tends to drive things towards black and white simplicity. Either things are too nice or too nasty. And I think your point was that the male would have been neither as sweet nor as misogynistic as the words suggested. So it was unfair to have the reveal suggest he was ever going to turn out authentically one or the other.

Reply to csalisbury I went back and read the ending again.

The story effectively ended at the end of the first paragraph below. The second paragraph begins the redefinition of the older (32) male character in the story who had previously been only an unsuccessful date. By the end of the piece, not many words later, he has been recast as something menacing. (Of course, at one point she thought maybe he was planning on murdering her.)

Margot collapsed on the table, laying her head in her hands. She felt as though a leech, grown heavy and swollen with her blood, had at last popped off her skin, leaving a tender, bruised spot behind. But why should she feel that way? Perhaps she was being unfair to Robert, who really had done nothing wrong, except like her, and be bad in bed, and maybe lie about having cats, although probably they had just been in another room.

But then, a month later, she saw him in the bar—her bar, the one in the student ghetto, where, on their date, she’d suggested they go. He was alone, at a table in the back, and he wasn’t reading or looking at his phone; he was just sitting there silently, hunched over a beer.

And then there is the texting which ends with her being called "whore". I didn't like the way it ended, and it didn't seem consistent with the man's previous presentation. The author couldn't leave it well enough alone. She made the merely unsuccessful guy into a bad guy.

As for millennial values about dating, male/female relations, and so on -- I really don't know how they think. It's a loop I'm out of. When I read about goings on around campuses, their values sometimes strike me as just plain bizarre.

Reply to csalisbury Yes it does make sense. All of what you described would have been lost had the ending not been like that. It would have been a lot different if it simply ended when she left the bar as you suggested.

Reply to apokrisis Which is why it’s interesting that the emotionally uninvolved roommate so easily types out the blunt truth and hits send on the text message.

Quoting csalisbury

One of the common memes or tropes or zeitgeisty thing you see floating around a lot (one which I think has a lot of truth to it) is that the quintessential 'nice guy', who caters to what he believes a woman wants and appeals soft and emotional and understanding - is sitting atop a volcano of misogynistic rage. The idea is that the 'nice guy' isn't really 'nice', but has this idea that if you do the right things, then you deserve sex and affection. When their routine fails, and they don't get what they think they've earned, the true self emerges.

Old gay men like me don't have much (any) experience dating millennial women, but It seems to me that the zeitgeistich thing of men having expectations that "a nice time" ought to be rewarded with at least some sex play, if not actual fucking, has been around for quite some time. Personally, I liked the old fashioned gay approach where one could count on sex, and the nice time was gravy.

Straight folks don't operate that way, at least not since the 1960s. Young straight folks seem to have a lot of baggage to work through. I've heard that even young gay men play dating games, these days--when they don't get it on (or off?) with the help of Grindr.

Reply to csalisbury This has been an interesting discussion. Thanks. I have to go to bed now so I can get up early to make it to a root canal appointment at 8:00. Only barbarians schedule root canals that early in the day.

Reply to Bitter Crank Sounds like Robert's probably the one doing the schedules over there. Good luck & thanks for reading it.

Reply to csalisbury

?La Cuentista One of the common memes or tropes or zeitgeisty thing you see floating around a lot (one which I think has a lot of truth to it) is that the quintessential 'nice guy', who caters to what he believes a woman wants and appears soft and emotional and understanding - that this sort of guy is often sitting atop a volcano of misogynistic rage. The idea is that the 'nice guy' isn't really 'nice', but has this idea that if you do the right things, then you deserve sex and affection. When their routine fails, and they don't get what they think they've earned, the true self emerges. (See also: the moral valence of the term 'Friendzoning')
The way this plays out on social media is that examples of this kind of behavior in texts, on tinder, etc are posted and so a character emerges: The Evil "nice" guy. The story makes implicit use of this cultural awareness in order to communicate to its knowing readership what sort of thing Robert actually is. I think its true what Robert does in the end is good evidence he's a pretty shitty dude, and the reader should lose any lingering sympathy they might have. But I also feel like the author is 'sealing' off the story in a certain way, by making Robert fit into this stereotypical figure. There's so much going on in the story, it seems like the end basically gives license to not think too much about what's going on.

They both made a mistake in not expressing their emotions at the appropriate time. Her friend rushed the closure process and left him in a predicament which he predictably responded to-- yielding to her feelings, politely giving her space. Of course that left him with unprocessed emotions, uncertainty/confusion and unmet longing directed at her. His world was shuddered by that encounter, clearly and then she practically ghosts him, suddenly the dynamic completely changes and he's left trying to pick up the pieces. So it's completely understandable he responded like that, in fact I feel like it was tame if anything. So I don't think he was a closet misygynist, I think he just wanted straight forward discussion to figure out what parts he did wrong, what parts he did right.

I wanted to highlight another element -- images/mental depictions of the other 'that cat person' 'concession stand girl' 'lumber jack aura' 'the witty person she knew through his texts' .. They're all shit.. I'd love a world in which people were aware that these are all just fancy snipets with no real existence outside of very narrow circumstantial confines and expectations were formed in full awareness and acceptance of how variable personas and momentary behaviors can be (in social context of course, professional setting expectations are set apart and defined narrowly).

Reply to Bitter Crank

The story effectively ended at the end of the first paragraph below. The second paragraph begins the redefinition of the older (32) male character in the story who had previously been only an unsuccessful date. By the end of the piece, not many words later, he has been recast as something menacing.

Yes, I think you're right. My first thought was that it ended when she left the bar, but the bar scene itself is superfluous, and is just a set up for the texts. plus: '...and maybe lie about having cats, although probably they had just been in another room" is a killer ending, just aesthetically.

Reply to ????????????? Yeah, I do think she intended to portray Robert like that from the start, and I think you're right that Robert ties rejection and clumsiness (like when he's mad at himself trying to get the keys in the door.) One thing that's weird, though, is that there's a pattern where Margot gets turned on by his clumsiness.

I think I understand maybe what's going on with Margot (since I've been the Margot once or twice irl) and I suspect the author does too (which makes the ending even more frustrating, but also might explain the temptation to end it that way).

Some quotes, all in a row, to highlight part of where I think Margot's coming from, in relation to Robert's clumsiness:

[quote=story]It was a terrible kiss, shockingly bad; Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing. It seemed awful, yet somehow it also gave her that tender feeling toward him again, the sense that even though he was older than her, she knew something he didn’t.[/quote]

[quote=story] She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easily he could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, because once she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed.[/quote]

[quote=story]By her third beer, she was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Robert. Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.[/quote]

[quote=story]She pushed her body against his, feeling tiny beside him, and he let out a great shuddering sigh, as if she were something too bright and painful to look at, and that was sexy, too, being made to feel like a kind of irresistible temptation.[/quote]

and finally

As they kissed, she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.

The more she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got

Every time Margot has a spike of sexual interest*, its tied to having power over Robert - he wants her more than she wants him and so she's more self-possessed and poised than him. The clumsier he is, the more desirable she feels by contrast. The problem with this kind of arousal is that its almost pure fantasy, and prone to evaporate at any moment. Will definitely evaporate after the sex. And what you're left with, invariably, is a really shitty feeling, that is hard to come to grips with, especially because of course now the other person feels close to you, and you feel more distant than ever. You wanted to get off to them wanting you ---perhaps because you know, deep down, that you yourself are liable to be a Robert to someone else's Margot, frustrated and scared with the keys, and that hurts, and you don't want to think about it, and this lets you pretend you won't ever have to have that happen. So you want to get off to them wanting you. You don't want to want one another together. That wasn't the point, and now you have to face the fact that you led to other person to think it was.

I don't think this fully explains Margot. There's clearly a bunch of different things going on with her. The author's really good here. Margot has a lot going on, and she herself can't quite make coherent all the things going on, and thats just how it is with this stuff. But this particular aspect of her is the one that dominates most from the bar on to the sex. As it subsides, she feels like shit.

I think that's why the ending is bad, and also why you can see why the author might be tempted to use it - its pure fantasy (even if endings like that really do happen)The void that the fantasy covers up: I feel really bad and confused and uncomfortable about what happened and I don't know to what extent I was indulging certain drives I'm not comfortable with seeing as part of myself. Robert being a monster is a convenient way to solve all of this.

It's frustrating though, because the author seems very self-aware of what Margot is doing, and to interrogate both characters masterfully. Up until the end.


*importantly: this is very different than the 'crush' feeling she sometimes gets. The way she sees Robert and relates to him is very different at those moments

I read the story around the same time as the Aziz Ansari 'story' broke (I think because of it, the piece having been published about a month before), so I can't divorce my reading of it from that general atmospherics of 'bad sex as a societal phenomenon'. I think you're right to highlight the strange game of power going on, and one of the things I thought a bit about in the wake of both the Ansari story and Cat Person is that we're just really bad at playing games with sexual power.

Or rather, we play games that we don't even know that we're playing; Or, we have these hazy outlines, absorbed through a mishmash of observation, gossip, some mixed experiences, and we do - or think we do - what we're 'supposed to', and you commit yourself to this network of expectations you (or your partner) didn't even quite know you've bought into. And normally this is fine (life is like that) except no one wants to talk about this stuff because sex is still treated as this weird and dirty thing that you can only whisper about, even as we're meant to be this sexually liberated society - which ends up confusing things even more.

So you have Nice Guys who do the Right Thing and still can't get laid, or end up being rejected like Robert, and they didn't do anything Bad, which is just jet-fuel for resentment - incipt 'incels'. So one thing I don't think than can be done is to give a purely psychological reading of the story: I don't think there's alot more 'going on' with either Margot or Robert than what's described in the story; or at least, what's going on is that neither has any idea of why they do what they do beyond the fact that they 'know what they feel'. I think anything they'd say, if you were to ask them 'now', would just be back-projection.

Quoting StreetlightX

I don't think there's alot more 'going on' with either Margot or Robert than what's described in the story; or at least, what's going on is that neither has any idea of why they do what they do beyond the fact that they 'know what they feel'.

There is an honesty that is very rarely expressed in literature of this nature, namely the protagonist was aroused by this idea that he desired her or her perfection and the idea that she is all that he would ever want and that egotistical arousal enabled the erotic encounter; that stunned look and stupid pleasure despite their clear sexual incompatibility. Her imaginary partner - the ideal boyfriend - yet again paints an interesting picture of how we can create this imagined person that we project outward into experiences with others in an almost delusional manner, until suddenly we realise who that actual person is and what we wanted them to be. She had the feelings that something was wrong with him and with the situation she found herself in but she excused it with imagined ideas, even later when she pretended to tell him about a gay high school boyfriend was clarity of her fear of him. She knew how to please him, clear when she reflexively stated that she was nervous as she became aware previously that he found her naivety or youth pleasing. It is all the lies we tell ourselves when the reality is plain and manifest.

He clearly had no understanding of her, for him it was all about him, he was a terrible kisser, terrible at foreplay and terrible at sex and yet he happily talked about his pleasure and happiness without realising at all how she felt. He was a sociopath.

Reply to TimeLine Nooo, I think it's so, so, so important not to reduce this to sociopathy or at least personal pathology - thats what I meant when I said it's impossible to give a purely psychological reading of the story. Or even, if it is sociopathy at work, it needs to be read literally as a pathology of the socius, of whom Robert is an accretion. What I want to emphasise is that we all have the capacity to be Robert, we (men, women, and everything in between) can all see ourselves doing the Right Thing, playing the Correct Role ('she asked me to come home with her!'), without still knowing what it is we are doing. Pathologizing keeps the danger too far; it Others too quickly, absolves us too easily. It needs to be near to be real.

Perhaps I can put it this way: Csal has been talking about games and meta-games recently: I think both Robert and Margot know the game, but are both utterly clueless about the meta-game: the motions are right, and there are real consequences of those motions, but the meta-game is incredibly fuzzy for both of them ('Do I want what it is I'm supposed to want? Do they?' - Margot to her credit, asks this question, even though she doesn't quite act on it; Robert remains oblivious). At the story level, one thing that's striking is the lack of any real, motivated 'decisional' action, I think. The whole relationship - with maybe the exception of the initial asking out - is built off reactions. Both are consistently unsure about what the other is thinking, and you consistently have this weird retroactive confirmation of motivation where each acts decisively only ever based on some expression of vulnerability in the other (with the vulnerability evoked by the other to begin with).

(Like, why the dolphin emoji? Because that's What One Does. It's 'Cute'. Actually alienating and objectively bizarre, but The Cute Thing To Do).

Maybe this is why there's something a little off about the story. There are no real narrative gestures, no elements of surprise and unexpected joys (the kind that make your heart flutter wildly when one begins a relationship). They're both constantly on the back foot with each other. There's an almost complete absence of romance (again with the exception of the texting at the beginning), which is a genre marked, I think, precisely by grand Gesture. Instead, the one real decision comes from an external influence, the friend who writes the message. The element that seems strongest here is tragedy - had the friend not intervened, would Margot have gone on at least one more incredibly awkard date with bad sex? I think entirely possible.

Anyway, just loosely strung together thoughts. I feel like the piece could also be called something like - pace Arendt - the banality of amorous evil - although evil is too strong a word. Something between evil and idiocy.

Quoting TimeLine

He was a sociopath.

Nonsense.

"Cat Person" is just not a great short story. I'd give it a B-. The New Yorker is the Big Time for short stories, and this just isn't that good.

Quoting StreetlightX

What I want to emphasise is that we all have the capacity to be Robert, we can all see ourselves doing the Right Thing, playing the Correct Role ('she asked me to come home with her!), without still knowing what it is we are doing.

See, this is really interesting because I was having so much trouble understanding him and it compelled me to continue reading until the ending almost confirmed that he was the anomaly and isolated from most men (or at least the men she experienced previously), because I could genuinely sense that same revulsion and fear that she described. Was his reaction at the end merely evidence of feeling emasculated from the experience - like when she laughed or when he received the text message from Tamara - or was it because he is one-sided in the experience and could not understand at all how his behaviour was wrong. It was like he was not present and as you say, a complete absence of romance where their motivations are rooted in something that lacks passion or that reciprocal compatibility that would make the sexual experience exciting rather than humiliating. Putting on the music in the room was an example of this "correct role" and he had absolutely no idea of how to treat her so surely he must have the problem?

As the story is written in first-person, I can only go by what the protagonist explains and I think that since she is consistently unsure about what he is thinking, that underlying intuitive response telling her that 'he could be a murderer' or that he has no cats etc, is telling of the authenticity of her actual motivations, that she really is afraid. The idea that he is vulnerable for me is something she projected onto him in order to maintain a continuity of that evening. She liked that he softened at the idea of her being naive and young and that was what empowered her and ultimately aroused her, being viewed as a princess where he kisses her forehead and calls her 'darling' and this is where the "correct" status of gender roles in our sexual behaviour becomes somewhat disturbing.

Quoting StreetlightX

Both are consistently unsure about what the other is thinking, and you consistently have this weird retroactive confirmation of motivation where each acts decisively only ever based on some expression of vulnerability in the other (with the vulnerability evoked by the other to begin with).

This is an excellent interpretation of what was happening. I need to think about this one because I am terribly sleepy.

Reply to csalisbury Yeah, I felt like the texts at the end were over the top, too. It gave a nice cap to the story so that it was resolved, but I think it reads better without the cap.

But, then again, maybe it was more personal than the story lets on - like it happened to the writer or a friend of the writer.

Though to preserve ambiguity I'd say that Robert would have to not show up at her bar, too. That already shows the lie.

Probably what struck me the most about the story was how much of it was a stream of conscious narrative -- like, the entire story basically takes place between Margot and herself. Most of the time we are reading about how Margot is thinking through the situation, and how Margot builds elaborate justifications for this or that action or reaction and her questioning herself too.

Robert, I think we can safely say, is probably doing the same thing mostly because neither of them ever really talk. And, in spite of that, they still decide to hook up under the pretense of a good date because it just seemed like the next step. Cooking up a good reason to have sex is easier than actually asking a question which may reveal yourself or the other person as someone you shouldn't have sex with.

It just seemed to me that the whole story was about a kind of gulf between people unable to speak frankly with one another about their feelings, yet deciding to go ahead and have sex anyway when that seems like the opposite of a good idea.

Casual sex is more open than this because you're both being honest with one another about what you want. But this fit somewhere in an awkward place between casual sex and the desire for something more while not communicating anything at all. It felt very cloistered to me.

Robert looks like 'Robert from Margot's perspective', I can imagine a parallel story where Robert's struggles against the weight of tropes and expectations is portrayed instead and isn't ultimately simplified in the way the story simplifies him. As if he was the image in Margot's head.

The weirdest part about it for me was that it affirms the 'nice guys are feminine and thus undesireable' narrative in how it juxtapose's Robert's ugliness with inappropriate 'femininity'. Because when you touch a guy's dick and he makes a happy noise it better damn well not be too high pitched, especially if he's a hambeast.

It's a bit more interesting to also read Margot's simultaneous disgust and obscene fantasy as part of Margot's entrapment in social norms, not just her capitulations to Robert. She seems aware that that's what she's doing.

She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easily he could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, because once she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed. She asked him lots of questions about the movies he liked, and she spoke self-deprecatingly about the movies at the artsy theatre that she found boring or incomprehensible; she told him about how much her older co-workers intimidated her, and how she sometimes worried that she wasn’t smart enough to form her own opinions on anything. The effect of this on him was palpable and immediate, and she felt as if she were petting a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear, skillfully coaxing it to eat from her hand

When they’d finished that round of drinks, she said, boldly, “Should we get out of here, then?,” and he seemed briefly hurt, as if he thought she was cutting the date short, but she took his hand and pulled him up, and the look on his face when he realized what she was saying, and the obedient way he trailed her out of the bar, gave her that elastic-band snap again, as did, oddly, the fact that his palm was slick beneath hers.

her disgust is really the only thing genuine, except how she reflexively frames her desires narratively even during sex:

The way he looked at her then was like an exaggerated version of the expression she’d seen on the faces of all the guys she’d been naked with, not that there were that many—six in total, Robert made seven. He looked stunned and stupid with pleasure, like a milk-drunk baby, and she thought that maybe this was what she loved most about sex—a guy revealed like that. Robert showed her more open need than any of the others, even though he was older, and must have seen more breasts, more bodies, than they had—but maybe that was part of it for him, the fact that he was older, and she was young.

As they kissed, she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.

The whole thing is just Age Gap Romance twisted with subverted Beast and Beauty by finally affirming the monstrosity of the beast (Robert). Add a pinch of subverted Single Woman Seeks Good Man by making it an explicitly internalised motivating narrative for Margot, in contrast to what she actually wants, and you're done.

Reply to Bitter Crank

I'd give it an F. It's badly-written, boring, and painfully contrived. And like one of the more popular episodes of a soap opera that resonates with the most obvious, surface-level concerns of the young and restless, was destined to go viral.

Reply to fdrake

It's not art anyway, that's for sure.

Quoting fdrake

Robert looks like 'Robert from Margot's perspective',

"Robert" looks like Margot cut him from an empty cornflakes' box and stuck him on her wall.

Quoting Baden

It's not art anyway, that's for sure.

It reads to me like one of those stories told to a therapist to avoid confronting the real issues. Here's a reframing alternative ending:

"So Margot, why did you manipulate your flatmate into taking responsibility for ending the relationship, why did you manipulate your friends into treating Robert as some kind of threat, and why did you contrive to get him to lose his temper with you? You made up that last bit, didn't you? I'm seeing a pattern here."

Quoting unenlightened

It reads to me like one of those stories told to a therapist to avoid confronting the real issues.

And not much more well-formed. But of course it's clever. In a commercial way. It's Mills & Boon for millenials.

Quoting unenlightened

"So Margot, why did you manipulate your flatmate into taking responsibility for ending the relationship, why did you manipulate your friends into treating Robert as some kind of threat, and why did you contrive to get him to lose his temper with you? You made up that last bit, didn't you? I'm seeing a pattern here."

Be careful. You might have the basis for an interesting story there...

I recommend anyone try this exercise. Read "Cat Person". Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.

https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf

Quoting Baden

Be careful. You might have the basis for an interesting story there...

And the sequel. Disbarred therapist relates the story of how he was trapped by a sociopathic female client under the rubric #notmetoo. To cries of "fake abuse!" Some guy called Robert is his only sympathiser.

Joyce, though, is a whole other league. There is menace; there is attraction.

Edit: that somehow turned into a link to the void - how appropriate.

Quoting unenlightened

Edit: that somehow turned into a link to the void - how appropriate.

:)

That was my hot take @csalisbury. And I don't want to sound like I'm being contemptuous for the sake of it. I am serious in my view that this is bad writing, and its success, such that it is, is reflective of something negative about the way we live now. Maybe come back with some cold reflections later.

Reply to Baden (1) youre a monster (2) I agree that it fails aesthetically, tho I’m torn on the quality of the writing. I think its quite in good in places. I think the style and voice goes well with the material. Also, i read along listening to the author read, and her (literal voice) is a familiar one. Its a faintly sexualized simplicity of
speech that I associate with english or art majors from good schools, especially ones into poetry. Simple because it knows it has the background not to have to prove itself. Faintly sexualized because it has a bored and ironc stance toward the texture of normal life, so it needs to make a kind of game out of it. Like the beginning where margot is flirting, like for tips, even tho its a tipless job.

I think what i find interesting in the story is less its aesthetic value than yeah that it it reflects particularly well a bunch of problems with How Millenials Date - and then, also, that the material actually gets away from the author despite her attempt to control it (I think the consensus is the ending is really bad, and I think we’re all saying, in different ways, that this is why). So in that sense the story is both the story (here comes the meta again) and an interesting artifact brilliantly - if unintentionally - showcasing one way how the substance of the uncomfortable parts of romance are becoming scrubbed away through simple narrative. And how (since the new yorker published this) its becoming more and more socially sanctified to do this kind of rewriting without any pushback(Have more to say but I’m typing from a small and broken phone and it sucks)

Gonna give the carol oates a read once I’m back home

Reply to Baden I see some similarities between the two, but I felt the New Yorker short story was something that could happen, where the Oates story has this quasi-magical feel to it.

I think that the New Yorker story is passed along because it resonates with people's experience.

Quoting Moliere

But, then again, maybe it was more personal than the story lets on - like it happened to the writer or a friend of the writer.

I read an interview with the author and she did say the inspiration was a real bad date that began with text-flirting. No hints about whether something like the story’s end happaned tho

Though to preserve ambiguity I'd say that Robert would have to not show up at her bar, too. That already shows the lie.

Good point, I forgot the detail that Robert indicates he doesn’t go the bars in this area himself. Maybe the idea is that him drinking despondently alone is an intentionally constructed tableau he hopes she’ll see. (I’ve actually done this, younger)

Quoting fdrake

The whole thing is just Age Gap Romance twisted with subverted Beast and Beauty by finally affirming the monstrosity of the beast (Robert). Add a pinch of subverted Single Woman Seeks Good Man by making it an explicitly internalised motivating narrative for Margot, in contrast to what she actually wants, and you're done

I agree that the ending turns in into something like this, but I think, before that, it does something more interesting - all those tropes are there, floating around, but there's a lot more of them too (there's a weird class dynamic going on, there's a mutal drawing from the manic-pixie quirk well etc.) but they're all bumping around in a kind of incoherent way. I think the story is good in that, until the end, it doesn't commit to any one of these tropes definitively. They're more like a mental environment, or half-conscious background, that's both part of the date, and also a frantic attempt to make sense of the date. You could say, I think, that the collection of tropes present is incompossible, so both Margot & Robert are just kind of tossed around from one to another ( I think you're right, that if we saw Robert's point of view, something similar would be going on)
I think this is the point that @StreetlightX was making:

[quote=Street]Or rather, we play games that we don't even know that we're playing; Or, we have these hazy outlines, absorbed through a mishmash of observation, gossip, some mixed experiences, and we do - or think we do - what we're 'supposed to', and you commit yourself to this network of expectations you (or your partner) didn't even quite know you've bought into. And normally this is fine (life is like that) except no one wants to talk about this stuff because sex is still treated as this weird and dirty thing that you can only whisper about, even as we're meant to be this sexually liberated society - which ends up confusing things even more[/quote]

[quote=Street]I think both Robert and Margot know the game, but are both utterly clueless about the meta-game: the motions are right, and there are real consequences of those motions, but the meta-game is incredibly fuzzy for both of them ('Do I want what it is I'm supposed to want? Do they?' - Margot to her credit, asks this question, even though she doesn't quite act on it; Robert remains oblivious). At the story level, one thing that's striking is the lack of any real, motivated 'decisional' action, I think. The whole relationship - with maybe the exception of the initial asking out - is built off reactions. Both are consistently unsure about what the other is thinking, and you consistently have this weird retroactive confirmation of motivation where each acts decisively only ever based on some expression of vulnerability in the other (with the vulnerability evoked by the other to begin with).
[/quote]

Margot's central motivation seems to be the boredom that comes from having no clear motivation. LIke, fuck it, why not, he's got a tattoo at least. Not that she doesn't want to hae motivation, I think, but she just truly doesn't know how. (Though I agree that the disgust/narcissistic fantasy that springs up probably goes a little deeper than some of her other ones.)

[regarding the class subcurrent - this line, in particular, irked me.

[quote=Story]For some reason, he’d chosen a movie with subtitles,[/quote]

This 'for some reason' is a lie (or at least it's something that would be said to her imagined future boyfriend.) Because, earlier:

[quote=story]She wondered if perhaps he’d been trying to impress her by suggesting the Holocaust movie, because he didn’t understand that a Holocaust movie was the wrong kind of “serious” movie with which to impress the type of person who worked at an artsy movie theatre, the type of person he probably assumed she was[...]

[...]He kept coming back to her initial dismissal of the movie, making jokes that glanced off it and watching her closely to see how she responded. He teased her about her highbrow taste, and said how hard it was to impress her because of all the film classes she’d taken, even though he knew she’d taken only one summer class in film. He joked about how she and the other employees at the artsy theatre probably sat around and made fun of the people who went to the mainstream theatre, where they didn’t even serve wine, and some of the movies were in imax 3-D.[/quote]

So, she knows the reason very well. "For some reason" really means "look at this: weird, if not pathetic, right?"

But the thing is this 'for some reason', in the story, isn't addressed to the imaginary boyfriend. It appears to be addressed to the reader (though maybe, in the end, the whole point of writing this story is that your readership gets to be the imaginary boyfriend, who otherwise would 'never exist.'

Thinking some more about this: I think the formula of the story is Mumblecore + texting/internet + Nice Guy Cautionary Tale/Affirmed Beast.

If you take out the fear-of-being-murdered aspect (which is, I admit, a pretty big thing to take out) the awkward and uncomfortable conversation in Cat Person kinda reminds me of this kinda atmosphere, just with the gender roles swapped:

Quoting Baden

I'd give it an F. It's badly-written, boring, and painfully contrived.

You are a tough grader. I didn't think it was that bad. But what I did think bad was that the New Yorker saw fit to print it. The New Yorker! Publisher of Welty, Cheever, and Nabokov; Updike, Jackson, Roth, Spark, Mary McCarthy, et al. Why bother with this piece--F or B-? The New Yorker gets enough submissions to publish only A+ stories. They published The Lottery which ends with a stoning. Maybe Cat Person would have been a better story if Robert had been a psychopath (per Timeline) and had taken her into the woods and murdered her. Or maybe she was the murderous one: The Case of the Killer Co-Ed. Hey, this is fiction -- murder is perfectly legal in a short story.

Flannery O'Conner has a wonderful story -- A Good Man is Hard to Find (I think that's its title). A family goes on a road trip and the grandmother insists on a pointless detour to look at something inconsequential. The result is, of course, that the family encounters the murderers who they have been hearing about on the car radio. Murderers murder and that's what happens to the family. At the last moment the frivolous grandmother perceives the human worth of the desperado who is about to kill her, and says so. Bang. She's dead. The murderer says "She would have been a good woman if she had a gun pointing at her all her life."

It's not a wonderful story because the old lady get's murdered along with the rest of the family. It's great because of the tightly drawn but simple plot, the banal characters in the car, the exceptionally evil murderers, and then at the end, the vision of goodness which comes too late.

The New Yorker just needs to stick to its established standards.

Reply to Bitter Crank In some ways, I think Cat Person has the function of a gun pointed to produce displays of goodness, and so kind of perpetuates the cycle of fear and facade its talking about. Like, Robert seems like the type of guy who would probably encounter Cat Person, so you can imagine this same scenario only now both of them have read Cat Person (maybe they even discuss it) so Robert’s savvy enough to conceal himself even better, at least until the next such story reveals him once more. I think the internet kind of speeds up this process - whereas before people exchanged samizdat about red flags in private circles (slowly until things finally crystallized in, something like say, Fatal Attraction) now everything’s in public, so theres barely time to catch your breath.

Quoting Bitter Crank

You are a tough grader.

Well, I should try to justify my criticism. I read it through again and I'll try to be more nuanced while still contending that it fails both in terms of form and content, aesthetically and narratively, in composition and in content. And, yes, I am holding it to high standards, at least partly because it was published in The New Yorker. You mentioned Cheever. The New Yorker published "The Swimmer". Enough said.

It fails aesthetically because it's poorly—if competently—written. It would be impressive as an actual diary scribbled down by a relatively well-educated young person similar in age and experience to the main character herself. But artistic renditions of the real thing are supposed to be aesthetic distillations not faithful copies. And I haven't heard a lot of argument in support of the writing anyway, so I'll take it as not particularly controversial at least that we're not dealing with the top-level here.

It fails narratively because there's a general lack of tension in the story:

1) It has a very stale and unengaging opening.

"Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines."

Nothing at all happens then until the mild sexual (mis)adventure and even that is not much of a something. We finish with Robert in loser mode writing a rude text to the woman who rejected him. And that's it. Again, I'm sure it resonates with young women who have had similar experiences, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt to go beyond that. Soap operas do the same thing. They resonate with experience. But at least they tend to have a variety of characters to appeal to a wider audience. The audience for this story seems not to extend much beyond millenial women.

2) The ending commits the cardinal sin of descending into kitsch, of providing an excess that detracts rather than adds to its value. We are told at the end who the villain is almost just in case we try to figure it out for ourselves.

Again, there seems to be a reasonable level of consensus on the bad ending, so I won't go on about it too much. Just to note though that if it were just that it copped out on the ending or went into excess mode somewhere in advance but before was authentically engaging, it might still pass in my book. The narrative of Breaking Bad, for example, had tension from the beginning but became unbearably kitschy with the religious metaphorical excess of the exploding plane and falling doll. And the first season of True Detective had a lot going for it until it descended into absolute kitsch with the happy/sad ending. Both were still reasonably good examples of narrative overall. This though never got going, so I suppose the ending was less of a disappointment in that respect.

2) The characters are poorly drawn (even for a short story where character development is necessarily limited by the nature of the genre).

One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic. The second is a pastiche of a typical young western woman, presumingly to appeal to as many millennial western women as possible (a bit like a horoscope is designed to say at least something somewhere that resonates with everyone who reads it). And in so far as we are defined by what we want, and the main characters' desires are the driving force of a narrative, what have we got here? Robert wants sex, and he got some, but apparently not enough. And Margot wants what? Love? excitement? better sex? more self-respect? better judgment? to be free of cognitive dissonance? confidence? all of the above? Who knows? She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.

3) Ideology/message. So what's the underlying message here? What does the story bring to the table in terms of cultural criticism etc?

Hard to say. It seems you've got the usual normalizing discourse surrounding the empty lives of these two that revolve around consumerism and entertainment. They go to the cinema; they buy stuff at 7-11; they drink at bars; they text each other. That's it. That's life folks, and as long as you don't meet a villain like Robert, you'll be fine.

But then others like @csalisbury see value at a more meta level, which is fine if it was intended but I don't really see that, so far anyway, though I'm open to being wrong here. I mean, the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space" arguably has meta value too. In this case, it was bad to the point of genius, a great, if perverse, example of the Hollywood dream. (And spawned a decent biography narrative / Johnny Depp vehicle about the director.) Point being, if you go meta enough you can probably find value in just about anything. But it may be that you're putting it there much more than retrieving it.

Quoting Moliere

I think that the New Yorker story is passed along because it resonates with people's experience.

Agreed. But that's pretty much all there is to it in my view.

Quoting Moliere

I see some similarities between the two, but I felt the New Yorker short story was something that could happen, where the Oates story has this quasi-magical feel to it.

The Oates story is engaging from the start; it doesn't try to be ambiguous and then tell you what to feel at the end in case you didn't feel the right thing. It has a simple goal, which is to paint the fear of an adolescent girl, embodied in Arnold Friend, in a way that anyone (though maybe especially adolescent girls) can relate to. The desire is strong on both sides; his desire to take her, and her desire to escape him, and that keeps the engine of the story running on high octane throughout. Plus, it's brilliantly written. So, I'd say in terms of villainy, Oates gives you the best of homemade meat and potatoes, whereas Roupenian gives you a Starbucks Decaf Mochalatte.

But I'll continue to read other contributors here with an open mind. It's always possible I'm missing something.

Quoting csalisbury

(1) youre a monster

So, this means you wanna date, right? :razz:

Quoting csalisbury

Gonna give the carol oates a read once I’m back home

:up:

As I said above, I'm going to try to unearth some of the value you, Street, TL and others see in this and respond more.

Quoting Baden

One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic.

The view of the pathetic male has been worked over in various ways in other threads, and there will be disagreement about how pathetic our villain (if he is a villain) is supposed to be. Pathetic, ineffective, clueless men exist, of course, and so do pathetic, ineffective clueless women; neither of them are especially good characters for short stories, unless they deliver something dramatic. The villains in A Good Man Is Hard to Find by O'Connor are pathetic. But they deliver in the story -- the murders of course, but also the most important line in the story.

Similarly the grandmother is a pain; petty, domineering, etc. But she steers the story into the ditch where she meets her demise--where they all meet their demise.

As you said, short stories don't have enough space for character development, so their first appearance has to be outstanding, and their character given the necessary complexity to make them interesting in only a few paragraphs, or brush strokes, to mix metaphors.

The kind of short stories that deliver all that are the pieces you finish with great satisfaction. You just know you had a real literary experience.

So I'll lower her grade to a C, which these days is pretty bad.

Flannery O'Connor wrote another short story that, at least used to be in freshman lit anthologies: Everything That Rises Must Converge. It takes place on a bus on a hot summer night in the south; there are four characters: a black woman with her 4 year old child, and an older white woman with her recent college graduate son. It's a simple set up but it is loaded with years -- and generations -- worth of hatred.

The characters are presented, established efficiently, and moved into position, and the inevitable storm breaks and tragedy ensues. So much is condensed into such a short moment.

Give it a read from the link above if you like. It's from the early 60s, so it's a bit dated -- but not all that much. Women aren't wearing hats, these days. If there are criticisms of the story, they will be altogether different than those of the Cat Person.

Quoting Baden

I recommend anyone try this exercise. Read "Cat Person". Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.

https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf

*long, slow breath out*; man, that was brutal - and a useful foil for talking about Cat Person, I think. One of the things you can't do with the Oates piece is necessarily relate it to a common, occasional experience (not a criticism). There's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex. Oates obviously isn't aiming for that even though her characters are obviously far more realized and starkly drawn, which is why the story resonates on a different level. So with respect to the following:

She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.

There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives.

Quoting StreetlightX

There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives.

Sure, and I get that's an understandable angle to take, but it's not just that characters are thinly drawn but how they're drawn thinly that matters. So, it comes down to figuring out the significance of how they're drawn with regard to other elements of the text in terms of it being a particular type of narrative, a short story, and trying to include the context that brings in looking at what the author's options were and what the rationale behind her choices were with regard to form and content. There are lots of ways to make the uninteresting, interesting (and, unfortunately, even more of making the interesting, uninteresting).

So, it may be as you said that she has deliberately made the characters somewhat unengaging and incoherent because they are so in relation to their romantic lives, and that's something we should reflect on. OK, fine. But given this is in The NewYorker, I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically.

To give an example to try to get more at what I'm on about (*warning—about to repeat something heard in YouTube video and back it up with a wiki quote*) Lars Von Trier, when he made the movie Breaking the Waves, was aware of the danger of emotional excess because of the subject matter of his movie. In order to avoid this, and actually offer something of artistic value, he had to play with the form. In his own words:

""What we did was take a style and lay it like a filter over the story. It’s like decoding a television signal when you pay to see a film. Here we encoded the film, and the audience has to decode it. The raw, documentary style that I imposed on the film, which actually dissolves and contradicts it, means that we can accept the story as it is"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Waves#Style

So what he's saying is something like the cognitive work the audience has to do in matching the form and content, the cheap documentary style imposed over the romantic-type narrative creates enough tension to offset the release the excess of emotional content might otherwise cause, and allows the film to offer something artistically that it otherwise couldn't.

Similarly, for Cat Person, the thinness of the characters could be offset somehow in the form, maybe with a stronger plot, for example, or a richer more evocative writing style, or a play with the narrative structure etc. Look at Oates and it's the opposite. She hardly even needed a plot she was so well-able to express the fear that drove the story, which as you said is "brutal" and there's the other point, the emotional payoff—in Cat Person it's as if the ending was the only thing the author had left to deliver the necessary wallop that would even make the short story worthy of being called a short story, and was willing to be kitschy just to suck that out of the work. But if it were any good to begin with...

Anyhow, the way I see the analysis so far is then that most here have more or less discounted the ending and are treating the rest of the story as if it's a list of events rather than a full narrative (which must have an ending), and so have sort of already given up on this being a credible short story and are viewing it more like it's a diary or a news story, and analyzing events in that way, which is fine as you can always get something from that as long as these types of things happen, which they do.

Quoting StreetlightX

here's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex.

And so, yes, the events resonate. I just wish they had been given a more effective vehicle from which to do so.

Reply to Baden

Well, I'll give you my take to respond to yours, but I don't know if it'll actually persuade you :D. I thought the story was pretty good.


I would say that the conflict in the story is between Margot and herself, rather than between Margot and Robert. And she is conflicted with herself in a way that many people are be they male or female. She kind of doesn't know what she wants, and she doesn't bother to ask Robert what he wants either. Neither of them do. At most they talk about pop culture and try to judge one another based upon reactions to it.

And if it weren't for the ending, if it had been cut short, then that conflict wouldn't have been resolved. The ending provides the cap to this conflict by saying "not him, certainly, whatever it is I do want".

I can see that the appeal is to millenials, but I'd say it's not just young women -- because the theme is really dating, and not Margot and Robert. The whole story touches on everything weird about dating, from my perspective -- from unwritten rules that are assumed, to following a script that you didn't have a part in, to feeling uncertain about yourself and your desires. It's not going on a date that's the target, from my view, but just the whole concept of dating -- because going on a date can be natural and normal, like anything, but somehow this strange sort of alienation has been built up around dating as a dance or a ritual -- how there are these sort of false pretenses "baked in" already from the get-go that lead to confusion of the self and conflict with the self.

Reply to Moliere

Cool. I expanded a bit in the next post above, which might give you more info on where I'm coming from including regarding the ending, and I don't disagree with you on much except the part about it being a good short story :D. Another thing is because I used to write fiction myself for quite a long time, I may be to an extent csal's monster in terms of critique. But I mean it at least.

Quoting Baden

I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically.

Yeah, I think this is entirely fair on it's own terms, but I suppose I just can't not see the piece from a critical-sociological angle which is the 'level' at which is resonates for me. As I mentioned earlier, I first came across it in the context of the Aziz Ansari 'awful date' story, which I always saw as a kind of 'test case' for the MeToo movement, and gauging the kind(s) of response that occurred in relation to it. And what Cat Person helped me to do (along with the Ansari story and alot of what's been in the air since, of which Cat Person was one piece in an assemblage) was put into narrative form how a certain kind of situation can develop, and the kind of 'ingredients' that go into making it.

I mean, to delve back in a bit - and to follow some of @Moliere's comments in his last post - one reading of the story is as a critique of desire, where both characters are alienated from their own desires - in different ways. Margot literally narrates her own situation (via imaginary boyfriend/narcissistic projective fantasy) as if she were other than exactly what she is. Robert, for his part, doesn't question his desires, but it doesn't take much to see them as thoroughly socially scripted, especially the way he reacts to Margot's tears outside the club, where he clearly finds comfort in playing the 'comforting, strong man' while projecting an image of feminine vulnerability upon Margot. Robert is so alienated from his desire he doesn't even realize it. Which brings be back to @Timeline's question:

Quoting TimeLine

Was his reaction at the end merely evidence of feeling emasculated from the experience - like when she laughed or when he received the text message from Tamara - or was it because he is one-sided in the experience and could not understand at all how his behaviour was wrong.

If what I said above is valid, then it's not just the case that Robert was emasculated (although he was) and that he couldn't see things from a non-ego perspective, but more that he can't see his own alienation from himself, doesn't realize just how thoroughly mediated his own desires are, and the effects they have. And the point of all this being that this kind of alienation cannot be thought in isolation from the social (the masculine script Robert sticks by), and the thoroughly confused relation to her own desires that Margot has (she asks him back home!, when by all accounts the night is going awfully, or at least very, very blandly). And if you read the Ansari story (written from Her first-person perspective as well!), you get a very similar feeling that She was uncomfortable for alot of what happened and it progressed to a point far beyond what it should have been (n.b. not blaming her, it's fucking terrifying and bewildering to be put in that position, and we are not educated and socially prepared for how to deal with it for the most part).

And it's these kinds of resonances, where I just can't see Cat Person outside of all of that, where I find it's value. On the other hand - yes, I totally agree that there could have been a far more effective vehicle to carry that fourth, and that yeah, alot of what I've said above is clearly not reading the story from a compositional perceptive. But yeah, that's just where my head's at when I read it.

Never judge a person by his/her texts, I suppose. We're less likely to be disappointed with others when our encounters with them aren't physical; when they aren't physical, in fact. Perhaps the inconvenience and burden of the real will be eliminated someday, replaced by some technological form of interaction between adaptable versions of each other we can manipulate in comfort from afar.

I was hoping there'd be cats, you know.

I did a ctrl-f on the story for “fear” to try to find a passage. The word fear comes up four times. Twice in reference to Margot’s fears, twice in reference to Robert’s. What’s most missing, in this story (in a lot of irl dating) is a way to express fear without an additional fear of being rendered pitiful for doing so.

Anger’s usually a secondary emotion, as we all know. In a lot of ways - and here I agree with @aporiap - Robert’s misogynistic outburst is a cover for his inability to process the date, which is, unequivocally, both his and Margot’s fault. The way he handled it was undeniably shitty, but I think we’ve all been beset by ugly thoughts that come suddenly upon us - I condemn the action, but understand what let up to it. The abruptness of Margot’s friends text is equally violent, and frankly hateful. Ugly emotions are part and parcel of actual romance. Obviously there are helpful and unhelpful ways of dealing with these emotions, and robert opted for the latter. But the way cat person functions, as part of the broader conversation around #metoo etc, is to pinpoint an evil core, and then retroactively make all the ambiguity of the date symptoms of that core.

In that sense it exacerbates the problem its trying to illustrate. As I mentioned in my response to Bitter Crank above, the natural progression is this: Same scenario, but now both participants have read Cat Story.

I’ve never called a woman a whore, but I am prone to emotional outbursts (cf my post history) which I usually feel ashamed of after the fact. I think the only way to deal with this kind of pattern is to take responsibility for it, which means something like: I could have chosen not to do what I did, but I still did it anyway, and that’s on me. The next step is to figure out why (the real reasons why) you fall prey to those patterns and then address the problem from there. But the ability to take responsibility means shifting from shame to guilt.

Shame means “I’’m essentially bad at my core.” Guilt means “I’m flawed, both good and bad, and that means its my responsibility to act in a way consonant with my values.” Cat Person, imo, is shame through and through - it really wants someone or something to be all bad. But when you uses this tactic, you don’t fix the problem, you just drive it underground. If bad behavior is seen as symptoms of an unalterable core badness, then those who recognize themselves in that behavior aren’t going to try to change at all. They can’t, after all, if the shame narrative is right. But they, like almost everyone, still deeply need intimacy, so even if they internalize that theyre bad, theyll wind up eventually, dating - except concealing their flaws, rather than have worked through them. So you get a sort of antibody/virus dialectic for red flags.

I’m just just out of a three year relationship and my therapist asked me if I’m thinking of trying to date again anytime soon. I told him I want to, in a bit, but I can’t figure out how to balance appearing dateable while not simply hiding my emotional baggage, because it'll just make stuff off from the beginning. He said something like: well you know just be up front that you're sensitive. My immediate, reflexive reaction, was like whoa guy, you don’t understand what “sensitive guy” connotes these days. I feel like what I'm looking for is something between a red flag and a flawless facade. Some way to communicate: this is what I struggle with, this is how I'm working on it, what are you struggling with, how are you working on it - and will these two struggles and ways of working through them fit together? But I have no idea how you would do this, unless you trust that the other person is cool with doing that too, and it seems like people are getting less and less cool with doing that.

I think this is the heart of my fascination with the story (how the particular way it tries to discuss a problem ends up perpetuating it.) I also find it troubling that the New Yorker published this - less for aesthetic reasons, than that it uses Kitsch (as @Baden put it) in a moral way, and in a way that kind of puts it a new yorker story on the same level as any other hot-take. It seems to exemplify a broader flattening.

So its pretty clear this a personal topic for me. Does any of this make sense to others or sound more like rationalization? This stuff has been knocking around in my head the past month.

Reply to csalisbury Yeah, it makes sense. People are flawed, people have baggage, but The Date is meant to showcase yourself as a desirable object -- yet, in order for us to have a real connection, we can't just hide our bad and show our good.

I think friendship is the best basis for building love, for that reason. It's slower than The Date really allows for, but it's a real connection built on trust. Not everyone seems to feel that way, but maybe they're just looking for something else than what I like. What love through friendship does is create something built on trust that maybe isn't super sexy and exciting, but is worthwhile and on the whole better than purely erotic and spontaneous pleasures (which is all The Date seems to be about, to me).

There's excitement and ecstasy, but not connection and relationship. And certainly not love.


Also, with respect to shame/guilt: I definitely see where you're coming from on that. You're wanting a path out, in a sense, for people who fuck up -- because we all fuck up after all.

On the other side I think there's a sort of exasperation which stops feeling care for people who fuck up. So shame is the end of a process in which someone is just tired of cleaning up the fuck ups.

I don't really know which is right, or if there even is a right way to respond. It almost seems to depend upon the circumstances of an individual -- where they are at and all that. I don't think either reaction is really better, per se. They honestly both feel like understandable sorts of reactions to the world.

Reply to Moliere I’m with you on friendship. Almost all of my long-term relationships have begun from within a group of friends, with someone I’ve known for a while. To be honest, I’ve never dated-dated so I’m scared to death of the prospect. But now as you get older there’s fewer opportunities for this kind of thing (for me and a lot of people at least. There’s work but I’ve seen the aftermath of work-romance breakups and they suck.)

I’m also with you on the exasperation thing. I’ve been on both sides. There’s a point where you’re like jesus christ [person]. There’s also the insidious thing of instinctively realizing you can play on sympathy for infinite free passes. One way to put this: I don’t think Margot should have had another date even if she sympathizes with Robert. She could say something like: ok so this is why, but I’m not gonna be the one to stick around while you fix it. I think thats a good response. This takes away the possibility of “playing good” to avoid change, while still communicating what went wrong. And then I guess it comes down to whether Robert takes that to heart, or plays good for the next person. What the friends text precludes is a way for Robert to reflect and make sense of what he’s doing.

(Also, lest it seem like I’m venting vicariously about my ex. She’s much closer, in this regard, to the helpful non-shame response. We still live together for the next few months and, tho we both know we’re going our separate ways, and the sex is done, we still talk about this stuff - at least when we're not awkwardly getting ready for separate evenings in the same space.)

Quoting Baden

Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.

According to Gore Vidal, the three saddest words in the English language are "Joyce Carol Oates."

Reply to Ciceronianus the White bullshit, three saddest words to Gore Vidal are: "Not Quite Elite."

Reply to csalisbury Vidal could be unduly waspish. I just remembered he made the comment, and thought I'd note he had. I've haven't read Oates' novels or stories. I read some of her poetry. I hope her prose is better.

I think Vidal wrote quite a few good things. I especially like his essays. But I don't know how one identifies the elite.

Quoting TimeLine

As the story is written in first-person, I can only go by what the protagonist explains and I think that since she is consistently unsure about what he is thinking, that underlying intuitive response telling her that 'he could be a murderer' or that he has no cats etc, is telling of the authenticity of her actual motivations, that she really is afraid.

I think it's telling that these thoughts pop-up in the text, in each situation, in context in which she put herself willingly and was actually looking forward to up until something made her uncomfortable. Basically she was fine as long as her expectations were met.

You are right that this is telling of the authenticity of her motivations, but not that this display some form of fear on her end. It just shows that she was no more authentic in her willingness to open herself and engage another in a relationship. Her retreat to safety was this move to "maybe his a murderer - lol - not really", which saved her from having to realize that she's as guilty of playing games as he is.

From the perspective given, what we have here, are 2 rather introverted individuals who are stuck in their own prisonner-dilemma scenario, unwilling to admit that reciprocated vulnerability is the cost for the possibility of a relationship.

Reply to Ciceronianus the White Creation is one of my all times favorites. it’s fantastic - but its also about how ruling classes are able to indulge in leisurely speculation while ignoring what lets them do that - there are a lot of frankly awful things that some of the elites do in creation, but the authorly tone is one of ironic and sympathetic “sure, but.” Vidal knows what “elite” means - its access to power, and the kind of do-what-you-need vibes that come with it. Only he never quite seems, himself, to be sure he’s reached that point. Only lowly courtiers write popular novels, I mean.

I first read this back when it was first published and loved it. It's always insightful when someone of a different identity, whether class-based, ethnic-based, religious-based,and, in this case, gender-based etc. can so effortlessly describe experiences that they've had, which are held in common among those of said identity, and, in doing so, rocks you to your core, for not having previously understood/experienced it yourself. It allows you to step into their shoes, empathize better, and hopefully, enable you to be a better, more thoughtful person.

Quoting csalisbury

I agree that the ending turns in into something like this, but I think, before that, it does something more interesting - all those tropes are there, floating around, but there's a lot more of them too (there's a weird class dynamic going on, there's a mutal drawing from the manic-pixie quirk well etc.) but they're all bumping around in a kind of incoherent way. I think the story is good in that, until the end, it doesn't commit to any one of these tropes definitively. They're more like a mental environment, or half-conscious background, that's both part of the date, and also a frantic attempt to make sense of the date. You could say, I think, that the collection of tropes present is incompossible, so both Margot & Robert are just kind of tossed around from one to another ( I think you're right, that if we saw Robert's point of view, something similar would be going on)

Perhaps the meta meta point is that modern dating is its own kind of unhappiness. The ending kind of ruined this possible conclusion by trying to make Robert over-the-top disgruntled. It then just becomes a cautionary tale, when it seems at parts, this was supposed to provoke social commentary about the psychology and sociology of dating culture. There is the unhappiness of finding a mate, the unhappiness of trying to create attraction or romance, there is the unhappiness of feelings that are not mutually shared, etc. etc. This stuff has been happening since the beginning of time, but of course the modern spin has information technology interwoven which creates more opportunities for unhappiness.

This falls in line with what I've said about the given and work. It is the individual versus the social dynamics of the given. Vulnerability and uncertainty brings with it awkward social realities of unhappiness. Loneliness is just one psychological layer away from restless boredom. It is the will constantly striving.

What does @Bitter Crank think?

Quoting schopenhauer1

What does Bitter Crank think?

Bitter Crank thinks that CSalisbury's phrase "manic-pixie quirk well" will come in handy for some devious purpose, as yet unknown.

Other than that, Cat Person has absorbed more energy than its agreed-upon mediocrity merits.

Crank is reading an excellent Sci Fi piece by Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem trilogy in an English translation by Ken Liu. Much better than Cat Person. The Three Body problem belongs to the Trisolarians. Their three-sun system produces constant instability, and they -- having become aware of earth because of a foolish astronomer's actions during the Cultural Revolution, have decided that Earth would be a better place for them to live, so they are on their way to wipe us out and take over the planet. It will take them about 400 years to arrive. In the meantime they have sent entangled protons to the earth (which unfold to higher dimensions, turning them into super-smart spies with instant communication abilities).

Earth is trying to figure out how to survive, given the advanced's civilization's numerous advantages.

Quoting schopenhauer1

This stuff has been happening since the beginning of time

Probably not quite that long -- something less than 13.xx billion years. I'm guessing that the first tedious dating story happened about 324,071 years ago. And every human has added to the immense pile of tedious dating experiences.

But yes, modern dating seems to have turned into its own kind of unhappiness. That's because our routinely super-educated young folk insist on analyzing the meta aspects of rituals which lead to people getting properly laid. A metaanalysis of these rituals invariably leads to intensely unsatisfactory sexual experiences. The secret to getting properly fucked is to stop thinking about it and just do it. Of course it's an act of disgusting animality -- but that who we are, that's what we do. So get busy.

Just do it and enjoy every minute of it, and when you are all done and washed up, have had a smoke and a beer, go to sleep. In the morning think about something else. Do not engage in restaurant-review-criticism of your sexual partners. If it felt good, schedule a rematch. If it didn't, get back to the bar or go on line and find the next study partner with whom you can gain carnal knowledge.


In other news, I have come up with a new slogan for Christ Church's refugee project:

Jesus is coming: stay where you are

You don't need to flee to Europe or the United States. Salvation is en route, so stay at home where god can find you. God gets confused trying to keep track of overly mobile people, flying here, driving there, even riding donkeys. Help god, stay put.

Quoting Bitter Crank

Crank is reading an excellent Sci Fi piece by Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem trilogy in an English translation by Ken Liu. Much better than Cat Person. The Three Body problem belongs to the Trisolarians. Their three-sun system produces constant instability, and they -- having become aware of earth because of a foolish astronomer's actions during the Cultural Revolution, have decided that Earth would be a better place for them to live, so they are on their way to wipe us out and take over the planet. It will take them about 400 years to arrive. In the meantime they have sent entangled protons to the earth (which unfold to higher dimensions, turning them into super-smart spies with instant communication abilities).

Earth is trying to figure out how to survive, given the advanced's civilization's numerous advantages.

That is way more interesting than this particular story, I agree!

Quoting Bitter Crank

But yes, modern dating seems to have turned into its own kind of unhappiness. That's because our routinely super-educated young folk insist on analyzing the meta aspects of rituals which lead to people getting properly laid. A metaanalysis of these rituals invariably leads to intensely unsatisfactory sexual experiences. The secret to getting properly fucked is to stop thinking about it and just do it. Of course it's an act of disgusting animality -- but that who we are, that's what we do. So get busy.

Just do it and enjoy every minute of it, and when you are all done and washed up, have had a smoke and a beer, go to sleep. In the morning think about something else. Do not engage in restaurant-review-criticism of your sexual partners. If it felt good, schedule a rematch. If it didn't, get back to the bar or go on line and find the next study partner with whom you can gain carnal knowledge.

I think this only works if you are interested in casual sex only, which perhaps would suit some people, and worth following. The problem is people usually want significant others. This is where humans are utterly hopeless with poorly designed social systems to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion. Then you people simply falling back into tropes as the prisoner's dilemma sets in. Anyways, as we both agree this creates much unhappiness. Writers use this unhappiness and confusion to write mediocre short stories and soap operas. They seem to be the only ones benefiting.

Quoting Akanthinos

I think it's telling that these thoughts pop-up in the text, in each situation, in context in which she put herself willingly and was actually looking forward to up until something made her uncomfortable. Basically she was fine as long as her expectations were met.

I think the point is that her expectations were imagined and we have behavioural roles that articulate correct responses and reactions that is devoid of any authenticity and almost at the expense of ourselves. She realised that she did not want to have sex with him and yet she still did (it is unfathomable to me the idea of having sex with someone under such circumstances) and a kiss communicates sexual compatibility. She should have known (she did know) and yet time and again she allowed those feelings to be overlooked.

He behaved in the right way. For him - and judging from what men are saying in this thread - he did not do a thing wrong, he followed the system every step of the way, from asking for her number up until the actual date, he obediently and strategically did what he was supposed to do and his final and aggravated response in the end was almost a declaration of his confusion. Why the fuck don't you want me? I did everything right, but was it? As @StreetlightX said so perfectly, he seems to be alienated from himself. He had no admiration or value for her, he was terrible sexually and he mistreated her. I literally felt repulsed that moment he called her sweetie, like hang on, why would you be saying that? That's what old married couples say to each other. He thinks he should and she thinks she should like it, yet they didn't even know how old the other was.

Quoting Akanthinos

You are right that this is telling of the authenticity of her motivations, but not that this display some form of fear on her end. It just shows that she was no more authentic in her willingness to open herself and engage another in a relationship. Her retreat to safety was this move to "maybe his a murderer - lol - not really", which saved her from having to realize that she's as guilty of playing games as he is.

Only for me the difference was she was playing games with herself whereas he was just playing the game and why after he had that horrifying sex with her felt like everything was dandy. She subjectively felt that something was wrong with him and that became visible when she was in the car, as though she momentarily awakened from some flirtatious slumber only to realise that cat person may not actually have any cats. And that made me think well hang on, what girl doesn't like a man who likes cats? It is an attractive quality for a man as it shows sensitivity and affection, and for me this aspect to the story highlighted that something was wrong with him and she felt it.

Quoting Baden

It fails aesthetically because it's poorly—if competently—written. It would be impressive as an actual diary scribbled down by a relatively well-educated young person similar in age and experience to the main character herself. But artistic renditions of the real thing are supposed to be aesthetic distillations not faithful copies. And I haven't heard a lot of argument in support of the writing anyway, so I'll take it as not particularly controversial at least that we're not dealing with the top-level here.

A diary would have been as worse as naming short story characters Billy or Jack, a typical template that is almost expected for such a narrative. If the author wrote this story intentionally, then she did a brilliant job in articulating the mind and subjective monologue of a twenty year old as though I were actually there as it was occurring in her mind. This oscillating imagery particularly with her feelings of repulsion when he took his clothes off actually made me feel as uncomfortable as she depicted to a point that I felt sorry for her almost naive inability to summon the courage to say no to him. I felt ashamed - despite never having experienced what she did - because the recognition emerged that even I am in danger for being as potentially vulnerable and guilty - again not to the level she did - of imagining some men to be something that they are not.

Quoting Baden

It has a very stale and unengaging opening.

This, I agree with. The first thing that came to mind when I started reading had nothing to do with the narrative but thoughts of how good Dostoevsky is and how contemporary writers lack that depth and skill. It went away soon enough as I trusted in @csalisbury' initial commentary that the plot may have some possibilities beyond the skills of the author. So, I kept reading. I came to see that any critical analysis of the style or skills of the writing was irrelevant because the story is some sort of a gateway into the psyche and experiences of many people, commentaries about her and about him seem to project the experiences as though there is a personal familiarity with the content.

I especially find it interesting when we overlook the first person narrative and somehow claim that Robert is thinking 'such and such' when no one can ever really know, as though verifying their own subjectivity in their analysis. Even a critique of the story is in itself a projection that validates guilt or sympathy or anger. It isn't a story anymore. It is an experience we are all having. We are angry for her for thinking he is ugly and fat. We are angry at him for his sexual failures. It is him. It is her. That is what a short story is supposed to do.

Reply to csalisbury I like Julian best, maybe because I'm a Roman history fan, and am especially interested in the transition from pagan to Christian civilization. But also because I enjoy how he used correspondence between the two philosophers who knew the Emperor, Libanius and Priscus, to tell the story. He was a very clever, perceptive man who wrote very well, and did his research (at least for his historical fiction) but could be fiercely malicious in argument and criticism. That evokes a certain admiration in a lawyer (this one, at least). In fact, judging from his writings he knew lawyers quite well.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I think this only works if you are interested in casual sex only, which perhaps would suit some people, and worth following. The problem is people usually want significant others. This is where humans are utterly hopeless with poorly designed social systems to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion. Then you people simply falling back into tropes as the prisoner's dilemma sets in. Anyways, as we both agree this creates much unhappiness. Writers use this unhappiness and confusion to write mediocre short stories and soap operas. They seem to be the only ones benefiting.

Casual sex is a good thing but the methods for obtaining it are not the basis for long-term relationships, except that sometimes a casual sex partner turns out to be the love of one's life, or at least one's life long sex partner in a more or less satisfactory relationship.

Obtaining and maintaining long-term-to-life-long satisfactory relationships is difficult no matter what. For one thing, we change over time and recalibration is required. For another, we cling to delusions about what a perfect life should be like. White picket fences and roses, the little cottage, an attentive partner, and rosy cheeked children is a delusion. (There are also delusions about the perfect work place, the perfect car, the perfect neighborhood, etc.)

We have unreasonable expectations (not delusions) about a prospective mate. We have unreasonable expectations about sex. We have unreasonable expectations about life in a relationship with another adult who has ideas as unreasonable as ours.

Happy people, or happier people, or at least reasonably happy people either started with fewer delusions and lower expectations or they learned how to adjust.

The conditions people experience in 2018 are NOT exceptional. Happy marriage has always been problematic (given that people have always been problematic). Lucky children had parents who were responsible people who kept their noses to the grindstone and were reasonably kind to each other and to their children.

Getting back to Cat Person:

Who is the intended audience of the New Yorker Magazine?

About a million people bought the New Yorker in 2015, mostly by subscription. How are the subscriptions geographically distributed?

Wikipedia:Despite its title, The New Yorker is read nationwide, with 53 percent of its circulation in the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas. According to Mediamark Research Inc., the average age of The New Yorker reader in 2009 was 47 ... The average household income of The New Yorker readers in 2009 was $109,877 ...

According to Pew Research, 77 percent The New Yorker's audience hold left-of-center political values, while 52 percent of those readers hold "consistently liberal" political values.[41]

Compare that to Sports Illustrated with a circulation of 3,155,000:

Average Income: $60,913
Average Age: 37
Percent Male: 77%

Obviously a much different audience than the New Yorker.

The New Yorker is read by an aging, fairly prosperous New York dominated audience. Sports Illustrated is younger, less wealthy, geographically dispersed across the US, and (not surprising) mostly male. Suppose @Cat Person had appeared in Sports Illustrated. What kind of internet reviews and commends would the story be getting? Probably a lot different than the New Yorker generated commentary.

@Cat Person was published for a particular demographic, and reactions were typical of a narrow slice of the public as a whole.

All this adds up to more reasons why this story is unimportant. It's "chick lit" for New Yorker and L.A. types.

Quoting Bitter Crank

All this adds up to more reasons why this story is unimportant. It's "chick lit" for New Yorker and L.A. types.

Yep and yep.

Reply to Bitter Crank Do you think, Bitette, that you probably lack an understanding of what the story means given you've enjoyed penis for supper for these long years?

Reply to TimeLine

Are these the sorts of things you say to your glowing underlings in real life?

Reply to Noble Dust How's you cats?

Reply to TimeLine

I'm assuming that's a "no"

Reply to TimeLine

He's right in my view. The decision to publish was almost certainly commercial rather than artistic. Because as I keep contending, it's not art, it's just topical. That's it. You could do just as deep a critique as you guys are doing on the real Ansari story.

https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355

There you go. That's just some stuff that happened. It's not art. So, other than the fact that it's worth discussing sexual relations in our tech-commodified modern world, as they are complicated and confusing, the story itself qua short story is a big yawn.

Quoting TimeLine

I especially find it interesting when we overlook the first person narrative and somehow claim that Robert is thinking 'such and such' when no one can ever really know, as though verifying their own subjectivity in their analysis. Even a critique of the story is in itself a projection that validates guilt or sympathy or anger. It isn't a story anymore. It is an experience we are all having. We are angry for her for thinking he is ugly and fat. We are angry at him for his sexual failures. It is him. It is her. That is what a short story is supposed to do.

I'm none of those things. I'm unmoved except at the fact that it was published in a magazine that has a history of publishing good work in this genre.

Quoting Baden

There you go. That's just some stuff that happened. It's not art. So, other than the fact that it's worth discussing sexual relations in our tech-commodified modern world, as they are complicated and confusing, the story itself qua short story is a big yawn.

I see it more aligned to Salinger' Catcher in the Rye because it attempts to ameliorate the inner subjectivity of a young person' mind that references those ugly qualities that we are each threatened to have, whereas the biographical account of the Ansari debacle is outside of us, something we will ever know. I feel you are taking some conventional approach to the meaning of art - as well as Bitter - that is indicative to the adapted tastes of the literary scene as though quality writing were contained within the limitations of particular features, and this only illustrates to me your dependence on definitions. Kant called this: "[a] kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication,” which is exactly what this story did. It is not aesthetics, but art.

I think you and Bitter may not have found any interest in the piece because there is no alignment or identification to the experiences and that severance to the nuances the author attempts to convey - i.e. authenticity and how we fool ourselves - is a shame, really.

Quoting TimeLine

I feel you are taking some conventional approach to the meaning of art - as well as Bitter - that is indicative to the adapted tastes of the literary scene as though quality writing were contained within the limitations of particular features, and this only illustrates to me your dependence on definitions.

But how could this not be used as a defense of any kind of any badly written and/or kitschy story that just happened to be topical? If we're going to disagree about whether something is art or not, its features and the context in which they are set are all we've got beyond the bare plot. Besides, which "particular" features are you referring to? Which features do you think I'm missing in my analysis?

Quoting TimeLine

Kant called this: "[a] kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication,” which is exactly what this story did. It is not aesthetics, but art.

But you seem to be focusing on the content, the plot, and its relevance again. If that's all there is to it, then anybody can make socially important art. I contend that the form is a major failing with this piece, and you don't seem to be addressing that. So, to try to clarify: could you or could you not do an analysis on the level that you've been doing on the news article about Ansari, taking the main characters and their social context as the subject matter? If so, either you need to contend that that news article is art or that you need to go deeper into the form to determine whether or not this story can be considered art. If you could not do that, then tell me what this piece gives you beyond the events? Then we may get to the bottom of our disagreement. As I said earlier I'm open to learning more on why people like this story and consider it worthy.

Quoting TimeLine

I think you and Bitter may not have found any interest in the piece because there is no alignment or identification to the experiences and that severance to the nuances the author attempts to convey - i.e. authenticity and how we fool ourselves - is a shame, really.

Why do you presume that of me as opposed to the other males commenting here? I mean of course I don't identify with the young woman much, and that may make it more difficult for me to appreciate the story, but there's a man in it too. Anyway, it's not a defense of your opinion that it's good art to assert that the author wants to convey something about authenticity and how we fool ourselves. That's a major theme of a huge amount of stories; some do it well, others not so well. So, what is special about the way this author does this? What elements of form ally with what elements of content to make this good art? You tell me.

Quoting Baden

But how could this not be used as a defense of any kind of any badly written and/or kitschy story that just happened to be topical? If we're going to disagree about whether something is art or not, its features and the context in which they are set are all we've got beyond the bare plot. Besides, which "particular" features are you referring to. Which features do you think I'm missing in my analysis?

That is why I mentioned my initial reaction and how that changed as I continued because there are a plethora of badly written narratives deprived of underlying structures or ideas that would thus cultivate fragmentary opinions; your criticism is evidence of the contrary. There is no exclusivity that demonstrates quality in literature because you are imposing yourself by directly expressing boundaries, claiming there to be right and wrong properties in literary representation according to some framework that consists of aesthetic standards. We know this is a work of fiction and yet still felt shock, revulsion, anger, and even fear because the meta-narrative contains psychological and cultural themes that broadly explains shared experiences and the very "features" that are missing in your analysis. Art does not impose anything other than making you feel as though revealing a mirror that enables a discourse with your own psyche and clearly - by this thread and socially - it has cultivated this broader communication; if you felt little, it is likely because the story did not resonate and you were left with nothing other than critiquing the skeleton.

Quoting Baden

But you seem to be focusing on the content, the plot, and its relevance again. If that's all there is to it, then anybody can make socially important art. I contend that the form is a major failing with this piece, and you don't seem to be addressing that..

I am saying that the form is irrelevant. You content that form is a failure in this piece and yet suggested a diary, which to me explains your limitations that are governed by definitions of credibility in literary form. Why not stop for a moment and listen to me; it made me think about how vulnerable to self-deception I can be. You are telling me that it was a terrible story that undermines my - and clearly a number of other people' - experience with this particular piece. You are forcing an ideology by failing to analyse this and the subject matter overall, the psychological experiences of young people and thus failing to appreciate the interconnection between a triptych.

Ansari is a terrible comparative that you selected and have likely done so based on base similarities - sexual experiences and text messages - but that is biography and fails to elicit a similar effect fictional literature can in similar vein to the symbolic power of parables to moral reasoning. It is these symbols within the fiction - and indeed in the case of Cat Person - that effects emotional responses.

Quoting TimeLine

I am saying that the form is irrelevant.

Ok, that is the crux of our disagreement then. I'm saying form is always relevant along with content in assessing any text in terms of its artistic merit.

Quoting TimeLine

Why not stop for a moment and listen to me; it made me think about how vulnerable to self-deception I can be. You are telling me that it was a terrible story that undermines my - and clearly a number of other people' - experience with this particular piece.

I'm listening and I'm not trying to denigrate how anyone felt about the story. Emotional impact can be achieved as far as I'm concerned in many ways not just through art. It's not the story that fails, it's the story qua short story that does.

Quoting TimeLine

Ansari is a terrible comparative that you selected and have likely done so based on base similarities - sexual experiences and text messages - but that is biography and fails to elicit a similar effect fictional literature can in similar vein to the symbolic power of parables to moral reasoning.

Hang on, I thought that was my point about art and your point was that form doesn't matter? If form is irrelevant then the fact that the Ansari story is biography and not fictional literature is irrelevant.

Quoting TimeLine

It is these symbols within the fiction - and indeed in the case of Cat Person - that effects emotional responses.

What symbols? One thing I liked about @csalisbury's story in the creative writing discussion (not that he likely wants us to go into that here) was the use of the cat as a symbol. So, what is the important symbolism I'm missing here in "Cat Person"? (Maybe you mentioned it already somewhere and I missed it. If so, please direct me to the appropriate quote).

Quoting Baden

Ok, that is the crux of our disagreement then. I'm saying form is always relevant along with content in assessing any text in terms of its artistic merit.

You seem to be confusing art with aesthetics here, because this structuralism is irrelevant in this particular story - as I have already iterated in our initial discussions - since there is a triptych here that overall explains one narrative account that draws attention to realising a psychological and social reality, namely that of authenticity in our sexual relationships. The devices used to reach that explanation are irrelevant once it is reached and that is why I said that I was able to overlook those initial reactions because I began to understand what that idea was that the author was attempting to convey.

I thought that the form in The English Patient was awful and intended to promote an air of literary sophistication by making you read and re-read paragraphs as you try to figure out what he is attempting to convey, but is that literary snobbishness what made it win all those awards? If writing something that goes over my head and forces me to second-guess myself or try to interpret and read into what you are saying, is it verification of some supreme quality to be admired simply because it goes over my head?

Edward Said perfectly articulates how writing with the intention to complicate our understanding of the broader subject or theme is intentional and that explaining the content sympathetic to the variety in our audience is a skill worth recognising. I loved the story in the English Patient, by the way, so I am going to ask you again, if you suggested the author used a diary instead, how would that improve the content?

Reply to Baden Reply to TimeLine
I think there are a couple things I can add here. This falls under the category of short story form. It may further be considered a "slice of life" short story. Certainly both of these can be considered "art" in that it is literature that is readable and has a structure. I as one who never produced something with too much literary value can see the value that others are able to produce in the realm of narrative and the general form of literature.

However, does this piece stand up as a "great work of art"? That to me would be harder to contend for this story. To make something great, it has to do something great- whether that be its use of symbolism, its compelling plot, its use of visualization and description, its character development, its ability to bring together philosophical or abstract themes. Does it even inform you about the world around you? Did you learn something about politics, science, history, art? No, not really. It was a very limited point of view. This story probably does little of these things, in my opinion. It provides a good view into a certain perspective of perhaps a certain demographic.

That brings me to the real issue. A real question from this is why do so many people not identify or would not want to identify with the character, even in this very limited scope of dating dynamics? Well, I'll throw something out there- the main character is privileged in a way. The reader is getting a point of view of someone who can get who she wants (well, at least from the content we are given in the story). This is not an underdog story. This is about a person who does have ability to attract others and keep their interest- to the point of them being possessive. There is something not that interesting about those with a privileged perspective. A person who can get what they want (in this case in the dating world), but finds out they don't really want it, is just not that interesting to a lot of people, and hard to identify with unless you are someone who also falls into that demographic.

Reply to TimeLine

You haven't addressed my questions on specifics. Anyhow, if it helps to clarify...

Quoting TimeLine

I loved the story in the English Patient, by the way, so I am going to ask you again, if you suggested the author used a diary instead, how would that improve the content?

I haven't read it although I saw at least some of the movie a while back (I don't think I bothered finishing it). Anyway, I said this story would have had the same emotional impact and been analyzed similarly here if it were just a diary. You could have got just as much out of it on the level you are getting something out of it. Ergo, the form is superfluous to the commentary. But, the story qua short story can't be analyzed without reference to the short story form by definition. That doesn't mean it has to follow a standard form just that the form is necessarily relevant as a reference point.

But here again:

Quoting TimeLine

You seem to be confusing art with aesthetics here, because this structuralism is irrelevant in this particular story - as I have already iterated in our initial discussions

No, because I've consistently emphasized the importance of the interplay between form and content. And form is never irrelevant to a work of art qua art (As for "this structuralism", I don't know what you mean by that or how it relates to my general contention re form). Have you read my Von Trier example? Any comment?

What I'm saying is that this means the story fails as a short story because it offers nothing more than a straight diary account would while seemingly trying to follow the standard short story structure and failing to do so effectively, for example, in terms of the beginning and ending (which most here seem to agree with, so I'm not sure how anyone could can continue to contend it succeeds as a short story). But I don't want to be sound overly pedantic. I don't want to deny the work may have some value. That's a different question. Considering its effect on some people here, it seems that it does.


Quoting TimeLine

I thought that the form in The English Patient was awful and intended to promote an air of literary sophistication by making you read and re-read paragraphs as you try to figure out what he is attempting to convey, but is that literary snobbishness what made it win all those awards? If writing something that goes over my head and forces me to second-guess myself or try to interpret and read into what you are saying, is it verification of some supreme quality to be admired simply because it goes over my head?

No, did anything I say suggest this? The example I gave of a good short story by Joyce Carol Oates was about as direct as you can get. I can't imagine it going over anyone's head.

Quoting schopenhauer1

This falls under the category of short story form. It may further be considered a "slice of life" short story. Certainly both of these can be considered "art" in that it is literature that is readable and has a structure.

No. Or anyone could create art. They can't. That's what's valuable about it.

Quoting schopenhauer1

This is not an underdog story. This is about a person who does have ability to attract others and keep their interest- to the point of them being possessive. There is something not that interesting about those with a privileged perspective. A person who can get what they want (in this case in the dating world), but finds out they don't really want it, is just not that interesting to a lot of people, and hard to identify with unless you are someone who also falls into that demographic.

That's a perceptive point.

@Baden

George Dickie makes a useful distinction between two uses of the word "art".

There is "art" in the categorical sense, as in "All paintings in the museum count as art"

And there is "art" in the evaluative sense, as in "That sculpture is a real work of art"

The former designates the set of all works of art, where the latter designates that something counts as good art.

In the categorical sense I'd say that Cat Person certainly counts as art. I think what you mean by art is in the latter sense, though let me know if you disagree.


I'd say Cat Person is more than a diary entry because it has a character which follows a progression from distinct uncertainty to certainty -- she undergoes a change of character, though not one that is exactly specified but more negative. It's not that she knows what she wants at the end, it's that she knows one particular she does not want.

In some sense the ending is what provides that journey for the character, so I can understand why it's there even though I actually prefer ambiguity (but not everyone does -- in fact narrative ambiguity drives some people absolutely nuts). The entire time she is always uncertain until the moment that Robert declares himself the villain by calling her a whore. She wasn't even able to break it off with him without the aid of her friend, in spite of knowing how she felt.

What was in her way the entire way was herself -- she had various feelings of disease, but she didn't listen to them. She instead listened to convenient concoctions that allowed her to continue in the role set out for her by the rules of Dating. She did so because of imagined possibilities which, at every turn, Robert gave evidence to contradict. The only times Robert seemed to do something nice would be when the rules of dating and mating seemed to mandate to him that it was time for him to be the nice guy he wanted to portray himself as.

It's this nice guy portrayal that the title "Cat Person" is meant to elicit. He was a cuddly cat person who would perform gallant acts of kindness, but when it came to actually asking what his object of affection wanted he wouldn't ever ask.

What Cat Person does over and above Aziz Ansari is portray the stream of conscious of Margot in her various decisions and conflicts. The plot isn't the point as much as her thinking through her desires in what is a rather mundane (and hence actually relatable) situation.

It's actually kind of interesting in that while it is a stream of conscious narrative, it's also in third person partial. Usually stream of conscious narratives are in first person. I'm not sure why that choice was made -- perhaps we are meant to take on the role of someone who is thinking through their experiences after the fact, looking at them from a standpoint that differs from living through the moment.



Just trying to give some more of my thoughts on why I thought it was pretty good. I don't know if it qualifies as the pinnacle of art, exactly, but I don't think it's fair to compare it to a diary entry or a news story either -- and not just in a categorical sense, but in an evaluative sense -- as in "That's a real work of art"

Though I must admit that I'm not entirely fixed on what makes a short story good, either. But a lot of the elements of basic good storytelling are there, when you look at it from the perspective not of two persons in conflict but rather one person in conflict with herself. There is conflict from the beginning (Flirting out of habit because that's just what you do in this role, not out of a desire to flirt with Robert), and a resolution at the end. There is a character arc. And there's the interesting choice of using third person partial in spite of it being a stream of conscious narrative.

So, sure, maybe it doesn't live up to some great work of literary fiction, but I'd still say that it's good, I think, in spite of being uncertain about all the qualities that make a short story good.

Quoting Moliere

In the categorical sense I'd say that Cat Person certainly counts as art. I think what you mean by art is in the latter sense, though let me know if you disagree.

I'm talking evaluatively, and my evaluation is that it's not art at all and therefore it's not good art either. Being published in the New Yorker doesn't make it art in the categorical sense you quote. The New Yorker is a business and despite having a good historical record can make commercial decisions that have little or nothing to do with considerations of artistic merit. As I said to Schope, just writing words on a page that follow the structure of a work of art doesn't make what you create a work of art. And as I suggested to TL, emotional impact alone is not enough because that can be got from texts other than the artistic. It's the interplay of form and content that counts.

Quoting Moliere

I'd say Cat Person is more than a diary entry because it has a character which follows a progression from distinct uncertainty to certainty -- she undergoes a change of character, though not one that is exactly specified but more negative. It's not that she knows what she wants at the end, it's that she knows one particular she does not want.

Maybe you've misunderstood me. I agree it is more than a diary entry or is intended to be (in terms of structure but doesn't offer more in general because it largely fails structurally and aesthetically). It does give us the standard character transformation, and the point would be to analyze that because it's relevant. I was arguing earlier that without bringing the form explicitly into the critique, no amount of discussion of its emotional impact would wrap up the question of its artistic value as a short story. (But I feel I've said something along those lines too many times now, so I should just let it be.)

Quoting Moliere

So, sure, maybe it doesn't live up to some great work of literary fiction, but I'd still say that it's good, I think, in spite of being uncertain about all the qualities that make a short story good.

And you are in the majority. I'm happy to remain in the minority in thinking that it's not of any artistic merit but is possibly useful as a conversation starter. Leaving that aside, as we're unlikely to agree and neither of us has a monopoly on artistic wisdom, what are a couple of short stories that do live up to being great works of literary fiction in your view?

A quick thought on the ending that I just had, though... I'm starting to second guess myself.

The ending actually shows us why Margot may have been looking for reasons to follow along the scripted path. He may have been doing all the right things, but it shows that there was a reason for her fear. Without the ending we do get a more balanced view of the two characters, and more ambiguity, but you don't understand why Margot is in conflict with herself. The ending shows that she was actually both an object of affection and possession, which she was not explicitly but may have been implicitly aware of.

Reply to Moliere

Yes, it shows us he was a bad guy and that her fears were justified with a metaphorical sledgehammer in the form of a text message. I can think of a million more subtle ways to do a similar thing. But maybe the author felt the readership would need a sledgehammer to get it. And judging by the amount of shares, she may have been right. That to me is sad. Sorry, I mean SAD!!!

Quoting Baden

I'm talking evaluatively, and my evaluation is that it's not art at all and therefore it's not good art either. Being published in the New Yorker doesn't make it art in the categorical sense you quote. The New Yorker is a business and despite having a good historical record can make commercial decisions that have little or nothing to do with considerations of artistic merit. As I said to Schope, just writing words on a page that follow the structure of a work of art doesn't make what you create a work of art. And as I suggested to TL, emotional impact alone is not enough because that can be got from texts other than the artistic. It's the interplay of form and content that counts.

Quoting Baden

Maybe you've misunderstood me. I agree it is more than a diary entry or is intended to be (in terms of structure but doesn't offer more in general because it largely fails structurally and aesthetically). It does give us the standard character transformation, and the point would be to analyze that because it's relevant. I was arguing earlier that without bringing the form explicitly into the critique, no amount of discussion of its emotional impact would wrap up the question of its artistic value as a short story. (But I feel I've said something along those lines too many times now, so I should just let it be.)

Ah, OK. I did misunderstand you because I was thinking you meant the second use. You meant the first.

I pretty much adhere to the institutional theory of art. What makes a work of art a work of art is that it is part of an artworld -- which includes creators, audiences, histories of art, various and changing standards for evaluating said art as good or bad, and (in our case) institutions which showcase art. So the difference between a can of Campbell's soup in the grocery story and one in a museum is that the can of Cambell's soup in the museum is part of the artworld, whereas the one in the grocery story is not.

So I'd count the short story here as categorically a work of art, though separate the discussion on how good it is from that categorical distinction. It's been published in a venue for short stories. There is an author. There is a readership. And there is a history of the short story as well as norms being applied to evaluate how good or not good said short story is.


Quoting Baden

And you are in the majority. I'm happy to remain in the minority in thinking that it's not of any artistic merit but is possibly useful as a conversation starter. Leaving that aside, as we're unlikely to agree and neither of us has a monopoly on artistic wisdom, what are a couple of short stories that do live up to being great works of literary fiction in your view?

I really love Robert Coover's The Babysitter. I kept thinking of it while thinking about Cat Person because of how it deals with the ambiguity of desire.

I'm also very fond of the naturalists -- so Steven Crane's The Open Boat and Jack London's To Build a Fire are some of my favorites. I just like the themes of naturalism, and they were both really good writers.

Quoting Moliere

I pretty much adhere to the institutional theory of art. What makes a work of art a work of art is that it is part of an artworld -- which includes creators, audiences, histories of art, various and changing standards for evaluating said art as good or bad, and (in our case) institutions which showcase art. So the difference between a can of Campbell's soup in the grocery story and one in a museum is that the can of Cambell's soup in the museum is part of the artworld, whereas the one in the grocery story is not.

Just to quickly note that I would agree with that, but the New Yorker is not the literary equivalent of a museum (even if it does have a historically good record). If that short story were to be taught in our top universities as art, I'd have to accept it as institutionally art, but I'd still evaluatively deny it was.

Reply to Moliere

"To Build a Fire" is great. I'll read "The Babysitter".

Quoting TimeLine

?Bitter Crank Do you think, Bitette, that you probably lack an understanding of what the story means given you've enjoyed penis for supper for these long years?

Real class.

No, because the problem of establishing relationships is the same among gay people as it is among straight people. Gay men may have a more casual attitude toward sex (being men) but in the search for more complex relationships, we, like straights, entertain delusions.

Quoting Baden

Yes, it shows us he was a bad guy and that her fears were justified with a metaphorical sledgehammer in the form of a text message. I can think of a million more subtle ways to do a similar thing. But maybe the author felt the readership would need a sledgehammer to get it. And judging by the amount of shares, she may have been right. That to me is sad. Sorry, I mean SAD!!!

I think that's a fair point. My original thinking was to read the story without the ending, but now that I'm rethinking that the story doesn't make as much sense from Margot's perspective without it I can see that it was over the top and that a more subtle approach would work better.

Quoting Baden

Just to quickly note that I would agree with that, but the New Yorker is not the literary equivalent of a museum (even if it does have a historically good record). If that short story were to be taught in our top universities as art, I'd have to accept it as institutionally art, but I'd still evaluatively deny it was.

I guess I think of museums as paradigmatic examples of institutions, but not exclusive ones. So they are sufficient to include something within the artworld, but not necessary.

For me the necessary conditions for inclusion is an artist and an audience. There are some problem cases that this doesn't deal very well with, but I think it get's at something important that's essential to inclusion into the artworld. The institution which brings these together, from my perspective, can even be informal -- it doesn't need a tax designation and a name and so forth. It can be a writers group that meets at the coffee shop to share poetry, for example. There you still have artists and audience applying evaluative standards and coming from a history of doing art.

Quoting Baden

"To Build a Fire" is great. I'll read "The Babysitter".

Let me know what you think!
(edit: Maybe even start a new thread so we don't get too far off topic here)

Quoting Moliere

Let me know what you think!

So far, I can see it's in a different (better) universe to "Cat Person". The writing is light and jazzy and it functions to bustle us along almost against our will through some extremely heavy and disturbing imagery. Here (as with Von Trier) you've got conflicting layers of form and content that make you do some important cognitive work. And the play with cuts on top of that makes my head hurt. In a good way. Much here to digest. I like. :up:

Quoting Moliere

(edit: Maybe even start a new thread so we don't get too far off topic here)

Just saw the edit. If you have a lot to say on it and want to start a new discussion I'll join it and try to contribute more.

Quoting Baden

You haven't addressed my questions on specifics. Anyhow, if it helps to clarify...

What exactly is your specifics? If we keep this real, you edit written content for a living so I feel that you are more defensive then actually ready to have a discussion about what it is I am attempting to convey.

Quoting Baden

You could have got just as much out of it on the level you are getting something out of it. Ergo, the form is superfluous to the commentary. But, the story qua short story can't be analyzed without reference to the short story form by definition. That doesn't mean it has to follow a standard form just that the form is necessarily relevant as a reference point.

I am not sure what you are saying here.

Nevertheless, it would not have had the same impact if the style were written as a diary, on the contrary, fictional narrative as a literary device offers a broader link that enables one to re-imagine symbolic and psychological significance and if the writing - however it is written - is capable of doing this, in this case Cat Person was successful, then the author has been successful in reinforcing that symbolic relationship.

Quoting Baden

No, because I've consistently emphasized the importance of the interplay between form and content. And form is never irrelevant to a work of art qua art (As for "this structuralism", I don't know what you mean by that or how it relates to my general contention re form). Have you read my Von Trier example? Any comment?

I am not (for heaven's sake) saying that it is not relevant, I am saying that it is purposive and if it is successful in explaining the content and thus capable of expressing that representation and therefore cultivating "the mental powers for sociable communication" then it has succeeded and no longer relevant to analyse. What is so hard about understanding that?

I have not read your Von Trier example admittingly, I am about to go on a hike so I'll read it when I return tonight (is it on here?)

Quoting Baden

What I'm saying is that this means the story fails as a short story because it offers nothing more than a straight diary account would while seemingly trying to follow the standard short story structure and failing to do so effectively, for example, in terms of the beginning and ending (which most here seem to agree with, so I'm not sure how anyone could can continue to contend it succeeds as a short story). But I don't want to be sound overly pedantic. I don't want to deny the work may have some value. That's a different question. Considering its effect on some people here, it seems that it does.

You are still making the same mistake, talking about short story structure because the value of the work is not a different question, that is what this discussion is entirely about. I have always wondered whether Doctor's enjoy the human form after seeing so many.

Quoting Bitter Crank

No, because the problem of establishing relationships is the same among gay people as it is among straight people. Gay men may have a more casual attitude toward sex (being men) but in the search for more complex relationships, we, like straights, entertain delusions.

This is the first time you have actually provided a decent parallel vis-a-vis the narrative rather than attempting to explain the commercial relevance and indeed, what do you mean being men and exercising casual sex? Are you suggesting gender differences?

Quoting TimeLine

Are you suggesting gender differences?

I not suggesting gender differences, I'm declaring gender differences.

Reply to Bitter Crank Declaring? So women are more deluded in their approach to casual sex?

Quoting TimeLine

what do you mean being men

In your extensive self-lauded experiences, professional and otherwise, you might have perhaps, possibly, noticed that men and women are different. When gay men have sex, their biologically inherited small male investment in reproduction, enables them to have casual sex without the expectation of further involvement. Gay Liberationists thought that was a good thing -- casual (and quite possibly splendid) sex enjoyed with no expectation of further involvement, unless desired. Women's liberation flirted with this idea too, but it didn't work well in straight situations. Women's biological inherited large female investment in reproduction inclines them toward bonding and on-going partnered cooperation.

These inherited tendencies are, of course, not absolute.

Straight men who desire an on-going relationship with a woman and perhaps with their children, adapt an approach like unto that of women: Sex is combined with an assessment of on-going sex supply, potential for amusement, child-bearing, and child rearing.

Gay men assess on-going sex supply and potential for amusement, in either order. Faster, cheaper, simpler, better.

Quoting TimeLine

So women are more deluded in their approach to casual sex?

Replace the question mark with a period and you have the facts.

Reply to TimeLine Women are deluded about all sorts of things. For example, women are deluded about what men think they owe women. (Hint: Not-too-much to as-little-as-possible.)

Quoting Bitter Crank

In your extensive self-lauded experiences, professional and otherwise, you might have perhaps, possibly, noticed that men and women are different.

I have noticed a reciprocal dynamic, men and women explaining what they want, producing vulnerabilities. Did you ever stop and think that perhaps women's approach to casual sex is a product of what men want? Like how our protagonist soothed the ego of vulnerable, disgusting Robert when she pretended that she was nervous?

I am about to get picked up by a friend to go on a hike, but I have much more to say on this subject.

Quoting TimeLine

Do you think, Bitette, that you probably lack an understanding of what the story means given you've enjoyed penis for supper for these long years?

"Bitette", and earlier: "Butter Crack"! Who's the "cat person", now? Do you really think the human dynamics are so different in gay male relations? How would you even know if they were? At least @BC is in a position to recognize things in the story (if he indeed does so) from his own experience.

Reply to Janus No. It was intended to provoke what is now an interesting discussion; and I am sure Bitterlips can defend himself.

Reply to TimeLine

So, you don't really believe that Bitter Crank "probably lacks an understanding of what the story means", then? You were just being provocative?

Have I suggested anywhere that BC is incapable of defending himself or even that he was being effectively attacked?

Reply to TimeLine

The specifics were the questions I asked that you didn't answer (such as regarding what symbolism you were referring to). Anyway, the editing that I do is mostly of academic English and is as irrelevant as BC's sexuality. You don't need to keep looking for personal reasons outside the text for why people disagree with you on the text. Matters like these often come down to taste, but sometimes there can be a bit of movement after an analysis and that's the only way to come to any agreement, so you just distract from the conversation by making it about me or BC. (And recently I've been spending most of my time doing photography not editing anyway. So, there's another off-topic sentence you made me do.)

Quoting Baden

The specifics were the questions I asked that you didn't answer (such as regarding what symbolism you were referring to).

You were asking me to reiterate what I already said to undermine what I said. I assumed you understood my meaning, but this is perhaps a good start

Quoting Baden

You don't need to keep looking for personal reasons outside the text for why people disagree with you on the text.

You are not disagreeing with me on the text. You are disagreeing about the form. Two very different things.

Quoting Baden

(And recently I've been spending most of my time doing photography not editing anyway. So, there's another off-topic sentence you made me do.)

Tell me how I can make you actually perform a decent response and I will be glad to oblige.

.

Quoting Janus

So, you don't really believe that Bitter Crank "probably lacks an understanding of what the story means", then? You were just being provocative?

Apologies, I may have misunderstood you as this is actually a good question. No. I don't and his comments on women clarified it for me. I will be responding to him now to explain my opinion on the subject.

Quoting Bitter Crank

Women are deluded about all sorts of things. For example, women are deluded about what men think they owe women. (Hint: Not-too-much to as-little-as-possible.)

This is really an unwarranted generalisation used rationally to distribute gender bias and clearly lacks any solid understanding of women. I am unsure of where your suggestions that we actually do think you owe us have come from, perhaps you would care to elucidate?

Quoting Bitter Crank

When gay men have sex, their biologically inherited small male investment in reproduction, enables them to have casual sex without the expectation of further involvement. Gay Liberationists thought that was a good thing -- casual (and quite possibly splendid) sex enjoyed with no expectation of further involvement, unless desired.

My closest friend is a giant Samoan gay man and he refuses to have casual sex. I have met his family and can understand why; they all accept him for being gay, love him and treat him with respect and they are all heavily involved in their Polynesian culture. If most of what we are is conditioned behaviour, given that gay men have long experienced oppression, ridicule and a number of other risks, they have been alienated from this conditioning. There are no rules. You are again generalising as though it were biological, but it is social psychology.

Women experience conditioning that attempts to articulate a responsibility to be sexually attractive and this includes popularity, innocence, and purity. It is everywhere, in everything that we do. This very conditioning about women is additionally and delusionally understood by men. Women who undertake casual sex works in contrast to these socially entrenched notions of the feminine, which is why Robert asked our protagonist whether she has had sex previously. The harmful representations of what a female is supposed to be like and how they should behave forms that dichotomy between the inner, authentic individuality and this conditioning.

Quoting Bitter Crank

Straight men who desire an on-going relationship with a woman and perhaps with their children, adapt an approach like unto that of women: Sex is combined with an assessment of on-going sex supply, potential for amusement, child-bearing, and child rearing.

Gay men assess on-going sex supply and potential for amusement, in either order. Faster, cheaper, simpler, better.

Love stands outside of this because it is one person' genuine self loving someone for who they are and they want to be with them only because they want to be near them. If men and women choose to play house with one another, it does not validate authenticity in such behaviour. Your almost clinical approach is still devoid of more depth to identity formation vis-a-vis authenticity.

Reply to TimeLine

This is a debate over the merits of a short story. Not all that important. If you feel undermined because someone has a different opinion on it, that's a failure of perspective on your part. And responding by suggesing the reasons other posters disagree with you is due to some personal deficiency on their part effectively ends the conversation as a productive exchange of ideas.

Reply to TimeLine This is off topic, but this is the way I think we are: Layered.

READ FROM THE BOTTOM UP

• [5] Adults are biologically complete, have more and less mastered the parts of culture most relevant to them, and gradually integrate unique self and specific culture as they age--a never-ending process. [4] Infants are born into the foundational levels of animal existence and swiftly progress both in individual learning from their unique standpoint and in their appropriation of the culture surrounding them.[3] Our species creates, transmits, elaborates, and learns culture. This layer builds on the previous two layers, and is as dynamic and complex as the biological layers.[2] On top of the foundational layer of biology are the characteristics of the species: still biological but bearing features unique to that species.[1] The foundation layer is biology; the untaught, persistent, insistent drives that keep individual animals and species in business.

Your "giant Samoan gay man" closest friend can choose or not choose to have casual sex, as he pleases. This is a choice individuals can make. I have gay and straight friends who also chose not to have casual sex. Quite possibly, they couldn't find the opportunity, were too risk averse, accepted a cultural rule that says 1 sex partner per lifetime, or some other such sick, perverted thing.

When gay men (who are created by and raised in a heterosexual milieu) step into the envelope of gay culture, a different set of values, behaviors, expectations, and so forth comes into effect. Because it is not mediated by broad, long-standing cultural norms gay cruising tends to serve the fulfillment of basic urges. (But it isn't entirely chaotic. Norms are established.)

To the degree that families do not prepare men and women to competently seek partners in the required, approved manner, straight people also find themselves in an envelope where official guidelines do not apply. A straight bar full of young men and women on the loose is a much more chaotic envelope of social interaction than a Baptist church social or a cocktail party for the Sydney or Adelaide Bar Association.

The characters in Cat Person were both operating within an envelope where vague rules are mixed in with vague romantic notions common in our culture. When things don't work out well, (as they often do not) individuals tend to interpret the poor outcomes in terms imported from the main culture.

So, two people fumbling in the dark (literally and figuratively) who fail to have a good time may seize upon interpretations from the culture at large which aren't suitable within the envelope. The author, in this case, applied exterior standards, the way many people do, and arrived at a yet more unsatisfactory resolution.

@Baden So I read the Oates at work, which was a bad idea, because I got a kind of minor Stendhal Syndrome thing from the end. Less pretentiously: got a little light-headed, sweaty, had to take a quick break. It was beautiful but....that's a deeply weird story, man. It felt a lot like almost remembering something I'd almost forgotten. I do agree with both @Moliere & @StreetlightX that its a different sort of thing than Cat Person, more 'magical' (in a demonic way), so I have trouble comparing the two. I mean I'd say, no question, that it's very clearly a better story, aesthetically. But then also - tho i guess this is a beaten horse now - the appeal of Cat Person, to me, is its social significance (how it makes use of contemporary conversation etc, how it is itself inserted in that conversation and what that means, what it means the new yorker published this etc etc.)

The oates story kinda reminds me, thematically, of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, but in a very different setting and register.

I.
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.


II.
What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,


III.
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

y/n?

(One big difference would be that Childe Roland acquiesces, then, only at the end, has the earth-shattering experience. The order's reversed in the Oates.)

Quoting Baden

And responding by suggesing the reasons other posters disagree with you is due to some personal deficiency on their part effectively ends the conversation as a productive exchange of ideas.

Indeed, but it is the other way around. I disagreed with your argument and spoke of a deficiency in your opinions and you responded in kind defensively by undermining my argument, but hey, this is not the first time you have done this. Oops, did I say you. My bad.

Quoting Bitter Crank

The characters in Cat Person were both operating within an envelope where vague rules are mixed in with vague romantic notions common in our culture. When things don't work out well, (as they often do not) individuals tend to interpret the poor outcomes in terms imported from the main culture.

That was my take. I said earlier: The problem is people usually want significant others. This is where humans are utterly hopeless with poorly designed social systems to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion. Then you people simply falling back into tropes as the prisoner's dilemma sets in. Anyways, as we both agree this creates much unhappiness. Writers use this unhappiness and confusion to write mediocre short stories and soap operas. They seem to be the only ones benefiting.

Quoting Bitter Crank

When gay men (who are created by and raised in a heterosexual milieu) step into the envelope of gay culture, a different set of values, behaviors, expectations, and so forth comes into effect. Because it is not mediated by broad, long-standing cultural norms gay cruising tends to serve the fulfillment of basic urges. (But it isn't entirely chaotic. Norms are established.)

Norms are starting to be created because the gay community are slowly becoming socially accepted, but nevertheless the intended idea here is the suggestion that these norms can penetrate the psyche in such a way that the conditioning prompts behavioural responses that stand outside of our own motivations. The dynamic between the two characters epitomises these reactions and the acquisition of these learned manners leads to these superficial motivations.

Bandura explained these stages of cognitive development (coming of age) where these layers of cognition - consciousness, unconscious, imagination - plays with our responses based on these socially learned expectations, and so our motivations are filtered and controlled by probable reactions and rewards that we will receive from others. It prompts me to remember how a grown man in his late twenties felt like he needed to lie and responded defensively because he learnt that if he did something wrong, punishment soon would follow and despite his age, his motivations remained child-like. Heidegger concludes at this point that conditioning is causally rooted to such fear, like when our protagonist continued to have sex despite realising she actually did not want to.

This is what Schops and Kant and many others discussed as transcending or rising above these socially conditioned behaviours to find that personal voice and our protagonist was oscillating between the interactions of the two with the stimuli being the sexual experience or dynamic..Authenticity is perhaps to a degree a type of cognitive training or applied approach where we prompt ourselves with reminders during those moments of acute awareness that we matter. There is that 'I' in there and how this forms for me is still somewhat obscure. This is the part of the story that I found interesting.

Quoting Bitter Crank

The characters in Cat Person were both operating within an envelope where vague rules are mixed in with vague romantic notions common in our culture. When things don't work out well, (as they often do not) individuals tend to interpret the poor outcomes in terms imported from the main culture.

This is exactly what I meant when I said that she imagined him to be something he was not, despite clear examples of their sexual incompatibility and yet she felt obliged - as though society conditions women to respond submissively - and in some ways aroused herself in order to proceed with what was inevitably going to be a bad experience and she knew it. We are prompted to fear punishment or ridicule that makes us submit and I highly recommend watching an episode of Black Mirror Nosedive that explains these social pressures, which I found to be a better comparative then most of the stories placed in here.

Being fed ideas of white picket fence, happy home where people create the lifestyle they are fed to believe will bring them happiness (reinforced by the positive social outcomes that come from performing this adequately) and in my opinion, it is not a gender issue. Men and Women are pressured in the same way that ultimately shapes these superficial behaviours and leaves people alienated from themselves.

Quoting Bitter Crank

So, two people fumbling in the dark (literally and figuratively) who fail to have a good time may seize upon interpretations from the culture at large which aren't suitable within the envelope. The author, in this case, applied exterior standards, the way many people do, and arrived at a yet more unsatisfactory resolution.

I am interested in how you concluded this because I cannot see how the author did apply exterior standards, unless I am misreading you. Can you explain further?

I also recommend the short story “Some Other, Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg.

Reply to TimeLine I'm interested in your take on this as well:

The problem is people usually want significant others. This is where humans are utterly hopeless with poorly designed social systems to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion. Then you people simply falling back into tropes as the prisoner's dilemma sets in. Anyways, as we both agree this creates much unhappiness. Writers use this unhappiness and confusion to write mediocre short stories and soap operas. They seem to be the only ones benefiting.

Reply to schopenhauer1 I’m not familiar with what you’ve said on the given - it may have been in a thread i missed. I feel like i might have a sense what youre talking about, but if you’re down, I’d be curious to hear you unpack it.

Reply to csalisbury
In my thread about work, I emphasized that the individual with his individual personality (created through a combination of experiential and biological interactions) , must confront the givens of the physical and social world. Here is what I said:

[quote=schopenhauer1]My point was about acquiescing freedom of thought to the demands of the given. Here we are with a personality (granted it is created from group interaction, but exists as a phenomenon nonetheless), and this personality has preferences, beliefs, values, and ideas that must aquiesce to the given. [/quote]

And this:

[quote=schopenhauer1]I see the fact that individual needs/wants/goals, though being wrapped up in the social world, are also thwarted by the givens of the social world. There is always a negotiation. I say that to make people negotiate is a reality once born. To have new people that need to constantly negotiate through the world of the give, is questionable. What is it about seeing new people navigate the social/physical world that is valuable to you that this needs to be procreated to a next generation?[/quote]

In the case of this thread, the main theme here centers around the dating world. The individual personality has to confront the givens of the the dating world. This confrontation of the individual with the given, just like in the working world, can lead to all sorts of unhappiness and frustrations. In this case, the norms are actually a poorly designed to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion.

With something so pervasive in the human psyche as looking for a significant other, you would think we would have better signaling systems but we don't. Instead we have tropes, expectations, and other poorly defined guidelines that lead to unhappiness.

In a way, the givens of the dating world have problems that are inverse to the givens of work. In the modern world, the working world usually has very rigid, defined, and strict guidelines that must be dealt with and creates unhappiness. The dating world lacks of almost any guidelines, but also crates unhappiness as a result.

Reply to schopenhauer1 ah, thank you, that makes a lot of sense.

Everything you say about the 'given' that characterizes the dating world sounds right.

I want to say that I think there is hope for the two characters, but that that hope is contingent on... a lot of things. So, like: Margot clearly gets the rules, and gets how they work. I think you were right to say that she is a character who is probably capable of attracting more socially savvy suitors. I think Robert is probably capable of a relationship too, but is too enamored of cute movie stand girls (yes they flirt and all that, but didn't you know, deep down, Robert, that this, like, 10-year younger girl, probably wasn't going to be a long-term thing?)

Both of them are chasing their own personal somethings, and both of their chases are probably overall unhealthy or unsatisfying, but they aligned just enough for one bad i've-always-wanted-to-fuck-a-girl-with-nice-tits/he's-so-attracted-to-my-perfect-skin date.

I feel like they just both need a date where they feel comfortable to express their mutual anxiety, and that would probably mean a different partner (for both of them.) A different type of guideline-ness.

But then also , if open-endedness is too much, then - and I don't mean this flippantly - there's also a robust guideline-centric community when it comes to casual sex - the sadomasochism community. S&M gets a lot of caricatur-y bad press (and I'll admit that I have trouble seeing it as a final resting point, relationship-wise) but it seems like a potentially healthy way to unambiguously structure the otherwise-confusing power dynamics of sex and romance.

Reply to TimeLine

:cool:

Reply to Ciceronianus the White I've only read Creation, I'll admit. I'll give Julian a look.

[quote=Cic]He was a very clever, perceptive man who wrote very well, and did his research (at least for his historical fiction) but could be fiercely malicious in argument and criticism. That evokes a certain admiration in a lawyer (this one, at least). In fact, judging from his writings he knew lawyers quite well.[/quote]

I'm no lawyer but I admire that stuff too. I objected (overruled! I object nonetheless!) to sneaking in one of his bon mots, context-free, as a pat dismissal. Savage Joyce Carol all day, I'd say, but savage her yourself! Imagine you were having a scotch in a lawyer-frequented bar, between [whatever lawyers do], regaling your fellow laywers with tales of how Heidegger pooped on the original copy of Sound of Music to Wagner, and Joyce Carol walks up, and says [joyce-talk] and then you say...

OR, alternatively, reread the story Baden posted like this: The girl, connie, represents the german people, and the bad guy, arnold friend, represents Heidegger - now you got something.

Quoting csalisbury

if open-endedness is too much, then - and I don't mean this flippantly - there's also a robust guideline-centric community when it comes to casual sex - the sadomasochism community. S&M gets a lot of caricatur-y bad press (and I'll admit that I have trouble seeing it as a final resting point, relationship-wise) but it seems like a potentially healthy way to unambiguously structure the otherwise-confusing power dynamics of sex and romance.

This sounds reasonable in theory. Any reasonably intelligent, slightly psychopathic person could learn how to inflict the requisite blows (and they are real blows) and humiliations as the "master" in the S&M scene. Maybe one could accept being tied up and beaten, whipped, etc. as a "slave" but one would have to be extra-extraordinarily tolerant of abuse.

S&M are a pair of "paraphilias" that happen to be complementary. One either is born with or learns very very early whatever it is that leads to sexual satisfaction being connected to something non-genital (like people who have a sexual fixation on shoes). For the most part, paraphilias are not a social problem because participants are self-selecting. (This does not apply to paedophilia.) S&M isn't a problem, but unless one is endowed with that paraphilia, 99.99% of the population are not going to enjoy being whipped--literally, and most people will not like doing the whipping either.

S&M is a specialty, except that one is more born with it than gets a degree in it.

Otherwise, it's a great idea. There are lots of rules and regs, there are organizations one can join, various web sites that sell S&M supplies (whips, chains, slings, hoods, paddles, tit clamps, ball stretchers, etc.), and arrange hookups. Just be sure you are totally turned on by this scene before you show up for a beating meeting.

@TimeLine How would you feel about this story if the genders were reversed?

Like:

Robert was a confident college-anchored guy, hot, working a part-time job somewhere, bored, flirting with customers to keep him busy. Girl comes up to the counter, a little overweight, but seems cool, and he jokes a bit. She leaves, nothing happens. But then a bit later she comes back, 'give me your number concession-stand guy!'.

They go on a date, (she shows up in some kind of clothing he can tell she's maybe a bit poorer than him, a stain on her jeans too. Clear she isn't a student, clear she's maybe a little desperate). The date is uncomfortable , she seems anxious, making probing jokes about class stuff to see how he responds. He feels uncomfortable, but occasionally he feels some kind of connection, drinks a bit to try to quiet his misgivings - then suggests they go back, to her place. During the drive, he worries, occasionally. She seems cool, had funny texts, but what if she's some kind of Fatal Attraction type? Is she gonna get obsessed? What if it doesn't work? Will she show up at his work? Holy shit, he doesn't know anything about her...

They sleep together. (He fantasizes about how she's a bit dumpy and is bowled over by a young well-muscled guy fucking her, how she can't think about anything else except how much she loves his body. Hot young college stud fucks....[etc]) After, she puts on some music, something hip she'd think he'd like, and he's like *rolls eyes* ("for some reason she played the smiths") ok I gotta gtfo. She says wait, why? He says 'they'll wonder where I am at the dorms.'

Drives back. Feels Guilty. She keeps texting him [smiley face with hearts for eyes etc.] He's like 'what the fuck, I don't want to deal with this. I feel guilty.. but. I got nothing to say" Finally his roomate texts back 'he's not interested, ok." She, hurt, texts back something reasonable.

One painful lonely night she goes to a bar he might be at - maybe she'll see him, maybe there was something there. She gets a few drinks and ends up slumped by herself (maybe about to call Uber).

Then!

he shows up with some friends. They sit at a booth on the opposite side. She can see them all talking and looking over. Maybe at one point he points, and they all laugh. Eventually they get up, laughing, all hammily 'concealing' him from her view and leave.

She texts him....


miss you
[etc]
(and finally)
do you do this with all the girls?
Why did you laugh when I asked whether you'd ever brought a girl over to your place?
What did I do wrong?
do you just fuck anyone?
Do you care at all, or do you just fuck anyone?
huh?
fuckboy
piece of shit


Is she a sociopath? Or is there some important difference between this ^ and the original story?

Reply to csalisbury
Well done

Reply to csalisbury
As BC explained, this really isn’t a good solution..if that wasn’t half joking :razz:. For whatever reason humans seem to desire having a significant other to have an emotional and physical bond with. It’s actually quite foundational. My pessimistic theory incorporates it under the category of boredom. As I’ve said before, loneliness is just one layer beyond the baseline restless boredom that lies at the heart of the human experience. This doesn’t solve the problem of restlessness as it is never ending and moves to the next goal to focus. However, relationships may be considered a “good” though many times this is fleeting and causes more frustration.

Anyways, for such a desirous and foundational goal, it has some of the worst systems for its attainment and/or maintenance. It is tragic, and like all other tragic things, we sweep it under the rug as some Nietzschean “pain makes life better”. And Schopenhauer shakes his head.

Reply to schopenhauer1 yeah, but Schop was a misogynist of the 'don't know em, so i know i dont need to know em' stripe. And on top of that: schop wasn't a bad looking guy, right. He could have - but...something got in the way. so: Cause and symptom, chicken and egg - who knows? Either way, I can't take him seriously on romance, good as he is on some stuff. Very very very smart, not bad aesthetically, but stunted emotionally. Was he doted on by a nice mom, had a mean or absent dad? I don't know, but that's my guess.

But romance isn't just [boredomcureX]. Certain cases are escapes from boredom, yes, no question. But romance isn't like drink or metal gear solid (my two boredom escapes.) Sometimes, it just really is romance and gosh it's nice. Romance doesn't last forever of course, so that 'gosh it's nice' has to evolve. but, still - that 'gosh it's nice' isn't reducible to [treat x ] staving off boredom. It's something very ..... Well, I mean, you have some soft and sweet childhood memories, I'm sure, otherwise you wouldn't be a pessimist. It's like those memories, only in addition to the sweet sadness, its hot too.

Reply to apokrisis

So the question I have is whether we can ever get through to the "truth" of another person, or ourselves. Because however we actually overtly act, there is then whatever is the antithesis of that by default. The issue is then whether that should be read as the hidden authentic desire - something we've repressed from sight because it is the bad "us" - or merely just another way we could have acted and didn't ... because we are essentially all right as a person ... as a habit of our social conditioning.

I haven't read Something Happened. I did reach Catch-22, a long time ago (13 years?). Catch-22, if I recall, does the Mark Twain thing of 'common sense in a world that sorely needs it.' If that holds true, it's ok, but...


at 16 it read like: no-bullshit hero follows the truth. Now, I'm a little skeptical of the pose. Twain was a misanthrope, like Vonnegut - the whole 'aw shucks, what a world, some people think theres a MAN in the SKY even though we're APES on a ASTEROID & pretend that STONES & METALS mean anything, but I'm just a MAN with a BEARD, SMOKING on my PORCH and I'm hear to tell you that..." - bullshit, but gets you in the literature books. Iconoclastic like America which is iconoclastic and also aristocracy is just people being like.... Thoreau is paradigmatic here: Cool thoughts about Ants, very cosmic, 'quiet desperation,' still have my mother do laundry on the weekends. The whole genre is bullshit. So those guys, got their number, but Helller?

I guess I don't know. My gut feeling he's part of this tradition. And my gut feeling is this aw shucks simple guy stuff links nicely up to irl doesnt know how the fuck to be with a real person. (because when a real person does real people things (APES on a ROCK) the husband guy can shrug to the camera that isn't there and go 'women (people), am I right?'

I was talking to someone younger (18ish) who read it, Catch-22 and he said [summarized] 'love that book, made me realize there's no point in risking anything for anyone but yourself, they're all just trying to sell you on something.' & ya maybe but ------

I 100% don't think we can get to the truth of another person (or ourself) but I'm open to the idea that we can get to the truth of a person insofar as they're part of some shared thing, which we are also a part of.

Sort of like umm - you got the mask, which is necessary, but you share a thing of knowing each other's masks, and their limits. Which is still not their truth (which is foreclosed to everyone, them too, except in moments.)

Is it possible to be authentic when being aware of how we think or feel must carry with it the sharp sense of the "other" which by implication or suggestion is getting suppressed by us?

'sharp sense' - I'm not sure. I think you can fall in love with someone, without ever really 'seeing' them, and go with that for a long time and neither of you will know who the other is and then after a while its too important, the relationship, to compromise, so you end up...

But I don't know what's essential or not here. I don't think the sharp sense of the other qua Other is essential, but maybe I'm romanticizing? In jungian terms I'd say I know couples who know each others shadows, the sharp sense isn't so sharp, and that seems closer, But yeah I don't -

Reply to TimeLine

I don't really care about what you said about me, but I do care about the homophobic-type vulgarisms aimed at BC and then you lecturing us all on how we undermined you without even acknowledging your bad behaviour in the discussion. Nobody else engaged in ad-homs except you and pretending you are the victim here is not going to fly.

Quoting Baden

I don't really care about what you said about me, but I do care about the homophobic-type vulgarisms aimed at BC and then you lecturing us all on how we undermined you without even acknowledging your bad behaviour in the discussion. Nobody else engaged in ad-homs except you and pretending you are the victim here is not going to fly.

I know you don't really care about what I said to you, clearly you have not read a word of what I was saying. And who is all? Don't use this notion of being so-called homophobic as an excuse for your anger towards me, because there is nothing about what I said that was.

This is really disturbing behaviour and I want to end our conversation right now.

Quoting csalisbury

I haven't read Something Happened. I did reach Catch-22,

I only mentioned it as I happen to be reading it and felt it matched your interest in the inner games people play. I found Catch-22 hilarious as a teen, but laboured when I tried to read it again a few years ago. Something Happened is surprisingly honest about the stuff people think and feel, yet could never risk saying.

Reply to apokrisis That's fair. Thank you for setting me up for that rant tho. I do want to read Something Happened. My ex-roomate had a copy and I flipped through it a few times and it looked good. I'm just skeptical of the tradition.

Quoting csalisbury

Is she a sociopath? Or is there some important difference between this ^ and the original story?

I see what you mean about the vulnerability that appears more visible in the woman in your story, whereas in the reverse the man - according to her story - appears to be sociopathtic, but you must understand that when I said the latter it is to imply this alienation from any empathy or understanding of the other person, so I still hold that Robert has some pathology. I was interpreting the story from a single lens though and it is difficult to ascertain otherwise other than through the examples given, namely that of missing cats and the final messages as well as his sexual behaviour. It is nevertheless food for thought, however, that my initial reaction to his emotional disposition was indeed harsher than it would have been had the roles been reversed, which iterates that social conditioning and our understanding of our feminine and masculine roles.

In saying that, however, how did you interpret the main protagonist? Was she a heartless tramp?

Quoting csalisbury

but Schop was a misogynist of the 'don't know em, so i know i dont need to know em' stripe.

True.

Quoting csalisbury

Either way, I can't take him seriously on romance, good as he is on some stuff.

I don't know, he seemed pretty insightful on certain aspects. Mainly when I invoke Schopenhauer here, I don't mean his specific writings on love and women (which I agree are of his lesser writings) but his general principle of will and the structural tragedies entailed in it (which is the kernel of his worldview and are extremely insightful). I also invoke him in contrast to Nietzsche, who tries to pull a fast one by embracing of what is painful to try to incorporate it in full acceptance. These are the people who prefer the frustrations, dramas, and soap operas because they want life to be its own drama that the individual plays out- a goal to strive for. Every Jack cannot have his Jill.

Quoting csalisbury

But romance isn't just [boredomcureX]. Certain cases are escapes from boredom, yes, no question. But romance isn't like drink or metal gear solid (my two boredom escapes.) Sometimes, it just really is romance and gosh it's nice. Romance doesn't last forever of course, so that 'gosh it's nice' has to evolve. but, still - that 'gosh it's nice' isn't reducible to [treat x ] staving off boredom. It's something very ..... Well, I mean, you have some soft and sweet childhood memories, I'm sure, otherwise you wouldn't be a pessimist. It's like those memories, only in addition to the sweet sadness, its hot too.

Yes, I am aware. Romance is a "good" in the positive sense amongst a handful of them. However, it is still a longing out of a restlessness. If we were simply content, we wouldn't need Romance or anything else for that matter. [quote=Schopenhauer]It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. [/quote]

However, the main point of my response here is how poorly this supposed "good" is attained and maintained. We haven't figured out the key to our own happiness in this seemingly important matter and so we fall into overanalysis, tropes, and other vague guidelines that simply make things worse. This story illustrated some of this.

Quoting schopenhauer1

The problem is people usually want significant others. This is where humans are utterly hopeless with poorly designed social systems to solve the problem of finding, signaling interest, and maintaining a relationship with significant other to have sex and other experiences with. With no set rules, the system gets bogged down with meta-analysis and confusion. Then you people simply falling back into tropes as the prisoner's dilemma sets in. Anyways, as we both agree this creates much unhappiness. Writers use this unhappiness and confusion to write mediocre short stories and soap operas. They seem to be the only ones benefiting.

I have had women copy the way that I dress, the colour of my hair, professionally and personally in a way of trying to morph themselves into the person they think that men would be attracted to. Whether this is based on some inner vulnerability or not, it exemplifies the superficiality of their inner life or being. I believe Erich Fromm states it perfectly:

Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinion as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as this of the majority.

When you suggest it is about wanting significant others, what this does is produce standards or a set of expectations about what you look like, how you dress, your pleasant mannerisms and thus femininity and masculinity is streamlined into a social system that defines qualities worthy of these 'significant others' and why I suggested watching Black Mirror's episode Nosedive, the series itself like a selection of short stories and as you say, all those soap operas and social media force-feed these perceptions that people are conditioned to believe is reality. Our motivations are prompted to adhere because the rewards - the congratulations by society - reflect positively on you, despite it not actually being you at all. Your happiness is superficial. You form bonds with people that are not real; that is why I often say that those who are feeling depression or anxiety are really feeling their authentic self trying to communicate through emotional responses about the unpleasantness of their circumstances, they just don't understand it consciously.

I mentioned love because love and moral consciousness for me is the motivation which is authentic, prompting us to respond against the grain of social cliches and to see people for what and who they are. It produces real happiness.

Quoting TimeLine

I mentioned love because love and moral consciousness for me is the motivation which is authentic, prompting us to respond against the grain of social cliches and to see people for what and who they are. It produces real happiness.

But romantic love also has something to do with attraction. It also has to do with signaling that attraction, and pursuing that attraction. It also has to do with luck (is the person available). It also has to do with social cues (don't look like a fool, seem charming, don't be too nervous, etc.).

Then there is the idea that people are mostly self-interested. To let another person be a focal point may be the biggest downfall for many people who just cannot get over themselves as their only focus point. Any one of these things I mentioned, can doom someone to be alone.

In this world, it's easier to find oneself alone and unloved than to find oneself with someone and truly loved (perhaps eventually in the way you describe: authentic, prompting us to respond against the grain of social cliches and to see people for what and who they are. It produces real happiness.). Hence, I put in the category of the tragic.

Quoting schopenhauer1

But romantic love also has something to do with attraction. It also has to do with signaling that attraction, and pursuing that attraction. It also has to do with luck (is the person available). It also has to do with social cues (don't look like a fool, seem charming, don't be too nervous, etc.).

Some people often call their experience "love" but it is actually a type of dependence, or their attraction is motivated by a preceding loneliness, or because their partner perfectly epitomises the socially constructed ideal. It is why they say that one cannot love until they experience being alone and accepting or overcoming loneliness. They are no longer prompted to make these attachments, where social cues and signalling attraction becomes natural. You don't need to do any of what you say because you are comfortable with yourself. It is that deeper lack of self esteem that impairs our capacity to hear our own voice and what compels us to blindly pursue relationships with people that we prolong and maintain for the sake of it, despite there being no feelings or genuine connection.

People who doubt themselves form such bonds where motivations are superficially conditioned by society and they do this because they lack the self-esteem and the courage, relying on the opinions and the congratulations from others as though such positive reception parallels meaning to their own identity. Conversely, those who are narcissistic and who cannot get over themselves are just as vulnerable to the above mentioned conditions and lack the same self-esteem but enhances that image by exploiting others, just like how cowards attack weaker people. It is rooted in the same superficiality but overcompensated by delusions of grandeur.

Quoting schopenhauer1

In this world, it's easier to find oneself alone and unloved than to find oneself with someone and truly loved (perhaps eventually in the way you describe: authentic, prompting us to respond against the grain of social cliches and to see people for what and who they are. It produces real happiness.). Hence, I put in the category of the tragic.

Love is the only thing worth living for but as I said earlier, you cannot give love until you learn to love yourself, which is basically overcoming that deeper lack of self-esteem and feeling comfortable with being alone and unloved. That sounds easy, but it is probably the most difficult thing we could ever do and the tragedy here is that many people never do. They live in quiet desperation tolerating their partner and creating new and innovative ways to prolong the relationship and "make it work". That idea for me is daunting, of sitting next to someone on the couch as they talk about things you hate, watching them as they pretend to be something you know they are not, basically suffering only to keep things going. That is the real tragedy. Imagine what the protagonist went through but instead spending years and years having sex with someone you don't love. :vomit:

A friend of mine recently broke up with his girlfriend of four years and everyone was in chaos, total meltdown as though he committed this huge crime. They were the perfect, iconic couple. She was a mindless drone but very attractive and popular and he was a borderline genius that dumbed himself down for her. He was losing his mind, but they looked good and everyone celebrated this image, keeping them going for years and years because he doubted himself. She was nice. Everyone liked her. Everything looks good. The underlying misery was that he felt trapped and obliged to do something he didn't want to do and in the end he finally snapped. It was like he needed to destroy it all in order to break up with her, completely smash down that social coercion forcing him to continue to do something he didn't want.

He is profoundly happy with his girlfriend now, a small, chubby unattractive and unknown nerd who is genuinely one of the most beautiful people I have ever met. She does not parade around pretending to be nice. She actually is. There is real love out there, but it first starts with you.

Quoting TimeLine

They are no longer prompted to make these attachments, where social cues and signalling attraction becomes natural. You don't need to do any of what you say because you are comfortable with yourself. It is that deeper lack of self esteem that impairs our capacity to hear our own voice and what compels us to blindly pursue relationships with people that we prolong and maintain for the sake of it, despite there being no feelings or genuine connection.

I think you are being a bit flippant with how relationships form. People aren't just self-actualized totally autonomous beings rolling around until they magically meet a significant other by way of pure attraction or kismet by way of their awesome self-actualized nature. Rather, people have to put themselves out there and work at trying to be with someone. This means, one has to initiate (whether that be a date, "hanging out", or offering to spend time together). This means that communication has to be kept open and flowing in a "natural way" (by phone, by text, by verbal communication). Initiating and communication can be frustrated at any moment and then chalked up to "it wasn't meant to be". Here is much of the anxiety and drama. To make such a flippant view of it, is to downplay the reality of the situation or ignoring of what is the case. Also, the person has to be mature enough to actually have the capacity to care for another person.

Quoting TimeLine

Love is the only thing worth living for but as I said earlier, you cannot give love until you learn to love yourself, which is basically overcoming that deeper lack of self-esteem and feeling comfortable with being alone and unloved. That sounds easy, but it is probably the most difficult thing we could ever do and the tragedy here is that many people never do.

Indeed, but as you mentioned, here is the tragedy. Perhaps many people can be comfortable being alone, and unloved. It is tragic nonetheless that they do not experience what you call "the only thing worth living for". As I said earlier, meaningful relationships don't just happen automatically because one is in some "self-actualized" state. This would be to attribute a false cause to how relationships form. Indeed, in any counterfactual situation, the person who is indeed alone and "comfortable being alone and unloved", can live this way until they die, missing out on a rather large "good" of life.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I think you are being a bit flippant with how relationships form. People aren't just self-actualized totally autonomous beings rolling around until they magically meet a significant other by way of pure attraction or kismet by way of their awesome self-actualized nature. Rather, people have to put themselves out there and work at trying to be with someone.

I kept my feelings for a guy I liked secret because he had a partner and everyday - I mean every, single fucking day - he would say something that would tear me apart because he had no idea how to treat a person that liked him nicely. I would spend my nights stitching up the wounds until finally I could no longer keep myself together. I knew we were very similar people, I knew we could have been great friends, but I kept on feeding him things about me that were not true because it hurt so much that I just needed him gone. I am a very strong woman, for instance, and I know he likes that, so I portrayed weakness to put him off and a number of other things where finally I got really sick because I hated myself mostly because I couldn't be myself. I have never in my life felt so vulnerable then when I liked him and I still find myself wishing - like our protagonist - we could just sit and talk this through where I am honest about who I am. We have every right to want to protect ourselves - by whatever means necessary - from that hurt and the best way of achieving that is through lies.

Socially constructed ideals work in similar vein and is our way of communicating with the external world, where morality forms that contrast that articulates a structure in how we respond to others. We can never really know another person, we are always two magnets that repel from ever uniting authentically and so this "work" or "putting yourself out there" is really that attempt to explain yourself. The problem and what the story conveys is that most people don't actually know themselves, their attitude or decisions are aligned with socially conditioned ideals and they are motivated to quiet who they are that most of their activities are not shared but rather subjective, in secret.

This is the whole point, how can we "put ourselves out there" if our self-esteem is vulnerable to criticism where we fear projecting that inner life because it betrays socially streamlined notions of happiness? People read books and think that there is somehow a way to behave - "play the game" - in order to reach some end and therefore act without ever sharing a bond; it becomes dependence whether emotionally or economically and they are fine keeping things going despite their unhappiness because it is the lesser of two evils, the other evil being loneliness.

But, there are people who are instantly compatible, they actually work well with one another and when the barriers of society are shattered like what my friend did and where we can openly be ourselves, that sharing is authentic, it is "real love" because she is herself and she admires the other person who is also himself and where they both - as independent people - share a bond with one another.

Quoting schopenhauer1

As I said earlier, meaningful relationships don't just happen automatically because one is in some "self-actualized" state.

No, one must first learn to love themselves because only then can they ever "put themselves out there" authentically and see others for who they are as well. I needed to go through all those struggles that I faced with him to realise that I lacked the confidence or self-esteem and I learnt more about who I was because of it. People who are stuck in unhappy relationships, for me, is way worse than being alone.

Quoting TimeLine

This is the whole point, how can we "put ourselves out there" if our self-esteem is vulnerable to criticism where we fear projecting that inner life because it betrays socially streamlined notions of happiness? People read books and think that there is somehow a way to behave - "play the game" - in order to reach some end and therefore act without ever sharing a bond; it becomes dependence whether emotionally or economically and they are fine keeping things going despite their unhappiness because it is the lesser of two evils, the other evil being loneliness.

I honestly cannot make out some of what you are trying to convey here. I think you are saying something along the lines that people play some sort of game to live up to an ideal and are not authentically themselves when dating. I guess, when first meeting another person, people usually tend to hide their most radical beliefs and most unique traits, because there is a notion that people expect some sort of "normalcy" standard- perhaps one a society has signaled through various cues as "socially acceptable". Sometimes, this leads to two people falsely living up to social standards but never being themselves.

Quoting TimeLine

But, there are people who are instantly compatible, they actually work well with one another and when the barriers of society are shattered like what my friend did and where we can openly be ourselves, that sharing is authentic, it is "real love" because she is herself and she admires the other person who is also himself and where they both - as independent people - share a bond with one another.

That's great, but again, most things don't work like in movies or fairy tales as "instantly compatible". In other words, it still takes work and putting yourself out there. You have to take the effort to meet, or go out into the world and be somewhere where this is possible. You have to show interest (usually the guy due to social expectations), and ask for a number, a date, a time to meet. The other person has to reciprocate interest by accepting. The date has to be actually followed through. A second date then has to be procured, etc. etc. This takes time, effort, work. Often, anywhere in this process, it is liable to fail, and often does. The chances to meet someone very compatible are slim. Again, we just chalk it up to "wasn't meant to be". But the process itself is rather clunky, which is rather tragic being that this is also something that is supposed to lead to a major good of life. As stated earlier, for something so important, we have some of the worst systems in place for its attainment. It is the lack of guidelines that could be a problem in this case. There is no defined procedure. It is all groping in the dark, and "putting oneself out there". Vulnerability. Showing interest in another in a vulnerable way, often repeatedly. Again, this dating process is where the anxiety, drama, and much of the painful part of the process occurs. It is not just instant, and it is not just fate, and it is not just kismet. It is a process that often leads to failure- failure to gain traction, failure to communicate, failure to be oneself, failure to fully find interest in the other or the other to find interest in you, etc. No amount of self-actualization will bypass the actual process. You can be yourself all you want, and fail at finding a companion, love, and all the rest. People can be alone their whole life and be comfortable with who they are and miss out on any meaningful romantic relationship. You seem to be overlooking that main point.

Quoting TimeLine

No, one must first learn to love themselves because only then can they ever "put themselves out there" authentically and see others for who they are as well. I needed to go through all those struggles that I faced with him to realise that I lacked the confidence or self-esteem and I learnt more about who I was because of it. People who are stuck in unhappy relationships, for me, is way worse than being alone.

Yes, and why I said that relationships often lead to more frustrations and harm, and thus makes it that much more tragic. What is supposed to be an absolute good, becomes just another negative experience- and again people sweep it under the rug in manic Nietzschean phrases like "pain makes life better", "pain makes us learn", and other such sentiments. And again, Schopenhauer shakes his head.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I honestly cannot make out some of what you are trying to convey here. I think you are saying something along the lines that people play some sort of game to live up to an ideal and are not authentically themselves when dating. I guess, when first meeting another person, people usually tend to hide their most radical beliefs and most unique traits, because there is a notion that people expect some sort of "normalcy" standard- perhaps one a society has signaled through various cues as "socially acceptable". Sometimes, this leads to two people falsely living up to social standards but never being themselves.

More like acting, People pretend to be likeable, they are motivated to perform because being socially accepted produces feelings of pleasure and since society has shaped our understanding of what is likeable, attractive, popular, our self-esteem depends on these social reactions that compels us to perform in a way that we think will enable the best response from others; the more positive the response, the more secure we feel. In contrast to this is the risk of negative, anxious feelings which develop when one is alone or ostracised since the opinion of the majority implies verification that you are unworthy in some way. It is this paradigm that causes us to feel alienated from ourselves.

Have you seen those relationships between people, despite not being able to sustain a decent conversation with one another and where they are completely unhappy, deliberately create events with the unrealistic hope that things will improve? What - other than the congratulations socially for adhering to the "normalcy"- would compel two people to remain together despite lacking compatibility? What would make the two in our short story remain together?

Quoting schopenhauer1

That's great, but again, most things don't work like in movies or fairy tales as "instantly compatible".

I actually think it can. I am not saying it is common, neither am I saying that it is not without some effort or work on both parts, but two people can be perfectly compatible, they just 'click' and my friend is proof of that to me although it took a really unhappy relationship to finally make him find the courage to be himself. He is incredibly attractive (according to society) whereas his current partner is not, but they are genuinely happy together. He just doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks anymore and for that reason he was able to see her for what she was and not for what society would see him to be if he was with her. Does that make sense? So yes, you do put yourself out there, that things take time and you still need to make an effort and make things work, but the motivations are different. This is the dichotomy between authenticity and unauthentic.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Vulnerability. Showing interest in another in a vulnerable way, often repeatedly. Again, this dating process is where the anxiety, drama, and much of the painful part of the process occurs. It is not just instant, and it is not just fate, and it is not just kismet. It is a process that often leads to failure- failure to gain traction, failure to communicate, failure to be oneself, failure to fully find interest or have someone else find interest in someone, etc. No amount of self-actualization will bypass the actual process. You can be yourself all you want, and fail at finding a companion, love, and all the rest. People can be alone their whole life and be comfortable with who they are and miss out on any meaningful romantic relationship. You seem to be overlooking that main point.

I may be overlooking this because the line is very close to that former 'acting' that I initially stated, since one could merely be practising this faux behaviour to reach that intended success. I believe what you are trying to say, however, is that it takes practice to overcome that vulnerability to be yourself and indeed, this is exactly right. My experiences liking someone who did not like me back and all the grief that came from that strengthened me to finally reach that self-actualisation that my confidence is now really solid. In saying that, however, I cannot admire contrived behaviour and I have met men who are wonderful and where we do actually 'click' but, I believe you make your own luck or kismet. If you really love someone, you would make an effort.

Quoting TimeLine

Have you seen those relationships between people, despite not being able to sustain a decent conversation with one another and where they are completely unhappy, deliberately create events with the unrealistic hope that things will improve? What - other than the congratulations socially for adhering to the "normalcy"- would compel two people to remain together despite lacking compatibility? What would make the two in our short story remain together?

I don't know, doesn't sound too good. Again, tragic.

Quoting TimeLine

I am not saying it is common

That right there is part of the tragedy.

Quoting TimeLine

So yes, you do put yourself out there, that things take time and you still need to make an effort and make things work, but the motivations are different. This is the dichotomy between authenticity and unauthentic.

I agree with you about being authentic, but I think we must really emphasize the time and effort it takes to find a person and maintain a relationship with them. The fact that this is unequally distributed and rare, is a signal that something off about the phenomena of dating and relationships itself.

Quoting TimeLine

I believe you make your own luck or kismet. If you really love someone, you would make an effort.

Okay, but again this is still not addressing the main point (which doesn't really have to do acting or being inauthentic) the point is:
You can be yourself all you want, and fail at finding a companion, love, and all the rest. People can be alone their whole life and be comfortable with who they are and miss out on any meaningful romantic relationship. You seem to be overlooking that main point. And there is yet another part of the tragedy. That is really the crux of my argument. We agree- authenticity in relationships is essential.


To summarize: Dating, relationships, love are often a source of harm, unevenly distributed, and often not even experienced by many people in the world. The avenues to experience these things are clunky, leads to many other negative experiences along the way, and often lead to failure in many respects. Here we are with this very desired "good" but have very poor ways to achieve it. And that is part of the tragedy of it.

Quoting schopenhauer1

That right there is part of the tragedy.

:ok:

That is it uncommon for two people who are authentic to actually meet.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I agree with you about being authentic, but I think we must really emphasize the time and effort it takes to find a person and maintain a relationship with them. The fact that this is unequally distributed and rare, is a signal that something off about the phenomena of dating and relationships itself.

Perhaps I am being ungenerous; it took several solid months before I realised that I was attracted to that guy I mentioned earlier and I must make it clear that I am not talking about the love at first sight scenario, which is just Disney at best. No two people are perfect for each other, which returns to my earlier statement about that inability to genuinely connect, but two people who know themselves and their self-esteem is solid, who have the courage to transcend the opinion of others, they are able to share and enjoy one another authentically.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Okay, but again this is still not addressing the main point (which doesn't really have to do acting or being inauthentic) the point is:
You can be yourself all you want, and fail at finding a companion, love, and all the rest. People can be alone their whole life and be comfortable with who they are and miss out on any meaningful romantic relationship. You seem to be overlooking that main point. And there is yet another part of the tragedy. That is really the crux of my argument. We agree- authenticity in relationships is essential.

Hmm, I cannot help but think that is the tragedy of consciousness that may substantiate the reasons for why people to delude themselves in the first place (are we compelled to act because evolution dictates this, since without it we find it way too difficult to form bonds with others?

Being brutally honest, I am not unattractive and I was recently approached by a man who was attractive, had a stable job and was generally a nice person, but I didn't feel anything for him at all and for a brief moment in my mind I heard this he'll do. It was brief and I was shocked at myself, but it was there, the idea that we could build a life together, white picket fence, dog, children, but no love. I wonder how many people see there partners in that way, rather than actually feel something for them?

When women found independence, they also began to have less children. The more conscious and honest we are, the more incapable we are of bullshitting to ourselves that being alone is inevitably a choice.

Quoting TimeLine

Hmm, I cannot help but think that is the tragedy of consciousness that may substantiate the reasons for why people to delude themselves in the first place (are we compelled to act because evolution dictates this, since without it we find it way too difficult to form bonds with others?

You'd have to explain the term "tragedy of consciousness" for me to comment on that. Are we compelled to act to find mates? I think it is not a matter of compelled but a matter of necessity. You cannot find a partner sitting by yourself, or not socializing in some way, so I see no other choice. But I could be misinterpreting what you mean by compelled to act.

Quoting TimeLine

When women found independence, they also began to have less children. The more conscious and honest we, the more incapable we are of bullshitting to ourselves that being alone is inevitable a choice.

Being an antinatalist, I am good with that outcome of less children :). I don't get your last sentence there. You'd have to explain. I don't correlate not having children with wanting to be alone. One can have a relationship and not have children. But I'd have to hear first what you are trying to convey about being alone to better comment.

Quoting schopenhauer1

You'd have to explain the term "tragedy of consciousness" for me to comment on that. Are we compelled to act to find mates? I think it is not a matter of compelled but a matter of necessity. You cannot find a partner sitting by yourself, or not socializing in some way, so I see no other choice. But I could be misinterpreting what you mean by compelled to act.

I think that consciousness is that additional layer that functions almost in contrast to this biological landscape and our brains have the tools that contradict our own nature. We recognise ourselves or have capacity for self-awareness and thus the activities of our bodies and our thoughts and opinions. This shapes how we treat the system by forming favourable cultural behaviours - monogamy, polygamy, asexuality = maximum diversity - and while our underlying motivations are always compelled by the primitive need for sexual contact, the epistemic features challenges how we approach that system.

This is why some cultures - particularly paternalistic ones - contain systemic women's rights abuses that eliminate any capacity for these women to voice consciousness or self-awareness and thus removes that reproductive barrier. Women who possess such empowerment and control over their own bodies make choices because there is that subjective authenticity and as a consequence - since authenticity is a state of mind - are capable of wanting that love that I mentioned earlier to a point that they would prefer to be single and if they want children, are empowered enough to voice what they want. While women have that maternal instinct, there is a clear difference between contemporary western women and those paternalistic cultures where women end up have +5 children.

Quoting TimeLine

Women who possess such empowerment and control over their own bodies make choices because there is that subjective authenticity and as a consequence - since authenticity is a state of mind - are capable of wanting that love that I mentioned earlier to a point that they would prefer to be single and if they want children, are empowered enough to voice what they want.

I am not sure why this is going down the gender politics route. I see what you are saying in terms of the fact that much of this authentic choice for relationships can only take place in a culture that allows for all genders to experience authenticity (in other words the ability to have choice). My main point still stands- people can be alone their whole life and be comfortable with who they are and miss out on any meaningful romantic relationship. Further, truly authentic love can be unequally distributed, rare, and can possibly lead to more frustration down the line. The avenues to obtain authentic love are also frustrating, clunky, non-harmonious, and often drama-filled.

As I said earlier to someone else: However, the main point of my response here is how poorly this supposed "good" is attained and maintained. We haven't figured out the key to our own happiness in this seemingly important matter and so we fall into overanalysis, tropes, and other vague guidelines that simply make things worse. This story illustrated some of this. Overall, it is a tragedy and more proof of the negative character of human life (the basis for philosophy of pessimism).

I think the main differences for why we are talking past each other is that where you are seeing themes of authenticity, I'm seeing themes of the (very often) futile nature of love/relationships/dating. I have agreed with your point that authenticity is part of truly loving someone for who they are and having them love you for who you are, but you have not addressed my main point which is the tragedy at the heart of this phenomenon.

Quoting TimeLine

Do you think, Bitette, that you probably lack an understanding of what the story means given you've enjoyed penis for supper for these long years?

God's teeth! How did I miss this savagery?

The old Elizabethan (I think) exclamation appears pretentious, I know, but strikes me as appropriate since you apparently associate the penis with "what's for dinner." Not that God would, of course, though that may be debatable if you accept the doctrine of transubstantiation.

It seems rather severe given the quality of the story in question, but I'm sure your comment, though stern, was well-intentioned and, like the story itself, meant to enlighten. "The Eternal Woman (or Feminine) draws us upward" (sorry, since we have Google we may as well use the original German--Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan).

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

It seems rather severe given the quality of the story in question, but I'm sure your comment, though stern, was well-intentioned and, like the story itself, meant to enlighten. "The Eternal Woman (or Feminine) draws us upward" (sorry, since we have Google we may as well use the original German--Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan).

Indeed, the eternal feminine of a pure and submissive woman who functions as a gateway to sexual ecstasy must align herself according to the socially constructed ideals that her own identity and responses are shaped by what men expect her to be. Nevertheless, by keeping it real, it was not the best way to joke about women being socially conditioned to behave sexually in ways that men do not understand and those members who don't know me or are not my friend may intentionally misinterpret the meaning, so either way I apologised and apologise again. As for aligning the phallic with some gastronomic Eucharism, well, that's your soul and problem. :halo:

Quoting schopenhauer1

My main point still stands- people can be alone their whole life and be comfortable with who they are and miss out on any meaningful romantic relationship. Further, truly authentic love can be unequally distributed, rare, and can possibly lead to more frustration down the line. The avenues to obtain authentic love are also frustrating, clunky, non-harmonious, and often drama-filled.

I am not disagreeing with your point, it is more a discussion not intended to undermine yours but to explain mine ("putting yourself out there") and I am particularly interested in the idea you say here regarding the avenues to obtain authentic love as I see authenticity as a state of mind just as much as I view love to be moral consciousness and thus a practice. If we play with the words a bit, it is the capacity to reason and therefore live with honesty and thus the non-harmonious frustrations is really some failure of communication either subjectively within yourself due to social constructs that delude your perceptions of reality, or the oft drama-filled miscommunication between one another.

With the latter, if you are having trouble communicating, I would call that a sure sign that you are not right for one another and why I was suggesting happiness to be that natural 'click' or compatibility where you both seem to understand and admire one another comfortably and contentedly.That quiet desperation is really a failure to make this connection and yet still attempting - despite the lack of harmony - to make things work.

Quoting schopenhauer1

We haven't figured out the key to our own happiness in this seemingly important matter and so we fall into overanalysis, tropes, and other vague guidelines that simply make things worse. This story illustrated some of this. Overall, it is a tragedy and more proof of the negative character of human life (the basis for philosophy of pessimism).

To see the story as a tragedy has shifted my understanding of it and of your points as I personally felt more disturbed by the experience rather than sympathetic to the underlying motivations, except for when she continued to have sex with him despite realising that she no longer wanted to that perhaps - afterwards - made me feel sorry for her. I don't see what happened as a negative though as though no hope exists, on the contrary her oscillation between the authentic and inauthentic illustrates cognitive possibilities, a type of coming of age or bildungsroman that will enable her to understand what honesty actually is. As I mentioned earlier, it is a terrible experience having a person that you like or are attracted to intentionally hurting you, but despite the hurt, you contrast and learn and in the process this social dynamism helps you to improve and develop that consciousness.

Quoting schopenhauer1

I'm seeing themes of the (very often) futile nature of love/relationships/dating. I have agreed with your point that authenticity is part of truly loving someone for who they are and having them love you for who you are, but you have not addressed my main point which is the tragedy at the heart of this phenomenon.

This, I see, as an error and not a tragedy, that error where you select the wrong person and try and make it work, and all other aspects that lead you to make that decision - whether it be social constructs or some underlying loneliness and desperation - and the tragedy is when your entire life passes practising in-authenticity. It is really sad when people cannot see you for who you are, but it is a tragedy when you cannot see you for who you are. I don't see being alone as tragic unless there is an absence of authenticity (like the end of Brave New World)

Reply to TimeLine
It seems to me that throughout our sad history, we males when taken together have for various reasons characterized women as either impossibly bad or impossibly good, as it suits us and our circumstances. We're either gross or (grossly) sentimental about them, generally. I'm not sure what Goethe was thinking when he wrote that line, but it sure seems he had the impossibly good woman in mind.

I wonder now and then whether we can be any more sensible. I think we can be in certain cases, but not as a rule, because I suspect when it comes to women we desire we stop thinking in any significant sense. I want to be clear about this, and don't want even to imply that we lose responsibility for what we do or are deserving of sympathy because we driven by impulses beyond our control. But I think that we can become exceedingly stupid and sentimental, though calculating. At worst, we become...well, repulsive. And that may inform the socially constructed ideals you refer to.

I may be wrong, of course. I prefer Pelagius to Augustine, and so think if I have a soul it was pure as pure can be, untouched by sin, at my birth and since then am responsible for my woeful life and will be no matter how many times I ate his body and drank his blood. I stopped doing so long ago, though. My soul and my problem, as you say.

Quoting TimeLine

It is really sad when people cannot see you for who you are, but it is a tragedy when you cannot see you for who you are. I don't see being alone as tragic unless there is an absence of authenticity (like the end of Brave New World)

Ah, then this is the crux of our current disagreement. Your quote there, seems at odds with what you said earlier: [Love is] "the only thing worth living for". Well, if real love, and relationships are so paramount, indeed so much so that it is "the only thing worth living for", then for MANY people not to experience this (I am talking specifically romantic love), would seem to be a tragedy. I don't see how you can vacillate between acknowledging it being such an important "good" of life, yet see the non-attainment of this paramount good as "not tragic", or "no big deal". Do you really think that the non-attainment of love/relationships/romantic love for many individuals (this very important good) is not bad? I don't see how this conclusion computes from your view. People are literally not experiencing of the greatest goods one can experience and can go a whole lifetime without it. Indeed, they may have other goods, but it cannot be denied that there is a major one that could have made that life better.

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

It seems to me that throughout our sad history, we males when taken together have for various reasons characterized women as either impossibly bad or impossibly good, as it suits us and our circumstances. We're either gross or (grossly) sentimental about them, generally. I'm not sure what Goethe was thinking when he wrote that line, but it sure seems he had the impossibly good woman in mind.

Goethe was almost biblical and this dichotomy between the harlot and the holy illustrates the subjective conflict between instinctual desires or the "bad" and moral responsibility or the "good" that seems to be projected and translated in women. We tempt and inspire the same struggle and thus men create these artificial constructs that they project into an ideal woman and women play the part in order to make themselves attractive. It is superficial communication that enables two people who don't really like each other to stay together, a type of possessiveness rather than harmony. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

I wonder now and then whether we can be any more sensible. I think we can be in certain cases, but not as a rule, because I suspect when it comes to women we desire we stop thinking in any significant sense. I want to be clear about this, and don't want even to imply that we lose responsibility for what we do or are deserving of sympathy because we driven by impulses beyond our control. But I think that we can become exceedingly stupid and sentimental, though calculating. At worst, we become...well, repulsive. And that may inform the socially constructed ideals you refer to.

Love is a practice or an ordination of character, about how we use our own mind and if a person cannot take care of themselves, how is it they can take care of others? If we cannot love ourselves, how can we love others? This subjective vulnerability and lack of self-esteem compels one to conformity or an almost delusional pathology, but as Erich Fromm stated: "Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.” I believe men do deserve sympathy because a deeper vulnerability pressures them to silence articulating their own identity. The pressure of masculinity. If they ever reach that unity within themselves, that honesty where they separate themselves from these socially expected ideals, such men can be inspiring.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Your quote there, seems at odds with what you said earlier: [Love is] "the only thing worth living for". Well, if real love, and relationships are so paramount, indeed so much so that it is "the only thing worth living for", then for MANY people not to experience this (I am talking specifically romantic love), would seem to be a tragedy.

The problem is you see love to be romantic love as though when I said love is the only thing worth living for that it is somehow meant for one person and so if you never find that one person than it is tragic. Love - like authenticity - is a state of mind, something that we give and if we only love one person and yet remain indifferent to all others, that is nothing but an enlarged ego or narcissism. You love only because you are loved.

These delusions that people conform to are rooted in this vulnerability, this lack of self-esteem and so when I said that love is the only thing worth living for, I meant reaching a genuine understanding of the world around them because "love" is moral consciousness. It is why some people can be physically alone but never feel lonely, whereas others are in relationships and have many people around them and yet feel anxious and lonely. It is that subjective, inner life that I speak of and working towards attaining this harmony with ourselves - love - is the only thing worth living for, because without it our understanding of the world around us is artificial at best.

It is not to say that authenticity in romance is impossible, the love between two people who have reached that subjective harmony and have overcome that narcissism and lack of self-esteem to see with their own eyes and not with socially constructed ideals. If they can "see" then they can see each other. The tragedy only exists in those that never attain that self-awareness.

Quoting TimeLine

Goethe was almost biblical and this dichotomy between the harlot and the holy illustrates the subjective conflict between instinctual desires or the "bad" and moral responsibility or the "good" that seems to be projected and translated in women. We tempt and inspire the same struggle and thus men create these artificial constructs that they project into an ideal woman and women play the part in order to make themselves attractive.

There's a certain danger in being desired or thought desirable by men, it seems.

The "bad" women to such as Goethe would probably be those who arouse the brute needs of the male (I've always wanted to use this silly phrase and couldn't resist using it when the opportunity arose) and the "good" women would be those who inspire our loftier ideals and so lead us onward and upward. It's likely a part of the old distinction we've liked to make between the merely physical and the mental or spiritual, the latter always being superior to the former, but the former always being paramount regardless of what we say, especially when it comes to sex where we (men I mean) are so motivated by what is visual.

Quoting TimeLine

I believe men do deserve sympathy because a deeper vulnerability pressures them to silence articulating their own identity. The pressure of masculinity.

The incendiary and divisive Camille Paglia claims that we men must define our identifies against our mothers or we'll be swallowed up by them. An image at once disturbing and suggestive. She can be such fun, sometimes.

But don't be too kind to us. Pity may be more appropriate than sympathy when it comes to these things. And caution. The pressure you speak of is largely self-imposed.

I appreciate your responses. I think better of the story and the author because of them, and may even understand them somewhat.

Quoting TimeLine

The problem is you see love to be romantic love as though when I said love is the only thing worth living for that it is somehow meant for one person and so if you never find that one person than it is tragic. Love - like authenticity - is a state of mind, something that we give and if we only love one person and yet remain indifferent to all others, that is nothing but an enlarged ego or narcissism. You love only because you are loved.

This is very much perennial thinking there that most people can get on board with.

Quoting TimeLine

These delusions that people conform to are rooted in this vulnerability, this lack of self-esteem and so when I said that love is the only thing worth living for, I meant reaching a genuine understanding of the world around them because "love" is moral consciousness.

Okay, but here you are really stretching the word "love" to such a wide scope, you should probably use another word (even agape vs. eros would be fine). However, you knew, based on the confines of this thread which was started from a short story on dating/relationships/romantic love, that the definition I am using is about romantic love- that is to say that involving having an emotional and physical bond with one (or more?) particular person(s).

Quoting TimeLine

It is why some people can be physically alone but never feel lonely, whereas others are in relationships and have many people around them and yet feel anxious and lonely. It is that subjective, inner life that I speak of and working towards attaining this harmony with ourselves - love - is the only thing worth living for, because without it our understanding of the world around us is artificial at best.

Again, I think you are broadening the world "love" to such a degree that it no longer fits into the topic. It's like making a category error. You are applying a concept of "being at harmony with oneself and the universe" as equivalent to romantic love, and I think this creates a false sense that what you are saying is really addressing the scope of this argument.

Quoting TimeLine

It is not to say that authenticity in romance is impossible, the love between two people who have reached that subjective harmony and have overcome that narcissism and lack of self-esteem to see with their own eyes and not with socially constructed ideals. If they can "see" then they can see each other. The tragedy only exists in those that never attain that self-awareness.

I really think you are putting so much emphasis on people's self-actualized sense of themselves, it overshoots the issue at hand. Humans are social creatures. We have thrived on committing to intimate/romantic relationships since the beginning of the species, in all societies (whether polygamist or monogamist, tribal or post-industrial, etc.). This social reality is simply not experienced by many people, and the phenomena itself leads to frustration.

So, even if someone is fully self-actualized (a modern concept I find lacking but that's another thread), a big part of being human (intimate relationships) either a) leads to more frustration or b) is not even experienced, thus making a life worse off or not as good as it could have been compared to the rare others who may have this experience of a meaningful relationship.

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

I appreciate your responses. I think better of the story and the author because of them, and may even understand them somewhat.

Thanks, and likewise.

Quoting Ciceronianus the White

But don't be too kind to us. Pity may be more appropriate than sympathy when it comes to these things. And caution. The pressure you speak of is largely self-imposed.

I do not see it as self-imposed. It is a given identity that narrates predictable male traits and guarantees this disembodiment or unsettling disconnection from the self in an attempt to find some solidarity with his environment, and society configures and regulates these archetypes through socially coercive Othering making men feel impotent should they fail to adhere to these patterns of masculinity.

This dyad exposes the vulnerability or lack of esteem in men and to call it a "weakness" or to say it is "self-imposed" is another mechanism that reinforces something "masculine" and does not productively explore the phenomenon leading men to conform.

I would not call it self-imposed, but rather a limitation of power. "Masculinity" as a socially constructed concept is a product of this relational ontology, where the solution for this lack of power is deviously the very thing that causes it in the first place, thus conforming enables an acceptance that leads to feelings of (inauthentic) empowerment when society is the reason why they felt dis-empowered in the first place.

Covering a bullet wound with a band-aid. The solution to this is escaping; if one is addicted to drugs, they need to go through the withdrawal. We need to get away from the toxic environment to improve, even if it means leaving loved ones. Education is another; self-education would suffice but learning and reading improves the psychological barriers in our search for authentic empowerment, but with so many barriers to this - while we have the cognitive tools to achieve this - makes me further sympathise why many men fail.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Okay, but here you are really stretching the word "love" to such a wide scope, you should probably use another word (even agape vs. eros would be fine). However, you knew, based on the confines of this thread which was started from a short story on dating/relationships/romantic love, that the definition I am using is about romantic love- that is to say that involving having an emotional and physical bond with one (or more?) particular person(s).

It is delusional to believe that some symbiosis is possible between two people and despite that sexual/physical bond, the ultimate reality is that it is just sex, we are just sharing our time together and why I say that philia is the best form of love. The futility is real and we play "games" with ourselves and others by portraying socially engineered notions of "love" to pretend some validity to this symbiosis - that you are a part of me - but this type of union is nothing but an exposure of your own subjective vulnerability and loneliness. In the end, it is a stale relationship between two actors mimicking socially constructed traits because they are too afraid to admit that separation is real.

If it is impossible to form that unity with another person, what is this feeling then? It is in you, love is something you feel, something you give. Not share. Give. If that is reciprocated, it is because your partner is giving it to you. The relationship is nothing more than two separate people that form a bond by equally expressing this love. So, when this love is authentic - that inner life contrasted by a moral consciousness - the communication between the two is genuine, because there is no underlying narcissism, no archetype or lies or socially constructed delusions. This is something within you and so when you say that I am stretching the word, you are actually trying to reduce it to definitions based on the ways in which we can express it, yet this doesn't change that it is us expressing it.

Quoting TimeLine

This dyad exposes the vulnerability or lack of esteem in men and to call it a "weakness" or to say it is "self-imposed" is another mechanism that reinforces something "masculine" and does not productively explore the phenomenon leading men to conform

I'm a cynic (in the common sense) trying to be a Stoic (in the uncommon sense). So, I have what may be a peculiar view on this issue. I think this lack of esteem is merited, as I think we're all too readily pathetic (although I think we try to use even this to our advantage; we're calculating, as I said). But, I also think that it results from a needless and harmful concern with things not in our control.

This isn't necessarily to say we're weak. We're thoughtless, however, and in a very literal sense. We just don't think, being intent on satisfaction of a compelling need. We're selfish in so complete a manner that even Ayn Rand would find it hard to believe it virtuous.

I'll just point out places I agree and disagree.
Quoting TimeLine

It is delusional to believe that some symbiosis is possible between two people and despite that sexual/physical bond, the ultimate reality is that it is just sex, we are just sharing our time together and why I say that philia is the best form of love.

Actually, I agree with this "deflationary" approach. Indeed, the the major difference between romantic love vs. philia friendship or other types is its basis in either sexual attraction or sexual bonding. It is funny, this point is missed for the sake of "decency". The sexual nature is assumed in our titles for romantic partners, but rarely explicit- titles like "girlfriend", "boyfriend", "partner", "wife/husband", "fiance", etc. This isn't just a fond friend.

Quoting TimeLine

The futility is real and we play "games" with ourselves and others by portraying socially engineered notions of "love" to pretend some validity to this symbiosis - that you are a part of me - but this type of union is nothing but an exposure of your own subjective vulnerability and loneliness.

The key word here is loneliness. At bottom, we form pair bonds with another because we are lonely creatures. What you speak of is one of the tragedies of the human animal. We are at bottom restless willing creatures (striving-but-for-nothing-in-particular..pace Schopenhauer). Loneliness is just a manifestation of this "well of restlessness".

Humans are social animals and manifestations of restless will. If done right, there is a "tamping down effect" of some of that restlessness (it will never go away though, and just moves on to different restless needs, as it is in our natures). This is the main benefit of a romantic partner though. You are emotionally invested in someone because you care for another and they care for you. You are also sharing physical affection with someone. At best, you can focus your restless will on other things. And I agree, much of this desire for (at least one) person to care about you (physically and emotionally) is simply out of our selfish, lonely wills. It really does not have any greater motivation behind it.

However, the difference between your view and mine, is mine doesn't discount it as unnecessary or to be abolished, but see it as a necessary phenomenon to desire this "tamping down" of the lonely/vulnerable will. Meditation, focus on a cause, work, hobbies, charity, and other (supposedly) higher end activities don't get rid of this very social animal/human/restless/lonely-motivated need for close physical and emotional affection with a close partner. The "tamping down" effect is desired from this relationship. I don't agree with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as being a good model for human motivation, however, I do agree with Maslow that finding a significant other is an important desire in the inventory of the restless/bored/lonely humans desires (for its "tamping down" effect), and makes a person "better off" if achieved with minimal frustration (which is rare).

Quoting TimeLine

In the end, it is a stale relationship between two actors mimicking socially constructed traits because they are too afraid to admit that separation is real.

Here you hit on an interesting point. Though a life would be better off with a (non-frustrating) romantic relationship, often people's relationships are actually just ways to provide some sort of status (look I am with someone and not alone). Really that relationship is nothing more than two people that get together sometimes and pretend to do the relationship-routine. The "tamping down" effect does not really take place, because the actual care and affection are not really had. You also bring up a point about separation. No matter how authentic the relationship, the "Other" (capital O) is always there. The significant other can never really know you completely. A person's full personality/character/motivations/thoughts/ticks are always hidden, even from the closest of people. No one can be fully understood and this can cause frustration and leftover loneliness (afterall, our wills are endless, and never satiated anyways).

Quoting TimeLine

If it is impossible to form that unity with another person, what is this feeling then? It is in you, love is something you feel, something you give. Not share. Give. If that is reciprocated, it is because your partner is giving it to you. The relationship is nothing more than two separate people that form a bond by equally expressing this love.

I agree mainly. Emotions are not in some ethereal realm of shared experience. Rather, you are having emotions, with another who might be roughly correlating the same experience in their umwelt. However, again, it is the effect of the emotion when properly achieved (and with little frustration) that is desired. That is to say, the tamping down effect, to care for and be cared for.

Again though, the problem I addressed is the tragedy that this isn't experienced more than a small number of people for various reasons I've mentioned. Our process for attaining this desired good is not great it seems and even if there were actually demonstrated improvements on it, the prisoner's dilemma would probably make any attempt towards this solution a non-starter.

Quoting schopenhauer1

Again though, the problem I addressed is the tragedy that this isn't experienced more than a small number of people for various reasons I've mentioned. Our process for attaining this desired good is not great it seems and even if there were actually demonstrated improvements on it, the prisoner's dilemma would probably make any attempt towards this solution a non-starter.

I began developing feelings for a man who was completely absorbed by these socially engineered constructions of reality that it was impossible to connect or communicate with him. That was the tragedy.

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the centre of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the centre of his existence. Only in this 'central experience" is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together...they are one with each other by being one with themselves.

It was not that I wanted him to love me, in fact my affection for him was very gentle and distant, but he was completely divided within himself, between the real "him" and the false identity formed by his environment as though disembodied from that "central experience" and it was very obvious to me. He had feelings for me, but he didn't understand that it was because I was "real" and a feeling that came deep from that "central experience" and this fucked him up, he could not stop hurting me as though at war in himself because his understanding of reality, that false life that he believed was real, was static. Love is moving, growing but his life was and will remain dormant. He is not alive.

I think I fell in love with him because of that subjective battle he was experiencing, as though I was egging him on in the hope that he would 'wake up' but it was just too hard for him and that is why I crumbled to bits. As mentioned earlier, a friend of mine broke out of that false reality by completely abandoning it. He just walked away from a life he was deluded to build despite the controversy of his departure, choosing only to remain in contact with some of his friends who are good people. That is a huge thing to do, completely start over, but he is happier because of it. His honesty is what makes him feel alive.