Monday 4 April 2011

The Intimate Relationship, The Hygiene Fallacy and Polite Lies

The idea of an Intimate Relationship (TM) pushed by therapists, counsellors and assorted mavens, is itself a fantasy of childhood dependence and security translated to the adult state. Children need their parents to do things like hug them when they come home hurt - they need hugs because hugs release Good Hormones that counter-act the Bad Hormones released by what the Mean Kids did. Lectures won't cut it. If this didn't happen to you as a child, you will be trying to fill the emptiness it leaves for a large chunk of the rest of your life. The Intimate Relationship (TM) is an attempt to do this impossible thing. It doesn't do it because it works on the wrong stuff. I don't need your sympathy and I don't need your understanding: I need to know that being around people can be fun and won't leave an empty taste when I take the train back home all on my own. I need to know those good times aren't just a one-off. If people aren't fun, what's the point? I can be miserable on my own and if I want hours of adult negotiation and compromise, I can get that at work.
The Intimate Relationship (TM) is an example of the Hygiene Fallacy. The Hygiene Fallacy is supposing that you will do Good Stuff by not doing doing Bad Stuff. There are managers who put not making mistakes first - as a result they never do anything valuable. Therapists and psychologists hear an endless stream of people moaning what's wrong with their lives, and assume that everything would be all right if those things weren't wrong. Unfortunately, you can be in a relationship with honesty, compassion, respect, understanding, trust, communication and compatibility, and it can be as dull as ditchwater.

This is because hygiene factors are things that people give as a reason for dissatisfaction: the staff toilets don't work, the pay is too low, he keeps lying to me, she plays all these games, we can't talk, I feel invisible. These things may be wrong, and one may be the final straw. Get them right and you won't make the staff productive or the relationship zing. To do that, you have to do Good Stuff. It turns out that if you do enough Good Stuff, a lot of the hygiene irritations fade away. Now go find a guru to tell you about the Good Stuff in a good relationship. You won't find much, and that's for a reason.

What makes a good relationship is: sex, having fun and doing off-beat things together, or not doing anything together because, well, who cares because you're together. In-jokes are good, as is a generally up-beat attitude. Compatible energy levels and cycles are good as well, so you slump together and are zippy together. The bit where she walks in the room and you feel better? That's important.

You knew all that. And you know as well as I do that the Daily Grind (work-eat-sleep-commute) grinds it down after about a year. Children kill it. Even without kids, your energy cycles get out of sync, you stop having sex, and that's it. The rest of your life is all about housekeeping, time management and damage limitation. I see very few up-beat couples these days - mostly they look irritated and tired. Why would I want to join them? I've been cooking my own food and ironing my own shirts ever since I left home, I don't need help with daily life, and if I did, I'd hire a cleaner. Of course, if you have a lot of money and don't have to work six days a week to get it, if you have a lot of useful connections, if you have nearby family to baby-sit the kids, if you have a lot of friends and places to go at the weekends - then it can be different. But back in our real lives...

So if you stay for the Good Stuff, you'll be gone in a couple of years and you won't have children. When people didn't really have a choice about marriage and children, the mavens could afford to be honest. Now we have a choice, they can't. So the importance of fun is either passed over in silence or translated into empty new-age jargon like "passion" or "joy", and the life management stuff is played up as "adult" and "mature" and bringing the rewards of "intimacy".

Let me be blunt. "Intimacy" is a crock, like "happiness". It's the consolation prize, and while it's better than being in an abusive, indifferent or mis-matched relationship, so is living on your own.

What do I want from a relationship? Good conversation. Sex. A fellow-conspirator. Someone to do stuff with, from movies to cooking to holidays to hanging out. Someone who is going to make my life more fun or interesting when they are in it, and who is under no obligation to stay when the moment is over.

And if your inner therapist is itching to ask "why are you so frightened of intimacy, of sharing yourself" the real answer is this: because I have a short attention span, because I get bored real quick, and because the chances of you and I having anything much in common to have fun over are, to a first approximation, zero. It's not that I'm frightened of sharing myself with you, it's that I'm frightened you'll bore me, and I won't be able to get away fast enough. But I'm too polite to tell you that, so I make self-deprecating noises that you and the therapists interpret as low self-esteem or far of intimacy.

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