Secret love

[liv]

atreic made a great comment on my post about Valentine's Day angst: it's not ... a day about traditional relationships celebrating themselves openly ... it's a day about secret love making secret hints.

My first instinct is to be scared of secret hints. I like direct communication, I'm afraid of horrible misunderstandings and even though it's really a very unlikely sort of danger to worry about, Far from the madding crowd still haunts me. There's also the issue of lots of teenage experiences where people sent tokens of affection (which were really badges of coolness) and I was among the despised group who didn't receive anything because I wasn't popular. I didn't want the valentines for their own sake, I wanted not to be laughed at for not getting any.

That said, I totally love atreic's definition of Valentine's Day:

It celebrates the fact that sometimes love isn't easy and people pine and don't know how to say things and that sometimes people are much fonder of you than you know they are.

So, I invite you to talk about crushes and pining and secret love and people you shouldn't have feelings for. Comment anonymously or identify yourself, talk about current situations or past experiences, anything goes.

When I was, oh, 15 or 16 or so, I experienced a funny feeling when I was around a good friend of mine. At the time I thought of it as like being calm and excited at the same time. Sometimes I had dreams in which we were both naked and we grappled or rolled down grassy hills together or tasted eachother's skin. I had no idea what to make of this, just absolutely no concept that it could be called attraction, because it didn't match what I'd read about what attraction feels like, and the idea of being attracted to another girl didn't have a clear referent for me. At some point she tried to come out to me, and I blurted out something of my confusion about sexuality and all that stuff in a way that made it seem like I was going to react by being homophobic, so we never really completed that conversation. In some ways it's probably a good thing I didn't articulate anything specific, even to myself, because the context I was in, I would have had a really hard time dealing with the idea that I might not be straight.

---

By the time I was in Sixth Form I was aware of the Kinsey report, and no, it's not great by modern standards, but at least I had a concept in my mind that lots of people experience same-sex attraction even if they don't fit a narrow, naive definition of "gay". Another friend tried to come out to me, and I shared my new-found knowledge about sexual orientation being a spectrum and again was fairly unhelpful. I'd also been reading a lot of Simone de Beauvoir who was overtly bisexual and talked about her attraction to and relationships with women. I was hopelessly in love with her, much as one might have a crush on a fictional character (she'd died when I was 7, and anyway I was in love with the persona she presented of herself when she had been my age in the 1920s.) I didn't really add any of these things up to thinking of myself as having a sexual orientation towards women.

---

The first time I saw two women kissing I was, oh, nearly 20? I thought very hard about my reaction to seeing that, and identified that one component of it was perhaps a hint of jealousy. This thing I felt for the first non-straight person I knowingly met, it perhaps wasn't just a schoolgirl crush on an older, much more worldly and brilliant woman (though I've always been somewhat prone to those in a fairly innocent way), there was something of actual attraction in there too. But also, it was almost the first time I consciously understood that gay was something that it was possible to be, it meant being attracted and falling in love and having a partner and all that stuff, not only being a pariah and a weirdo who hoped people wouldn't hate you too much.

---

Early in 1999 I met the love of my life at a J-soc event. I fell in love at first sight, coup de foudre, just at the instant she smiled vaguely in my direction from across the room. It was so intense that I couldn't possibly have denied my feelings. In fact I spent a lot of time angsting not about the fact that I was possibly bi (I was in a relationship with a man at the time so I knew I wasn't purely lesbian), but about doing something so irrational as falling deeply in love with a total stranger. I knew nothing about her, I saw no possible chance of a relationship ever developing, I assumed she was probably straight just because most people are, and yet there I was, utterly consumed with the intensity of feeling I had for this essentially random person. But it probably took my falling in love that hard to give me enough of a metaphorical kick to add together all the clues and work out I was in fact bi.

---

It's hard to think I was that ignorant, back in the 90s. Recently I was chatting to a friend who is dealing with her 14-year-old step-daughter coming out as bi. And partly it was a jolt to think that my peers have teenaged step-daughters, but more than that I just couldn't quite get my head round being 14 and not only knowing for yourself that you're definitely bi, but being able to tell your parents about it. At 14, I don't think I knew the word bisexual and lesbian was pretty much a synonym for weird and uncool and maybe a little bit (whisper it) perverted. Nowadays 14-year-olds have the internet, including decidedly-not-straight teen subcultures such as Tumblr and media fandom. And more than that, they have professionally published media, books and films and TV shows with canonically, overtly gay characters which are not Problem Stories about how terrible it is to be gay. And they can watch or read the ordinary mainstream news and follow discussions about the exact legal status of same-sex marriage. I don't imagine that being 14 and not-straight in 2013 is a bed of roses, not at all, but it seems to me like there are a lot fewer 14-year-olds nowadays who are in the position of not even knowing that not straight is possible.

Happy day of not knowing how to talk about your feelings, or having unruly ones.

Comments

[jack]

My first instinct is to be scared of secret hints.

I was thinking about this. I think that maybe, ambiguity is an inherent part of flirting, but that "receiving hints from a secret admirer" is like "being ravished" -- romantic and sexy and exciting when it all works out like you expect, but prone to horrible blunders if you don't have a way of communicating whether or not you both actually share the same desires.

[liv]

I think you're right, intentional ambiguity is fun but requires solid meta-communication so that it doesn't lead to actual misunderstandings. I guess the idea with something like sending anon love tokens on VD is that you're relying on a shared cultural expectation to prevent anything too horrible.

[ptc24]

I remember the time in sixth form when I got a Valentine's card, and eventually I had to say to myself, "I'm being a bit Farmer Boldwood about this, aren't I?" Of course, not to the point of producing anything more than a certain awkwardness about things, but the analogy with FFTMC was fresh in my mind...

[liv]

And who says we don't learn from literature?! I'm glad you didn't end up with worse than a bit of awkwardness. (I'm also a little bit paranoid about Madame Bovary, so I often second guess myself when I fall in love.)

[ptc24]

Well, mostly in GCSE English Lit we learned that Thomas Hardy needed a good editor, but his good bits were pretty good.

Analogy of the day: in Machine Learning there's an idea called "lazy learning". You give your classifier a big pile of examples, and your classifier says "that's nice" and does nothing more - if you ask it what it has learned, it just gives you the examples back. Then you give it something to classify, and it looks through all of its examples to find things that are similar, and makes a decision based on those; for example, by some sort of majority vote or averaging or something like that. For example, you give it a pile of photos, each saying what it is a picture of, then you show it a photo, and it says "most of the photos like this are pictures of stoats, so I think it's a picture of a stoat".

I think the lessons of literature - and for that matter, of history - are like that; you can't say what the lessons are in a nice compact pithy way, but nevertheless you can put them to good use.

[liv]

I think it's true that a lot of the point of reading literature is to give you a whole bunch of vicarious experience, so you are more likely to have a relevant example when something comes up in real life. Each individual book may not be that directly applicable. I like your lazy learning analogy, thank you.

[simont]

Hmmm. I think, for me, it's precisely the fact that V-day is (or has become) both a day of conventional-relationship-celebration and a day of pining and secret crushes and anonymous declarations of fondness which causes me the most trouble with it.

When I was a nipper I had a huge, all-consuming, terrifying crush on somebody for many years. Literally terrifying, in the sense that it was my first experience of feeling any such thing and I had no idea what to do about it, and also had a strong notion that if I did ever express my feelings to her she'd probably do something really cruel like laugh at me. (An accurate notion, as it turned out down the line, but that came later.) After bottling this up for [mumble] years, I eventually decided that I ought to let it out somehow to reduce the risk of bursting, and due to the abovementioned fear I decided sending an anonymous valentine was the best plan.

This did not help. From more or less the instant I dropped it in the letterbox I realised that the main effect had been to increase the number of things I had to feel worried and frightened about (e.g. now I was irrationally scared that perhaps she might work out it was me and come and say something scary, or laugh about it behind my back with her friends) and also it hadn't really been successful at relieving any of my previous feelings.

(Also, yes I know, it doesn't speak well of me that both my motivation for sending the thing and my angst afterwards were all about my feelings without much thought for hers, and secondly it's difficult to reconcile my quite strong belief that she would do something incredibly cruel with my feeling that I was in love with her. I plead guilty to two counts of being young and foolish.)

So that was a thoroughly unpleasant formative experience and gave me a strong antipathy to the whole idea of V-day which is basically related to the 'secret love' side of it. So now, on the (rare) occasions that I'm in a relationship when V-day rolls round, I find it difficult to wholeheartedly do the 'celebration of existing conventional romantic relationship' thing because the form of that celebration (or at least the cardboard part of it) so strongly resembles the aspect of V-day that reminds me of nothing but woe. This has caused some friction with partners in the past – especially since it's not the easiest thing to explain! – and the effect of that in turn is that I now see the relationship-celebrating side of V-day as first and foremost an occasion for attached people to guilt-trip their other half into making grand gestures that they either didn't really want to make at all or would rather have made at a time of their choosing with fewer unpleasant resonances (not to mention when the restaurants were less crowded).

A side effect, however, is that I don't at all mind being single on V-day. The 'guilt trips and pressure' angle makes it very easy for me to take an attitude which says, no matter how nice it might or might not be to be attached in general, this one day of the year is a good moment not to be!

[liv]

Gosh, that really does sound horrible. I think that kind of confirms my view that anonymous declarations are really not a good way of dealing with complex emotions and inter-personal relationships! Being in love I think is only tangentially related to your assessment of the person; I'm not in love with most of the admirable people I know, and I'm in love with some people who I know have some negative qualities. So I'm not surprised that you were in love with someone and were also justifiably concerned that she'd be cruel.

I can quite understand that the bad associations from the secret crush version of the festival would poison the celebrate relationships version. I think I have some of that too, though my early experiences were nothing like as bad, just some minor social exclusion from not being cool enough to receive a valentine. And I'm completely with you that it's wrong for a largely commercial festival to be used to guilt people into making insincere gestures.

[monanotlisa]

::hugs you from afar::

[liv]

Aww, distant hugs, thank you so much, Mona.

[elf]

It's also worth noting that anonymous declarations of affection mean something very different today than they meant a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago.

The myths of Valentine's Day grew from a culture where people didn't expect to interact with dozens or hundreds of near-strangers every day, and an anonymous note was from someone you probably knew and at least moderately trusted. It would inspire thoughts of "hmm, which of my coworkers/neighbors likes me?" rather than "omg, is this from that skeevy-looking guy who catches the train the same time I do and plays his music too loud and winks at me while he mouths the 'sexy' lyrics?"

The Valentine's Day concept of secret love is a lot less creepy in the context of a known community. It can still be uncomfortable, still leave some people feeling left out, but it looses a lot of the stalker-ish aspects.

[liv]

Wow, that icon is mindblowing! Your point is also worth considering. I think in some ways an anonymous valentine would have made more sense if you knew everybody you interacted with; on a very simple level something pushed through your letterbox is much less anonymous than some internet messages can be. And that does make sense of the schools that have a custom of sending valentines to classmates; in that context, you do have a small, closed quasi-community where everybody knows everybody.

I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that it's less creepy if it's someone you know; creepiness very much does happen within small communities, and if you strongly suspect it's the guy who's been following you around for ages getting off on making you feel uncomfortable, you haven't really got a way out of the situation. I've been at least disturbed by anony messages from people I know and know have something against me (whether it's creepiness or bullying or an actual vendetta) than by anony messages from random internet strangers which I can usually dismiss as irrelevant to my life.

My feeling is that the point of anonymous valentines is that you're supposed to be able to guess, but it's deniable. As in, if you reckon it's X and you quite like X, you can do something to indicate interest, but if you reckon it's X and you aren't keen, you can just pretend you didn't realize it was X? But it still looks like there's a lot of room for damaging misunderstandings and wrong guesses, even if the whole exchange happens among people who are all known to eachother.

[mirrorshard]

I don't like sending unsolicited anonymous messages - that is, only to someone who's made a clear declaration that they're welcome from Various Sources. Apart from anything else, I've been on the Internet for long enough that I've internalized the idea that all women, female-presenting people, and female-assumable people have far more attention, especially pseudo- or para-romantic attention, than they want already, and any anonymous message will either add to their generalised uncomfortableness or be lost in the spam.

It's lovely to have an opportunity to use the holiday for generally Saying Nice Things, even if I'm not particularly good at it. I'm not a fan of the "you must perform your culturally acceptable romance, preferably in an extremely commercialised manner" interpretation that's become unfortunately prevalent, though. Possibly because I dislike being asked to perform in general.

I get a great many lightweight crushes still, but I've managed to move on from "my hopeless love is a curse", through "I don't suppose...? No? Oh, well" to "I don't plan on doing anything about this, but it's sort of fun and I thought it might be nice for you to know". This is almost entirely due to getting my romantic needs thoroughly satisfied by now, I suspect.

[liv]

You're right, it's incredibly gendered, which is kind of depressing. I actually haven't experienced much myself in the way of low-level background people trying it on, but still. If I were perceived as male I think I'd be very reluctant to flirt at all. Obviously women can be creepy and intimidating, but I think a lot less likely to upset people accidentally.

I'm already quite nervous about flirting; I've sometimes led people to conclude I'm not interested when I have a huge burning crush because I don't like to touch someone without permission or make innuendo-ish jokes unless I'm sure they'll be well received. Though my preferred method of directly stating how I feel can also be intimidating and off-putting to some people, so I don't have a perfect solution.

I definitely agree with you about being pressured to perform by buying stuff. So yay for general nice things and personal, non-commercial expressions of love.

[liv]

I've pretty much always managed to enjoy crushes, I think. Partly because I enjoy being unpartnered, and partly because I don't have a lot of ego invested in whether people are attracted to me. I know there are a lot of people who are admirable in many ways and aesthetically good-looking, whom I don't happen to fancy, so if someone turns me down it doesn't make me feel as if my self-worth is diminished. And being around crushable people makes me feel extra happy and sparkly, so I can quite enjoy that. Yay for being able to give people a bit of a boost by a neutral, not expectation-laden mention of how you feel about them, though!

[lilacsigil]

I'm very glad that the anonymous and declarative sides of Valentine's Day are not a big thing in Australia - it's more of a "people who are already dating have a special date" event. And when I lived in Japan it was a very clearly defined social occasion where women and girls give chocolates to their male superiors and co-workers/fellow students. (A month later is White Day, the opposite, which is not asidely celebrated!)

[liv]

I think some people find the special date version more intrusive than the declarations version. But I can definitely relate to finding the more planned and above-board type of celebration more comfortable.

That's really interesting about Japan. I think it's a good idea to have days of gift-giving, without necessarily attaching the gift to some other celebration. Like Christmas and Valentine's Day and birthdays there can be pressure to inflate the size and value of the gift because it's a symbol of how much you love someone. But if it's just, this is the day when you give eachother chocolates or small toys or books (I really love Catalan Sant Jordi!) then the gift is just what it is.

[purplecthulhu]

I've never done the secret or unrequited card writing side of VD (can't help but read that abbreviation as something else!). This is at least partly because I think any unwanted messages of that kind would potentially be rather stressful, but also because I'm really bad at picking up the signs that they might be appreciated by someone I'm not already in a relationship with. Once someone has whacked me over the head and dragged me off then VD cards can be quite amusing, especially if it's a LDR, but that isn't exactly the traditional usage.

[liv]

Heh, VD is a deliberately evil abbreviation, it comes from Meish.org's anti-valentines. I most certainly don't have the social skills to be able to be sure whether initiating something in this sort of way would be welcomed, and I would very much rather err on the side of not playing that kind of game than risk hurting someone.

I used to comment sometimes in the old Valentine postbox communities that people put up on LJ, on the argument that if someone's checking through the community they at least won't be horrified to see a message saying "I think you're rather lovely". I hope people wouldn't feel pressured or threatened if they figured out the message was from me and didn't like me in that way.

But yeah, cards can be lovely or amusing when you're doing a lot of your relationship maintenance by correspondence anyway. I meant to send valentines this year and just didn't get organized enough.

[kaberett]

Realising I was bi wasn't really ever the problem for me, as such; bringing it to resolution with religion was much, much more difficult.

These days it's mostly that I'm fine with flirting outrageously for flirting's sake, but even with a single person if Feelings are confessed to - and that does feel like the right word, for me - I come over all awkward and shy and reticent. I don't know. Maybe one of these days I will have an intense crush & desire to kiss someone & actually say this first before they get around to asking? But even in situations where I think there is mutual interest I - don't say anything. Because I don't want to impose? Because I don't think I have the time for it? Because I don't think I'm what anyone is actually looking for? Because if I think I'm not "serious" then I have enough else to occupy my time without going through How To Make Love To A Trans Person (is lovely poem, strongly recommended) and if I am "serious" then I think I don't have the time and energy and resources and I'll find it that much harder to cope if the answer is no? And I'm still trying to work out how I feel about poly as something I can practice anyway? So. Pile of FEELINGS that I'm not sure what to do with, and mostly hold close to myself (which is... not a bad thing? Just a thing that means stuff's less likely to Happen.)

[liv]

I was really, really lucky in my early encounters with religion. I had a couple of out rabbis who had a big influence on both my own education and the community where I grew up (one of them founded Beit Klal Yisrael which was a gay synagogue in the 90s and is now a kind of radical post-modernist genderfuck synagogue). And the very clear message of my religious context was that you treat people with respect no matter what you might feel about scriptural prohibitions on sexual activity.

I'm not very good at recreational flirting, I must admit. The things that make me bad at sincere flirting mean I don't even know where to start with low-stakes flirting with friends. And I have a terrible lesbian sheep problem when I am actually trying to initiate something; I tend to fall for shy and socially awkward and unconfident people, and both of us assume the other couldn't possibly be interested and argh.

I can definitely relate to the whole tangle of stuff that means things are not likely to Happen. I've always been complicated to date, I'm not great at romantic relationships, I have a life-consuming job / career. And now I'm, y'know, married, so.

Thanks for commenting, I really like your thoughts.

[khalinche]

Many of your pile of feelings closely resemble my own pile of feelings, and you have put them very well.

[blue_mai]

Surprisingly (to myself, at least) I've a reasonably good track record with Valentines Day - taking it as an opportunity to proposition/court people and so forth on a few different ocassions. One particularly notable year, there was a student-run thing which facilitated the setting-up of blind dates and not-very-blind dates through university emails. It was a fund-raising thing. And if someone you had sent an anonymous "valentine" to also sent one to you, then you were set up on a blind date together. If not you were set up on an actual blind date. So, I did this thing, and on my way to the date saw someone who I'd sent a valentine to, who, y'know had kind of set my feelers going (friend of a friend, we'd never really spoken) who also clocked me - this in quite a busy street, and we had a bit of an awkward "erm, so are you going to the pub? yeah? the Regent... yup. so, we don't really need to go there then... do you want to go somewhere else?" conversation. which was cute. and then went out for a while, which was also cute.

Also, I'm not really sure where the Being Gay thing really came from. It was just there, and somewhere along the line I fell in with a group of kids the same age (13ish) who were also interested in such things and talking about it, and I started going to Gay Youth Group. Which was a slightly strange place, and a bit mismatched to the younger people who went, I suppose it was a strange transitional time when the assumption still held that you were probably having a major internal issue about being gay, and if not, you were definitely having an external issue with school and home life. And everyone was petrified of AIDS while simultaneously being crap about practising safer sex. When in reality the younger people were on the whole not having that much of an internal issue (still some, and for a few people still a really big deal) although external issues varied - no-one was completely closeted at school, nearly everyone was not out at home. But it was definitely a thing that was defining and a preoccupation while a teenager, and never more so than while being 14.

I think the thing I enjoyed about Valentines Day is that I liked being proactive about crushes (sometimes) and it's an opportunity for that. I don't mean that thing of giving people compliments and thinking they should enjoy it, even if they really don't. I mean when you think you have chemistry and you want to make it more visible to the other person, Valentines Day is actually a good day for propositioning someone. They might be sort-of expecting it, and because it's a day for declaring your feelings, it somehow makes it less heavy to do so. Like, if you do and they aren't interested, it's not so big a deal.

Argh. I've just looked below this box to the captcha, and I don't understand it. I'm going to have to copy and refresh...