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The Problem of XKCD 386
Nov. 4th, 2013 10:32 amOver the past year, I've entered into a very fraught and unpleasant relationship with the wife of a friend of mine. Some of you know the back story, and some of you don't. What I want to talk about here isn't the back story so much as my own reactions, and try to parse what I have been doing and why.
The bottom line of this relationship is that it really isn't good for anyone, as far as I can tell. Engagement has been punctuated by bad behavior on both sides. (I would argue that she has behaved worse than I have, but I would, wouldn't I?) The weird thing is that we can't seem to disengage. It is my perception that she continues to poke at me and that I continue to respond. It seems likely that she would argue that I continue to give her provocation, and that she is responding to that provocation. Since other people's motivations are at best a matter of speculation, and my own motivations are the topic, here, let's set aside exactly who's doing what to whom and look at why I keep on responding. The thing is, for a year, we've been doing exactly the same things. One useful although very incomplete definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And I have totally been doing that.
My first assumption was that I have been doing it because in style and personality, this person strongly resembles my father, with whom I had a very complex abuse history. So, deep childhood programming. This explanation seems profound and useful. But here's the problem with it: this is not my first rodeo. I was able to sever contact with my father. I came to realize that every time I talked to him, I lost about three days of my life to misery and stress. After a great deal of thought, I decided that determining whose fault that was, and trying to fix it, was more labor intensive than I was willing to deal with, especially since it wasn't clear that there was a fix. What I concentrated on was the fact that the relationship as it stood was too expensive for me to continue to pursue, and that there wasn't any clear resolution available on the horizon. Finally, I realized that I didn't see any particular profit in resolving the relationship. He no longer had anything I really wanted or needed. While it might have been nice to have a loving and supportive father, that not only wasn't in the cards, but I was now old enough that it was no longer a driving need. So, I severed ties. More than ten years after, he died. I felt a little bad, but I never regretted my decision.
Twice in my life, I have left romantic relationships, not because I no longer cared for my partner, but because in my estimation, the relationship was permanently broken. Given everything I knew about me and my ability to change, and everything I could see about them and their ability to change, there did not appear to be any hope of significant happiness together. Love wasn't enough. And so, I left. In both cases, the man I left was very angry about it, and has not forgiven me. I'm sorry about that. But I stand by those decisions. We weren't good for each other, and there was no reason to believe that this would change in the future.
So, I know that I can walk away from a relationship. It is clear I have the skills to evaluate a relationship as non-profitable, and take my emotional investments elsewhere. I think this is a good and valuable skill, actually. (There are, of course, people who disagree and think that one should simply stick it out. I think they're crazy.) Which brings me back to the wife of my friend. Why the hell can't I seem to disengage? Why do I continue to respond? What is going on here, with a person I don't particularly like, which seems so addictive, when I was able to go cold turkey from people I actually loved?
I think that I may have a bad case of XKCD 386: "Someone is wrong on the internet!" There are two pieces, here. The first is that I feel most strongly about responding when this person has either stated things which I believe are counter-factual, or when she makes judgments about my character which I find abhorrent. Again, not my first rodeo. The first, in particular, was very much part of my dad's arsenal. In fact, one of the reasons I gave up on him was because he tried to tell me that I had had a happy childhood. There have been several times where she and I have experienced an event, and her account of it varies significantly from my memories of it. I am somewhat vulnerable to gas lighting because of my own mental health issues. So, I try to keep careful track of situations where my memories and someone else's are at variance. It's a baseline worry of mine, getting the facts wrong. So dealing with someone for whom facts appear to be malleable is especially challenging for me. It takes special effort, and double checking with people whose memories and character I trust, to keep everything straight, especially if there is any stress in the situation. In general, I rely on my conversation partners to help me keep track of what did and didn't happen. And I cannot rely on this person, and I feel a sense of personal betrayal when she misrepresents the facts. (I have done extensive checking with other people who were also present, and they confirm that my memories much more closely track with their own than this person's stated memories.) The thing that is unique, here, is that most of this is happening in public or semi-public fora. Either in person, with other people present, or on LJ. And there we have XKCD 386.
I've talked a bit in previous posts about how we construct reality. How it has a communal nature. What we understand comes not just from our own experiences, but from the information other people give us about their experiences. We know ourselves partly by our reflection in other people. We are partly contingent upon our context. And our community is built out of overlapping and layered contexts. We know oddly complicated things about people, like this person is easy to get along with in small groups but becomes a boor in big groups and that person is likely to tell the truth in ways that hurt feelings even though they don't intend to and this other person rarely talks about their personal life but seems to have a vibrant relationship with their SO and a pretty functional relationship with mostly everybody else and we have detailed models of how these people combine and what kinds of experiences we are likely to have with various combinations. Our understandings of each other both within our community and as individuals is based on an endless amount of fine detail, much of it anecdotal. And when someone lies about me, or about my experiences in public, I get very uncomfortable. I can feel my own grasp of my context and the context of my friends deforming slightly when I read her weird ideas on who did what and why. And I dislike that discomfort enormously. I do worry, sometimes, that people will be led astray by her statements. I should be able to trust my friends to resist making rash judgments based on statements which don't really seem to fit with the rest of the fabric of our reality. Most of the time, I do trust them. I think that usually, it is my own discomfort that I am addressing.
I keep on trying to write a conclusion to this noodle. The problem is that, having identified the problem, I still don't have any particular desire to stop. The satisfactions I get from engaging are sufficient, and the discomfort I get from not engaging is not something I seem to be able to ignore. My preferred solution, that this person stop lying about me and mine on the internet, isn't an available option. I don't get to control other people's behavior.
The bottom line of this relationship is that it really isn't good for anyone, as far as I can tell. Engagement has been punctuated by bad behavior on both sides. (I would argue that she has behaved worse than I have, but I would, wouldn't I?) The weird thing is that we can't seem to disengage. It is my perception that she continues to poke at me and that I continue to respond. It seems likely that she would argue that I continue to give her provocation, and that she is responding to that provocation. Since other people's motivations are at best a matter of speculation, and my own motivations are the topic, here, let's set aside exactly who's doing what to whom and look at why I keep on responding. The thing is, for a year, we've been doing exactly the same things. One useful although very incomplete definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And I have totally been doing that.
My first assumption was that I have been doing it because in style and personality, this person strongly resembles my father, with whom I had a very complex abuse history. So, deep childhood programming. This explanation seems profound and useful. But here's the problem with it: this is not my first rodeo. I was able to sever contact with my father. I came to realize that every time I talked to him, I lost about three days of my life to misery and stress. After a great deal of thought, I decided that determining whose fault that was, and trying to fix it, was more labor intensive than I was willing to deal with, especially since it wasn't clear that there was a fix. What I concentrated on was the fact that the relationship as it stood was too expensive for me to continue to pursue, and that there wasn't any clear resolution available on the horizon. Finally, I realized that I didn't see any particular profit in resolving the relationship. He no longer had anything I really wanted or needed. While it might have been nice to have a loving and supportive father, that not only wasn't in the cards, but I was now old enough that it was no longer a driving need. So, I severed ties. More than ten years after, he died. I felt a little bad, but I never regretted my decision.
Twice in my life, I have left romantic relationships, not because I no longer cared for my partner, but because in my estimation, the relationship was permanently broken. Given everything I knew about me and my ability to change, and everything I could see about them and their ability to change, there did not appear to be any hope of significant happiness together. Love wasn't enough. And so, I left. In both cases, the man I left was very angry about it, and has not forgiven me. I'm sorry about that. But I stand by those decisions. We weren't good for each other, and there was no reason to believe that this would change in the future.
So, I know that I can walk away from a relationship. It is clear I have the skills to evaluate a relationship as non-profitable, and take my emotional investments elsewhere. I think this is a good and valuable skill, actually. (There are, of course, people who disagree and think that one should simply stick it out. I think they're crazy.) Which brings me back to the wife of my friend. Why the hell can't I seem to disengage? Why do I continue to respond? What is going on here, with a person I don't particularly like, which seems so addictive, when I was able to go cold turkey from people I actually loved?
I think that I may have a bad case of XKCD 386: "Someone is wrong on the internet!" There are two pieces, here. The first is that I feel most strongly about responding when this person has either stated things which I believe are counter-factual, or when she makes judgments about my character which I find abhorrent. Again, not my first rodeo. The first, in particular, was very much part of my dad's arsenal. In fact, one of the reasons I gave up on him was because he tried to tell me that I had had a happy childhood. There have been several times where she and I have experienced an event, and her account of it varies significantly from my memories of it. I am somewhat vulnerable to gas lighting because of my own mental health issues. So, I try to keep careful track of situations where my memories and someone else's are at variance. It's a baseline worry of mine, getting the facts wrong. So dealing with someone for whom facts appear to be malleable is especially challenging for me. It takes special effort, and double checking with people whose memories and character I trust, to keep everything straight, especially if there is any stress in the situation. In general, I rely on my conversation partners to help me keep track of what did and didn't happen. And I cannot rely on this person, and I feel a sense of personal betrayal when she misrepresents the facts. (I have done extensive checking with other people who were also present, and they confirm that my memories much more closely track with their own than this person's stated memories.) The thing that is unique, here, is that most of this is happening in public or semi-public fora. Either in person, with other people present, or on LJ. And there we have XKCD 386.
I've talked a bit in previous posts about how we construct reality. How it has a communal nature. What we understand comes not just from our own experiences, but from the information other people give us about their experiences. We know ourselves partly by our reflection in other people. We are partly contingent upon our context. And our community is built out of overlapping and layered contexts. We know oddly complicated things about people, like this person is easy to get along with in small groups but becomes a boor in big groups and that person is likely to tell the truth in ways that hurt feelings even though they don't intend to and this other person rarely talks about their personal life but seems to have a vibrant relationship with their SO and a pretty functional relationship with mostly everybody else and we have detailed models of how these people combine and what kinds of experiences we are likely to have with various combinations. Our understandings of each other both within our community and as individuals is based on an endless amount of fine detail, much of it anecdotal. And when someone lies about me, or about my experiences in public, I get very uncomfortable. I can feel my own grasp of my context and the context of my friends deforming slightly when I read her weird ideas on who did what and why. And I dislike that discomfort enormously. I do worry, sometimes, that people will be led astray by her statements. I should be able to trust my friends to resist making rash judgments based on statements which don't really seem to fit with the rest of the fabric of our reality. Most of the time, I do trust them. I think that usually, it is my own discomfort that I am addressing.
I keep on trying to write a conclusion to this noodle. The problem is that, having identified the problem, I still don't have any particular desire to stop. The satisfactions I get from engaging are sufficient, and the discomfort I get from not engaging is not something I seem to be able to ignore. My preferred solution, that this person stop lying about me and mine on the internet, isn't an available option. I don't get to control other people's behavior.
