explosivecombat | NIETZSCHE; DEAD PHILOSOPHERS' INBOX

You told me yourself, you don't feel love the way I'd define it. And I wouldn't want you to tell me so just because you thought it would make me happy, or because it'd be true enough.

I think you understand love as a series of values and degrees. You gauge how important someone is to you; you measure how upset or conflicted you'd be if they were gone. You note dips and spikes of sentiment along your baseline, and you add those all up into a conclusion founded in reason and analysis, where most people would judge it by emotion and introspection.

I'm important to you. That already puts me ahead of the curve; farther ahead than most people, maybe. But you're the only one who knows all the values you're taking into consideration, and where the threshold lies to tip that sentiment over the line into the category you've defined as love.

I don't think I've hit that degree for you, yet. Maybe someday I will. But I wouldn't mistake that for love, either.

And frankly, I think that given the choice, you'd rather have me understand you than love you, anyway.

You know, I'm rather flattered that you think I would be so complex; that's so admirably overcomplicated that I'm reluctant to shatter what a lovely image you have of my inner workings.

Do you want me to tell you where you're wrong?

To say nothing of the fact that if you loved me, you wouldn't take such pleasure in treating me like I'm an idiot.

Yes and no; we're more able to be ourselves around those we're close to, aren't we?

Most people are under the unfortunate impression that I'm a gentleman, believe it or not.

Being a gentleman has nothing to do with whether or not you treat me like I'm stupid.

You'd waste a lot less time on me if, rather than prompting me to answer questions just so that you can have the pleasure of telling me I'm wrong, you'd just tell me things outright.

I'll tell you two things outright, then.

1. My fondness for asking you questions has very little to do with whether you're right or wrong in the end (though I admit that my sense of humor is often incredibly mean, and I never said it wasn't); I just like to see how you answer the question. Your mind is what interested me in the first place; why wouldn't I want to see how it works?

2. I would much rather you understand me than love me.

Then you'll be happy to know I reached the conclusion in part one myself about three seconds after I sent that message to you.

And teacher, since it's I who should be asking you the questions: what did you learn from me this time?

That there probably aren't enough flowers in the world to make up for treating you like an idiot, for one thing.

Do you think it's really about the flowers?

Oh, I'm well aware that it's about the effort, but you weren't on the receiving end of the wrath earlier.

The effort is most of it, but some of it is the illusion. And to think, I managed that without treating you like an idiot.

Would you care to explain how I was wrong, earlier?

I've only ever considered the possibility that I might be in love with anyone twice. Once was a fleeting thought, something so easily dismissed that it can't have been the genuine thing; it followed someone offering me a particularly profound gesture of kindness. I don't think she even understood what she'd done, and I never really made it plain to her.

The second time was with my significant other, and there was only one question used. One "value", as you put it.

Dare I ask what that was?

You should know that if you tell me, I'm naturally going to want to know how I measure up in comparison.

It's going to take a moment of explaining before I get to the point, and since it's rare that I discuss such a thing at all, I may not be terribly clear and my analogy is far from perfect; I can clarify whatever you would like afterwards.

Imagine for a moment that you're in a closed room with no doors and no windows; the walls are painted white, and the only thing in there with you is a radio that's constantly broadcasting. Now, this radio is built to last in that no matter what you do to it, you aren't going to be able to break it; there's no switch that you can locate, there's no dial that you can see to change the station, and it runs on some sort of internal power source - there isn't any sort of cord, and you could probably remove the power source if you had a screwdriver with you. Of course, your luck being what it is, you don't, so you just have to deal with the walls and your permanently-turned-on radio and listen to whatever the horribly stupid thing decides to broadcast.

And of course, your luck being what it is, it's poorly-tuned.

Most of the time it's just white noise; it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and at times it can be calming if you need it to be. Sometimes, however, it does other things. Once in a while it's sounds that you can't quite hear; you think they're words but you can't be sure, and the effect is hideously unsettling. Other times it's music you like, but it's interspersed with blasts of static that make you more than a bit on-edge, and after a while you stop listening to the music in favor of waiting for the static bursts to happen again. Once in a while it's that hideous shrill noise that notifies you that something is horribly wrong and there's about to be an emergency broadcast, only the broadcast never comes and the noise itself doesn't stop.

Usually you can handle these things. Even if it's unpleasant, there are ways to solve it for at least a little while; you can always knock the radio over such that some of the noise is absorbed by the floor, or set it in the corner and go across the room and try to occupy yourself until the sound stops. Maybe do a bit of both, if it's particularly pervasive. But after a while, you decide that you've had enough, and that's when your methods get a bit more extreme. You pick the radio up and you throw it into the wall or into the middle of the room against the floor, you try to kick it until it breaks, you crack your nails trying to get the screws off the back. Whatever it takes to make it stop. And eventually your efforts manage to knock the dial into another station that you can deal with.

That's probably the closest analogy I can think of when it comes to human emotion, and why I'm glad I don't experience much of it. My default state is white noise; everything else causes the other various states of unpleasantness that I've described. It doesn't matter if the stimulus is positive or negative; it all broadcasts the same way, in the end. If it continues for too long, I acknowledge that I can't get rid of it but at the same time, throwing the radio feels more productive than just sitting there listening to it scream.

Interactions with other people usually register with me as either white noise or those odd unsettling noises that are almost words but not quite. Not something I'd prefer, but something I can tolerate. Intense relationships are more like the pleasant sounds interspersed with bursts of static. Overstimulation in general is the incessant shrill blasting that seems like it won't stop until something is done. My relationship with my significant other was somewhere between generally intense and overstimulation.

The difference with him is that, for some reason I've never been able to comprehend, he was able to turn the radio off.

Edited 2013-07-28 06:30 (UTC)

The only things I can think of to say are either pitying or insipid, and somehow I imagine you're not interested in having either one.

How many people know that this is what it's like for you all the time?

I've only explained it like that to one other person.

To your significant other?

No. To my best friend.

My significant other never knew, really.

I wonder if he would've wanted to.

As for me, I understand you better now. And I'd love you less for it — if I ever had in the first place.

And that's fair enough, though I'll thank you not to repeat it.

I warned you I'd ask where I fell on your scale. Are you willing to tell me?

What difference does it make to you?

Because I can care about you without loving you, and I can want better for you without pitying you.

And if somehow having me around makes your existence more bearable, then I want to know about it so I can keep doing it, and take steps to make sure I don't accidentally take that away from you without good reason.

And how is that not a form of pity in and of itself? If I tell you either way, it's going to consciously influence your decisions when it's neither your job nor your place to be making my existence more "bearable" for me.

I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand how little I want this to influence our interactions, outside of perhaps bringing you some sort of understanding that you seem to have been seeking for some time now; I believed I could trust you at least that far. If I was wrong about that, then so be it, but I won't have you acting as though continuing to interact with me is showing me mercy.

Because it's overwhelmingly selfish on my part. You know full well every ulterior motive I have for keeping you placated and defused. It's completely in my self-interest to keep a lid on you, and you've just made it known to me tonight that apparently the one person you've ever found who did that job better than anyone else has up and disappeared.

You don't want this to influence our interactions? If anything, this maintains our status quo, because I'm rarely a good conversationalist when I wake up in the middle of the night to find you're overstimulated and blowing things to kingdom come, and the more that happens, the less likely I am to want to keep associating with you anyway. That's not a threat; that's simple rational logic. I don't like you when you're upset, you don't make the experience of being overstimulated sound pleasant at all, and so frankly I don't see why it isn't completely in both our interests to find an arrangement, if one exists, to keep that from happening.

I think you would read what I think of as "love" as the highest form of pity. But I told you that's not what I'm offering. I want an arrangement, a bargain, a negotiation. The fact that I'm allowed to like you while I do it is a separate consideration entirely.

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