Puzzling Emotional Connection

Q: Why do you make such a big deal about why I like you? As you realize its not easy.

A: It's a puzzle and I like puzzles. I like to plumb the nature and properties of relationships, my own especially. I like to dance around the edges of givens, not to automatically challenge their existence, but to sharpen the questions about them. I enjoy the dance we do. Because I do not feel any danger to my own existence, and I pose no danger to yours, I can have and express any feelings I choose. Since you seem to me generally so unmoved by my remarks, minimally affected by them, I can explore what ever comes up. My responsibility, as I understand it, is to distinguish between objective facts about you and your actual assertions, and everything else I might feel or think.

I am in the midst of learning to engage emotionally with other people in ways that are personally meaningful and safe for all involved, and I have endeavored - you may be the judge of my success - to own my stuff, to project gently and without offense, what I perceive may be true. This is an art in all cases, for me at least, but in the case of our relationship, certain key tensions, that are built in, raise the challenge level.

How much me and how much you? Perhaps neither, but the chemistry of how we interact. I am not easy to like, as you say, but since the episode following the work on the deck and siding, I have not cared. For me, liking you is not easy, but it is interesting. You can decide you do not like me, and I would lose a foil for exploring feelings and ideas, for calibrating my language in terms of effective communication, a foil which demands that I expand beyond my normal conception of things. All of which I like and would miss, but is not necessary for my survival.

Sometimes I feel you are responding to me as if I am a crazy, and not to be taken completely seriously. Although not a preferred response from you, I enjoy the challenge of probing you to see what would reach you and engage you emotionally. This curiosity probably explains why I wonder why you like me.

There is no reason to deny a certain "father factor", in that you do remind me of my father in many ways. There is a huge key difference - you are not intentionally cruel, you actually wish me well - which I appreciate enormously. But some of what remains feels like a degree of emotional disinterest in the things I regard as important, and therefore of key importance for my personal validation in relation to a father figure, and therefore of great interest to me. Herein lay the rub, because further probing would reveal contradictions and confusion, because at any deeper layer of feelings I am no longer talking about my relationship with you, but with my father, and the feelings of abandonment that I have in relation to him. With you, at the not-so-deep level, I can remain disinterested too. But it is a cunning disinterest. It is an interested disinterest. It is the disinterest that is interested in the dance at the boundaries of who each of us is.

When I consider your career and your origins, I do not actually expect you to be equipt understand me, or how I think or feel, and how I express myself. I expect you to be baffled by much of what I say. This is part of the puzzle for me - how can I communicate who I am to someone who, it feels to me, doesn’t get me? Who may feel like he gets me but with whom I do not feel that reciprocal sympathy that marks connection? (Someone who, we may say, is unique in my personal constellation of friends in his similarity to my father.) What reaching out beyond the limits of my own mind do I need, to make that connection? Is the hope, the need, even meaningful? Would I be better served by discovering that I feel respected by you at the deep level that I feel the need of, or
by the internal adjustments I make to the feelings of loss I have in relation to my actual father? In the universe of your origins and career, these feelings and thoughts may seem completely a waste of energy, or just a mystery. But I am willing, because I need to, to explore feelings, ideas, perceptions, syntheses, with you, as long as you remain open to reading about them, and responding with the candor I have thus far found.

Tis a fully loaded cart? Yes! Are you having any fun? I hope so. I could stop.

I play, quite seriously, at the boundaries of social consensus, where perhaps I am alone, where I do not always feel substantive, reciprocal sympathy, from which I need to seek the channels of communication between the subjective person I actually find myself to be, and other people who presumably have a subjective existence, because they exist in the objective world around me, but do not respond in a way that is comprehensible to me. Is that me or them, or is it just the chemistry of who we are together? I do wonder.