Something I’ve come to realize as we’ve seemingly eased out of the pandemic is that being with people is unavoidable. I’m unsure how I spent high school keeping to myself, but I’ve grown to need people’s presences over time. Before I choose the classes I enlist for, I ensure that I’m going in with at least one good friend. At the very few parties I’ve been permitted to attend, I’m a frantic mess until I see someone I can cling onto just enough.
I’m not incapable of being alone though. I enjoy zoning out at home and can eat lunch alone comfortably. It’s just that, in most cases, depending on others is a good protective mechanism. Especially in young adolescence, so much security and sense of belonging stem from being part of groups, no matter how much you actually fit in. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to think about these things, but these are unfortunate realities we face.
Another unfortunate reality I face? I’ve been questioning a lot of my relationships lately. As someone with an anxious-avoidant attachment style, I get the worst of both worlds. I see myself as impatient and unforgiving, so I disconnect once someone gives me an “ick”—all without communicating how I feel. And yet, I still crave external validation and chronically fear being alone.
Maybe it’s hypocrisy, or maybe it’s a conscious avoidance of being subject to less-than-positive judgment. Whatever it is, it’s been driving me mad. Can I truly open up to and rely on others? Can I count on them?
the presence of presence
This month, I finished taking my first university-level philosophy class, and an insight that’s stuck to me comes from Gabriel Marcel’s The Existential Fulcrum: reflection is a break in routine. That is to say, you don’t reflect on things that don’t matter. The mere act of reflection makes whatever you’re thinking about automatically, well, matter. I feel that the same goes for presence. Presence is technically everywhere around us. An org general assembly in a college hall counts as presence. Messages, or the lack thereof, count as presence, too.
But the presence of presence doesn’t inherently entail its quality. That general assembly will likely only have the officers and a few bibo newbies actively participating. You can reply to messages, but if you’re not in the right headspace, you’ll sound dry, which is as good as not replying at all.
The T-shaped skills model says that the ideal individual possesses both breadth and depth—exploring various fields while developing niches. The same can be said for relationships at large: you can be in multiple social circles, but some must matter more than others. Breadth and depth.
I get to practice breadth and depth, but my model probably looks more like a row of Ms than a single T. I have a bunch of social circles and ensure to establish at least one tight friendship in each of them. That way, I have people to talk to about academics, work, passions, and their possible intersections.
As nice as this sounds on paper, there’s a price I have to pay: an erratic sense of emotional security. Being everyone’s friend doesn’t make you everyone’s top priority. Though I enjoy surrounding myself with different people, I can’t help but crave being grounded in deep relationships I can always count on. I can talk to many people about just about anything, but there are very few who I can tell everything to.
While I have a journal for that very purpose of having a tell-all, I'd be lying if I said I don’t want so-called profound and life-altering connections—“my own people.” We want what we don’t have, and what I lack most is consistency. Thus, the idea of having reliable confidants you can reach out to anytime is easier to romanticize, even if it can lead to unrealistic expectations.
A hard pill to swallow, no matter how often it gets shoved down our throats, is that people won’t always be there for you, despite desperately needing or wanting them to be. One can argue by saying “if they wanted to, they would,” but I say this: how many times have we wanted to but ended up not pushing through?
would you rather be in hell than alone?
Co-dependence is a dream for many, but it remains a dream for just as many reasons. People yearn for relationships to be able to call someone their person. However, despite craving these things, we admittedly have values and priorities that are less aligned with co-dependence. We’re immensely individualistic, and we’re also intensely afraid of commitment and choosing just one option. If we care most about ourselves and run at the thought of needing to choose, how might we find our people?
Very recently, I read Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Designing Your Life, a self-help book positing that we can get our lives together through design thinking. In life design, Burnett and Evans acknowledge that we’ll have, and in turn, be overwhelmed by a plethora of decisions we have to make. Regardless of how impactful a choice may be, whether you’re choosing where to eat or what to do for a living, it’s inevitable to think twice before, during, and after. They illustrate the choosing process here.
Burnett and Evans emphasize that letting go and moving on after choosing are the healthier ways forward. Of course, this is easier said than done, and even they acknowledge that one will always feel like there were better options. What matters at the end of the day, though, is a better method of choosing.
Choices are everywhere in relationships. If cliques still matter, you may be second-guessing the people you surround yourself with. If you’ve fallen into the throes of modern dating, you may be perpetually stuck in steps 1 (gather and create options) and 2 (narrow down) by preoccupying yourself with as many talking stages as possible because you never know what your best prospects are.
Another hard pill to swallow? Sometimes, the best option is simply choosing yourself. Staying single, having more you time, keeping to yourself. And even as it’s been established that society’s grown highly individualistic, as SZA says it best, we’d rather be in hell than alone.
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I don’t believe that opposites attract. To be good, surround yourself with good. Conversely, toxicity breeds toxicity. That’s probably why I thoroughly enjoyed BoJack Horseman in high school: my life’s lowest points had something that resonated with them, if not something that was viscerally worse.
While I haven’t rewatched the series, I always find myself going back to key moments from the series through screenshots or Tweets. BoJack Horseman will forever have a chokehold on me, no matter how emotionally healthy I may seem to be. The screencap above is a prime manifestation of said chokehold. “To know you more is to love you less” is representative of the series’ self-destruction and insecurity. It’s highly cynical, but there has to be a reason why divorce rates are so high, right?
Perhaps knowing someone you claim to love more leads you to knowing that you don’t truly love them as much or at all. As heartbreaking as that sounds, it’s not that foreign of a concept, really. Puppy love operates on this inverse proportion, and we’ve all had our fair share of regrettable crushes.
I suppose what I’m trying to say all throughout is that there’s an endless supply of rude awakenings in human connections. We won’t always be there for each other, we may never find our people, and even if we seem to find them, they’re not guaranteed to last forever. Maybe John Donne was wrong. Maybe co-dependence is merely a game of luck, if not a complete fluke.
But maybe, there’s also a reason why rom-coms and love poems will always have a target audience (me included). Maybe we don’t have to feel that kindness can be taken away from us at any time. “For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time,” says Brian Eno, and what is so much of life if not delusion persevering? If nothing else, I’d like to side with my idealism as often as I can.
This is some really interesting stuff...