Hmmm. I think, when I was fifteen, I decided that falling in love was essentially a biological function, and at that, not particularly kind -- so I did by best to avoid it entirely for the, oh, rest of my life <wry g>. Loving was a different thing, and falling in love almost after the fact, a revelation -- but as a relationship starter, no.
Where, in this case, we're probably using the phrase "fall in love" in a different context.
Is part of the flip side of possession responsibility? Or perhaps I should rather ask, what makes the primary relationship primary? How do you handle these attachments that have no boundaries?
What I discovered when I was younger -- and I think I've changed, so this may not be true now, but I'm not in a hurry to test this hypothesis -- was that friendship without (emotional) boundary became very intimate emotionally -- and that led, inevitably and always, gender notwithstanding, to the question of sex, which then led to feelings of rejection, which then led to broken intimacy, and rupture :/. I'm not sure if this also had much to do with the age of the people at the time, this tying of the intimate with the sexual, this assumption that being close led to that particular state of relationship, and no other. It didn't have that connotation to me -- but I dislike causing people I'm close to pain, and I accepted that in general emotional parlance, it was going to be an issue.
I'm still mulling this over. We're talking about it as we make brunch, as well, and it's interesting because of the built-in assumptions that we (my husband and I) have that we haven't examined in decades (we've known each other for just over twenty years).
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-07-04 09:02 am (UTC)Where, in this case, we're probably using the phrase "fall in love" in a different context.
Is part of the flip side of possession responsibility? Or perhaps I should rather ask, what makes the primary relationship primary? How do you handle these attachments that have no boundaries?
What I discovered when I was younger -- and I think I've changed, so this may not be true now, but I'm not in a hurry to test this hypothesis -- was that friendship without (emotional) boundary became very intimate emotionally -- and that led, inevitably and always, gender notwithstanding, to the question of sex, which then led to feelings of rejection, which then led to broken intimacy, and rupture :/. I'm not sure if this also had much to do with the age of the people at the time, this tying of the intimate with the sexual, this assumption that being close led to that particular state of relationship, and no other. It didn't have that connotation to me -- but I dislike causing people I'm close to pain, and I accepted that in general emotional parlance, it was going to be an issue.
I'm still mulling this over. We're talking about it as we make brunch, as well, and it's interesting because of the built-in assumptions that we (my husband and I) have that we haven't examined in decades (we've known each other for just over twenty years).