Reading Wednesday

[liv]

Recently read

I don't believe in God, but I believe in lithium by Jaime Lowe. It's a really gorgeously written ode to the element lithium, centred around Lowe's experiences taking lithium to control her bipolar illness. She's not taking an ideological pro- or anti- meds stance, but is really clear-eyed about the compromises involved in medicating mental illness with blunt-tool drugs.

On Tumblr, helloelloh wrote a very sweet thing about romantic relationships, specifically about established relationships where love is not a fire in your soul, but one in your hearth, keeping you warm and comfortable. I mean, I haven't been in a really long-term relationship, I'm looking forward to finding out what living as a couple is like after decades, but I have been with jack for 7½ years now. And it's nothing like the story in pop culture where you get a few months of happy sparkly being In Love and after that it all degenerates into bickering over chores and feeling vaguely resentful that you don't get to hang out with your friends any more. It's not exactly like Elo describes either, but much closer to that.

Currently reading

Still reading my friend's long unpublished novel.

And we've got up to The shining wire in rmc28's Watership Down readthrough. It's an amazingly powerful, and terrifying, piece of writing, to the point that I keep trying to compose a comment and get completely blocked on how emotionally intense it is. I mean, there's a scene in my friend's novel which I read in an earlier draft 10 years ago, and it had a similarly powerful effect on me, but coming back to it my reaction is much more detached, cerebral. And that's not the case with The shining wire; rereading it now, probably closer to 30 years later than the first time I encountered it than ten, even knowing exactly how it turns out, I'm just as much caught up in the emotions.

Up next I have a yen to read The girl with all the gifts by MR Carey, mostly based on rachelmanija's informative review. I have borrowed it from jack, partly because I couldn't find his copy of Ancillary Sword (has anyone reading this borrowed it, by any chance?)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I hate the "And then it all descends into bickering" view of relationships, because it seems to me that this only happens if you've married the wrong person - someone who isn't willing to behave like an adult (or, of course, are that person yourself).

It's as pernicious as the "Men do men things, and hang out with men, women do women things and hang out with women" view of relationships, which leads to people thinking they can't have a relationship with someone they share interests with.

[liv]

Some of it is really a weird form of sexism, where men are expected to be basically incompetent at adulting and it becomes their female partner's responsibility to make sure they do things that lead to long-term financial security as well as having fun right now. Which is a pretty clear recipe for resentment on both sides!

And I think that's not unrelated to the idea that your romantic relationship should be separate from and even compete with your interests and friendships. Like, Shmuely Boteach in Kosher sex literally argues that people can't have a relationship with someone they share interests with, and that the only way to have a strong marriage is not only to be heterosexual, but to make sure that men and women keep to entirely separate spheres other than in bed. Similarly the idea that you can be close with your same-sex buddies, but if you have any opposite sex friendships that's a threat to the dyad, which again tends to segregating social groups in a way that feels really unnatural to me, given I've always been part of entirely mixed gender groups.

[sfred]

That's really, really sad!

For a while a big of my social life was in a mostly-male (tabletop-gaming) group and I mostly didn't know my friends' (female) partners because they were "allowed" out on Wednesday evenings and occasional Saturdays for games, and their partners' social spheres were kept entirely separate from their own.

[liv]

I'm generally pretty comfortable in mostly male social groups, but I would be quite skeeved out by a group of people who were allowed out by their spouses who had completely separate social lives. I mean, the geek scene where I spend a lot of my time has considerably more men than women or any other gender, but many of the men are either single or solo-poly, they're not deliberately excluding female partners from their social lives.

I also felt fairly uncomfortable at my husband's work party where the gender ratio was as far as I could tell exactly 50/50, but it was pretty much exclusively male programmers (wearing plain, mostly black clothes) and their female partners (wearing brightly coloured dresses). That felt very strange, it can't be that demographically different from the parties I more normally go to with my husband, and yet not one person was even in a minor way visibly gender non-conforming, nobody was single, nobody had brought a same-sex or GQ partner. It was most probably just one of those clusterings rather than anything more fundamental (though J's company not having any non-male engineers at all is probably not a coincidence), but it was still quite freaky.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, Julie and I both have our own competencies, and we're both dependent on the other to point out when things need to be adulted. But the idea that one of us is more infantile than the other is pretty disturbing, even if it is common in many societies.

And that view of relationships feels horribly old-fashioned. Rooted in the same kind of thinking I've been seeing more and more objections to - that relationships are not supposed to be about happiness and joy, but about grim subservience to a higher goal of some kind.

[liv]

I think you're right, it is a very old fashioned idea of relationships, not just the rigid gender roles but the idea of marriage as a duty (to society and to the offspring, I guess?) rather than a partnership. And to be clear, I have no objection to relationships where one partner does all the money earning and the other does all the housework, or whatever division of labour makes sense. But I don't like the trope of relationships where one person presumed female) takes all the responsibility and the other (presumed male) never does anything sensible willingly, but resents being pushed into doing anything that isn't completely short-term gratification.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. It's a tired setup for a sitcom, let alone something I'd want to base a relationship on :-)

[sfred]

Yes, all of this.

I think my current domestic relationship (c5.5 years together; 20 months living together full-time) and the previous one (which lasted about 7 years) have been a mixture of the things that traditionally characterise a 'new' relationship and the things that Elo describes.

I think the assumption that there'll be a descent into bickering is really sad.

[ex_inklessej388]

I plan on getting my hands on a copy of The Girl with All The Gifts as well as a result of the same review I read through my network (most likely connected to you).

I hear you on the long term-ish relationship thing too, M and I have been together for four and a half years and while we are not resentful, we are not googly-eyed either. I jokingly call our relationship a controlled brush fire, ha!

[rmc28]

Tony and I will be married 10 years tomorrow. We do occasionally bicker over chores :-)

The bit about feeling calm and secure when near the other person, that one rings utterly true for me. Although sometimes I will just look up and see him and be caught in a rush of intense love/happiness/desire too.

I think the biggest strain at the moment is meeting the needs of the children while also having space/time to be ourselves, individually and together, to meet our own needs too. I'm reminded of a discussion on another parent's blog, about the preciousness of periods of time where "no-one needs me and I don't have to do anything".

(This too shall pass: in another ten years, the children will be 13 and 18. I expect we'll have rather more time to ourselves, but a whole different set of needs to meet!)

[crystalpyramid]

It had never occurred to me that all those retreats to hot springs people used to take back in the day actually had some biochemical justification, because of properties of substances like lithium. That's really cool — thanks for linking the article!

Elloh's description of long-term romantic relationships feels right, too. Not that there isn't bickering, but trust is the nicest thing in the world sometimes. (My spouse and I have been best friends for most of the twelve years we've known each other, dating for a non-consecutive ten of those, living together for five.)

[seekingferret]

I did not borrow jack's copy of Ancillary Sword.

[wild_irises]

Somehow, probably because of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, and Scalia's ridiculous comments (underscored by many other right-wing folks) about how marriage is all about shutting up, not saying what you think, etc.), this topic is so very up. I've seen that article linked by lots of people (deservedly).

The Girl with All the Gifts is awesome! I envy you getting to read it (I would say "for the first time" but I'm not sure I'm going to reread it; as much as I loved it, it's a very difficult book.)

[ofearthandstars]

The lithium article really sat with me. ♥

[mathcathy]

Thanks for the article link.