LS Harteveld

A Life of Agency

The biggest takeaway from our call was a sad one;
I will never belong in society ever again.
This conclusion is contradictory to an earlier conclusion that I never belonged to begin with, so I don’t know why this keeps coming up.
How can I mourn something, or hope for something, that I already established as not having existed?

In hindsight, the natural belonging in the way I have moved and lived, pretty much effortlessly, my whole life, were merely situationships.
The result of proximity which was provided through the structures of education, work, or family structures.
None of it was real.

And I must never forget that all my current, very much hailed and beloved relationships, are at heart not real either.
There is something in the system, that will never allow them to be.
Every day we have in friendship, in love or in harmony or genuine connection is created with our own bare hands, and therefor ultimately unsustainable.

The system will always win.

A few years ago, I consciously detached from my friends and family. A move that was not dramatic and has only made all of my relationships better, for sure.

I knew “detaching” was not the right word at the time.
Because I was merely making my peace with something that already was. Or wasn’t.

But I didn’t know what I was fighting. Not what was really at play. I knew they were not bad people undeserving of my love or anything.
But I did know that the best thing I could do for all of us, was to emotionally remove myself from all relationships.
And I did.

The call with Sara was where I discovered the no-longer-taking-this-personal reason they are not real. Or at least not according to my standards.
My thoughts on this undermining system, underpinning our whole lives, are completely new!
I’m gonna give myself credit for making all those moves of assessment and detachment, basically in the dark.

As a sort of in-between side-thought, I can now also see why I (like most people?) am so disappointed in love;
Because I expected those relationships to be real.
They were not, and for the same soon-to-be-disclosed, not-taking-it-personal reason.

Isn’t that idiotic? Why on earth would we expect to have fulfilling deeply satisfying love relationships if our other relationships are effectively devoid of deep, immutable meaning?
How would we even be able to attend to such a rare natural phenomenon as a true relationship, if we fake all the other ones?
Or put in a friendlier way:

If society does not allow for our relationships to be real, and demands us roleplaying, then why would our love relationship be an exception?

The system I am talking about, and which prohibits us from real connection, is of course capitalism, which is the concept that only part of the work needed for a healthy society is rewarded with money, yet money is necessary to live for everybody including those who would choose to, or are forced to, do the unpaid or underpaid labor.

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~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Master of The Field

The biggest takeaway from our call was more finetuning around why my friendships with women have been so prone to difficulty, compared to my male friends with whom friendships are fairly uncomplicated.
Huge disclaimer!
This is taking into account 2000 years of male privilege to the best of my ability.
Which by definition, will never be enough.

You cannot expect the gender that did not even have voting rights until the 20th century, and their father or husband having to sign for their creditcard just a few decades ago, to be at the same level of Let’s Lay Back And Have An Existential Discussion About The Nature Of The Universe.
That’s privilege.
That’s not having to constantly be on the lookout for predators.
That’s not having your body policed, nor your morals scrutinized. That’s you just letting it hang and having another beer because you have been safe your whole life, because patriarchy has been doing the heavy lifting for you.

I try to take that into account when writing this, and at the same time I know it will never be enough. There is a privilege and a safety gap between my female friends and my male friends, that cannot be overstated.

So there’s all that, and at the same time I’m still not skilled at adjusting my expectations to this. I’m pretty far with raising the bar for potential lovers, meaning that just being a man or even a man I’m in love with, will never be enough for a relationship – real effort needs to be made – but I’m not being supportive towards my female friends, to the level that I would want.
I feel we’re still mostly on our own, battling the consequence of being a woman.

Over the last few years, I’ve said goodbye to all who I could not be a friends with. So the ones who are still my friend, have really come forth and I to them.
For lack of a less dramatic way to put it, we chose each other.
I don’t want to f* it up.
And yet, I find myself still being frustrated that it’s not going as smoothly as with men. 

So that was the first takeaway, that my friendships with women will always stay a work-in-progress. From my side and theirs. And that cognitively understanding where the difference between men and women stems from, has done too little in dealing with my expectations.
I really want to be a better friend to them.

But the second takeaway came from dissecting these so-very-hailed relationships with men. Because initially I thought, and I feel almost silly and definitely self-centered thinking this, I thought they all protected me like knights in shining armor, right.
That because of our difference in gender, they shielded me from harm. And I felt that. And it was a safety no female friend has ever given me.
But I was wrong;
They are not shielding me,  that’s not what they’re doing. Occasionally they might, for sure, but that’s not the foundational safety I feel.
What makes me feel safe, is that they’re shielding, protecting, and walling off, themselves.

It are their own impeccable boundaries, that make me feel safe. 
The exact same boundaries we only accept from men, although fortunately more and more women do adopt them.

An example sprung to mind about a business women I overheard having a conversation on the train. It was a call to the company where she worked, and it was about a visit to a client.
She was discreet and disclosed no information, but it was clear she wanted to report and go home, so she didn’t have to remember anything and could start fresh tomorrow.

The conversation was about projects that cost tens of millions of euros, and which option the client had chosen.

The person on the other end received the information and their way of rounding off the conversation must have suggested that they would pick up the topic tomorrow, at which the business women intervened.
“I just told you,” she said. Repeating the option the client had chosen, identified by the number of millions the deal would be.
She did not hang up the phone until the person on the other end understood  perfectly well that this 5 minute phone call from the train was all she was going to spend discussing a deal of millions of euros.
Impeccable boundaries.

In the call with Sara, this example came up and I started realizing that what makes me feel safe but also (strangely) seen, is when they create that safety for themselves. And they see themselves. I feel taken seriously, when they take themselves seriously. It’s a strange and in a way pretty f*-ed up projection (because on territory that is clearly none of my business), but that’s how it works.

The basics of my flawless friendships was not in them treating me right;
It was in them treating themselves right.

After this I chose to zoom in even further, to the men who had been my lovers, and this new era of my life, where I know I will never get the affairs or flings or relationships I once had. My boundaries are now up to the level of spending 5 minutes on 8 figure deals, if there would be an equivalent for that in love.
Nothing that happened in my love life, ever, would have happened under my New Law. Yet my history provides interesting examples of feeling completely safe and taken care of, under circumstances/ with men that provided no acknowledgement and boundaries in the traditional sense.
My most exquisite sexual experiences, were under conditions any woman looking for red flags would have dismissed.

“I really wonder how that worked,” I said to Sara.

The question was answered within the call, but it wasn’t until later that I was able to come up with the right analogy to illustrate it.
This is an analogy of a gym class, also called physical exercise class (PE class).
It answers the question why men who offered none of the traditional signs of commitment, had made me feel safe enough to have sex.

The gym class analogy goes as follows;
Regardless of the type of sports we’d do that class, our field or exercise terrain would always be marked by a set of bright orange pawns.
Very often the teacher would not carry any specific equipment, just the pawns. Sometimes there would already be other materials on the field, such as balls or bats or gloves, but other times it was just the pawns.
Which was not a good sign because then we’d have to do a lot of running and moving around. The more official the game of sports we’d be doing, the less moving around would be required.

But what I’ve realized these lovers did, in situations that would look unsafe or casual on paper, is that they behaved exactly like the PE teacher, with regard to three things.

First, they were confident and in control.
It was clear that they were in charge, first and foremost of themselves.
They had a firm stance, did not fiddle their hands, and showed no signs of insecurity. They made no sudden movements nor were they overly familiar, or talkative. They just held their ground, and let you go through your emotions without much interference.

Second, they were clear about what we were there to do. What the trajectory was, so to speak. They were, again, unmoved by whether you were going to finish or to what base you were gonna go today.
Their job was simply to offer the game, and to make sure everybody played by the rules.

And third, they marked the field. They decided on the boundaries of our playing field, physically, but also time-wise. And if there was more than one game, they were the ones switching it up.
This could be because of several reasons, but it was always their call.

When students withdrew, they would vary how they responded, depending on the student. But they knew exactly what was going on, nothing went unnoticed under their watchful eye.

In the same way, my best lovers placed their pawns at exactly the right spots. They carved with surgical precision, the lines we would never cross.
They told me the rules, but more than that, they embodied them.

It was an invitation to play, a game where no one could really win.
But more importantly;
No one would ever lose.

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~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living