Dear Soulful Revolutionary,
On our first date, my husband asked me a series of profoundly vulnerable questions. They were the sort of questions which your average bear might have responded to with: Get me off this ride — this is too deep too fast!
But I am not your average bear.
I am the sort of person who is like, “Heck yes, let’s plumb the depths of our respective human experiences! What are your most potent longings? Your most profound disappointments? Your most tender hopes?”
(Y’all, I am great at a party).
This disposition has yielded a breadth and depth of relationships that are my saving grace on a regular basis.
And. Presuming the other’s willingness to engage with vulnerability has gotten me in trouble with some regularity throughout my life. Especially when I was in my teens and early twenties. Vulnerability can be experienced as threatening, especially when that vulnerability is requested by a stranger.
I’ve learned to be more discerning about when and of whom I ask my most soul-searching questions.
The presumption that we can ever know a person fully, whether that be someone we deeply love, or someone we profoundly loath, is fraught with pitfalls. There’s much to be said for honoring the mystery of the space between us, even as we seek understanding and connection. However close our relationship with another person, there will always be an inherent strangeness to them.
Our movements for liberation have a lot to learn about dancing with strangers.
Hence this essay, in two parts, in praise of strangeness. We’ll explore what can be discovered in the enigmatic space where we end and the other begins:
Today we’re looking at the strangeness that exists within the relationships in which we most desire intimacy;
and next week we will unpack the strangeness which exists between ourselves and those whom we’d rather avoid entirely — those whom we might be reluctant to call “enemy,” but whose relationship with us is its own strange form of intimacy.
We didn’t start the fire (but we can keep it burning)
Let’s begin with the role of strangeness in committed, intimate relationships, knowing that this is a station on the way — our train will keep chugging along to Collective Movement Junction!
In her provocatively titled book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, psychotherapist Esther Perel puts forward a compelling thesis: for loving, committed relationships to maintain their passion, they must maintain an element of strangeness. She explains:
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.
For people in the West, lust is generally a catalyst for getting into a committed relationship. But the domesticity of commitment overcomes the thrill of desire, because it obscures the mystery of the other. Love overrides lust. And the longterm consequence of the loss of the one is often the sacrifice of both.
Desire feeds on a sense of danger. It inspires risk-taking. It thrills in the unknown.
In seeking closeness with someone whom we desire, there can be a strong temptation to be melded into them, to imagine ourselves as one concurrent being, thus losing ourselves in the process. The refrain, “I do not know where I end and they begin,” is a nice romantic sentiment. But the deep desire it conveys to be one with the other is its own eventual demise.
As mystery is lost, so is longing.
The counterintuitive nature of erotic relationship is that one needs to maintain a strong sense of self in order to continue to be magnetically drawn toward the other. Perel notes that it is “our ability to tolerate our separateness” or “selfhood” that maintains “interest and desire in a relationship.”
There is an inescapable strangeness to the Other. This is just as true of how others experience us. We can never be fully known. No matter how much time is spent together, no matter how probing the questions asked and answered, there will always be more to discover. The elusiveness of total intimacy invites pursuit and precludes passive consumption.
Maintaining a strong sense of self and being mindful of the inescapable strangeness of the Other allow us to form more lasting, honest, and fulfilling bonds.
Betrayed by an illusion of insight
This awareness of strangeness can also help us communicate more clearly and honestly. As human beings, we tend to assume more effective and efficient communication with those with whom we are close.
In a study of married people understanding one another’s ambiguous sentences (e.g. is “It’s getting hot in here” a sexual overture with a nod to early 2000s lovemaking music, or an implied request to turn up the AC?), they were often no better at doing so than strangers! People communicating with friends displayed a similar pattern of missed cues.
A researcher explained the dynamic at play: “Our problem in communicating with friends and spouses is that we have an illusion of insight. Getting close to someone appears to create the illusion of understanding more than actual understanding.”
What characterizes relationships with our loved ones is the assumption that we understand them. Anyone who has ever tried to finish someone’s thought, only to be told, “Please let me finish, that’s not what I was saying!” can appreciate this dynamic.
Why this matters in movement spaces
In groups, including movement spaces, faith communities, and organizations, I have often seen collective understanding assumed, based on the presumption of shared values. Allegiance to a particular political cause can leave us thinking that we intimately understand the people around us.
The fruit of this thinking, more often than not, is conflict.
Think about it:
Have you ever entered into a group which professes a value you share, and let down your guard, thinking you would be more fully understood by this group than by most, only to be hurt by the simplest of misunderstandings?
It is so painful when this happens.
This is not to say “Be on your guard! Don’t let anyone get close to you!” Rather, it’s an invitation to be wise and strategic about how we build communities that profess love and liberation as their values.
Statements of vision, mission, and values can do some of the work of clearing up what we’re about. But there still has to be willingness to hold space for people surprising us. Because there is a massive zone of mystery between each of us and any other person.
Imagine how movement spaces might be transformed if we didn’t assume agreement. If we held room for the possibility that there is much that we don’t understand about one another.
Perhaps we wouldn’t become as surprised and angry when we are misunderstood, or when someone else misconstrues what we are saying. Maybe we’d be less prone to put people in boxes, punishing them when they no longer fit in the box we assigned.
In the absence of “group think,” how might communities resistant to this status quo flourish?
Resisting the entropic tendency of our brains toward simple categorization, might we find ourselves delighted by the uniqueness of each person? Might joy — that most vulnerable of emotions — take root and grow among us?
Swimming upstream against the homogenizing socialization of a white supremacist, late-capitalistic society by embracing pluralism with all its surprises, might our creative muscles grow? Might we find ourselves enriched by a wide variety of gifts to equip our movements for strength in the face of totalitarianism?
Is it possible we would fall in love with one another? That we might even want to be with one another in the world we are building?