foundations pt. 2: better
last year a friend gave us a peculiar gift; a music cd, burned with an album it liked and some odd bonus data at the end. the data in question turned out to be an end-of-year episode of a christian marriage podcast, run by a married couple talking about their christmas shopping plans and recapping their talking points from the last year.
their theme for the year has been "how can i love you better"; they talk about trying to form solid, concrete, targeted goals for themselves and each other in their relationship, and go on to discuss some of the different life contexts that might change what those goals look like.
now, at first glance this feels like awful advice to me. it feels like death by formalisation, carving out the emotion and thought in your relationship and replacing it with checklists and quotas. plus, it strikes me as indicating a fundamental lack of care; how can you love someone if you don't Know them, completely, inside and out? and if you do Know them, then why do you need to *ask what they want? maybe you just weren't paying attention? the truest demonstration of Understanding is to make the call turn one and be right; a gesture that the person is expecting or that you had to double check means less, and one they had to ask for means nothing.
but.
but.
over the last few years, Knowing has gotten harder. we talk less, we exist more outside of each other. i used to be really good at picking christmas presents; nowadays my uni friend group has a shared google doc that we update with our current interests and material desires every few months, and it's really useful.
and i know, i know, i have this one really awful tendency to value information or ideas entirely on what i think of the person presenting them. i will take awful advice because i think the person giving it is Cool™️, and i will actively ignore anything a person tries to tell me if i have a minor objection to some part of who they are. i am so very shockingly not immune to propaganda. but i've been trying to be better about that, and let's be honest; even if i'm not trying to live a cisheterosexual, monogamous, jesus lives life to the fullest marriage, there is probably something i can learn from the podcasters who have been together for longer than i have been alive.
so.
how can i love you better? i don't think i'm perfect for anyone around me by any means, and i do want to grow and improve in that way. i still think having at least a sense for what your partner wants from you is a Very Good Thing, but the idea that i could ever figure out what someone wants as accurately and efficiently and effectively than by just asking them is awfully hubristic. after decades together, maybe, but not with my partner of a few years, and especially not with my partner who i first met a year ago. and especially not with the several people who are not my partner at all, but who i nevertheless would like to be a better friend to.
the last few weeks i've felt my wheels spinning a lot, and i'm sick of getting mired in my own thoughts. i crave traction, so i might need to just tie some winches to my friends for a bit and suffer the indignation. it's worth it to start moving forward again, i think.