F, L, and C: Putting Enticement on the Kibosh, or Kibosh on Enticement

Saturday morning, and I am reading over my materials to write on, namely, the topic of the past two weeks, which was the cost/benefit argument.

Reading Robin's post from last summer again this morning I have come to the conclusion that theory is religion of a kind regardless of its nature--I mentioned in the earlier posts that cost/benefit lends shape and discipline to my earlier approaches to friendship. To briefly recap, in the past I was simply friends with anyone who asked, regardless of what the cost was to me and the lack of benefit. I never considered the balance. I considered my only contribution to be my loyalty. I couldn't imagine any other reason for people to be my friend, lover, or my employer.

Years of people seeing this in me and abusing me for it because it was easier than balancing in their own worlds drilled me right down to a meanness, and a rather unfair one. I nursed the meanness in one state, forgetting that there were smatterings of the same thing all over America. I looked for something to beat up. And then I closed myself off and beat up on myself for a while. It got to the point where waking up and walking around with myself was too high of a cost.

Cost/benefit, then, in my case, registers to move on to a health issue, and gives me some say where before my mother had told me to take care of all others, to never say no. Being alone forced me to find something else in myself that others might call a benefit. Loyalty is not discarded completely, but it's no longer even near the top ten. What was it that Denys Finch-Hatten says in "Out of Africa"? "I'd mate for life--one day at a time." My loyalty exists one day at a time. That doesn't mean that I am present on Monday and walk away on Wednesday. It means that if the other party is not present then I don't press the party back to presence. They have to come back to the table on their own, and hope that I am still there, like I must hope that they are still there if I were to walk away.

This sounds cold. But it's less likely to be manipulated. My abject love of earlier life was constantly manipulated--"Oh, she'll always be there, so I can treat her any way that I want." Now there's a weighing...

Defining manipulation is difficult, and I re-learned from FG this week that silence does not determine lack of caring. I knew it before when my mother couldn't find time to write me letters, but then a LOT of people aren't letter-writers. I didn't mistake this for abandonment. I haven't heard from some of my friends in months, but do I panic and withdraw as in Ashbery's poem? No. DK goes through weeks of life where he has to take a time out and get back in the groove. I have backed out of my blogs for sabbaticals. T.T. openly admits to not being a consistent blogger. Do any of these actions signify an end for me? No.

So where does manipulation come in? Where do I feel it? One ingredient is availability--none of the people in the paragraph above are geographically available. Another ingredient is what the interaction is like when it does happen. Is there a free exchange of ideas and passions? Is one person taking care of another? FG and I are often brutally honest with one another, but we are still there afterward. We both share our days (since we work for the same company that is easy, but since one of us is a manager and the other is not, it can be difficult). I can say anything in comments to friends' posts and feel comfortable in knowing that as long as I am respectful and accepting of their opinions they will be of mine. And the third ingredient (I'm sure there are more, but this is a process, now) is that are they willing to extend me the same courtesy that they expect from me? If I send my brother a text and don't get an answer, does that mean I need to park my sorry self next to the phone until he does? Or can I shut the phone off and leave him in silence if he expecting an answer?

This last question is the foremost of my issues with manipulation.

FG and my boss have been talked to about this--they know I am working to balance when I write and when I am available. But my brother and his girlfriend are more difficult to balance--the history goes way back and my brother likes to impress people in a variety of ways. I LOVE it when I share things with my brother; I HATE it when we start dueling for glamour, even if we are alone. It takes the discipline of cost/benefit--"What have I got to gain? What have I got to lose?"--that reins me in and lets him go, but the sharing is lost with that transaction.

As you can see, what I am wrestling with out of Robin's post is less of Robin's words than T.T.'s truth. I can't argue with what T.T. said, but I LOATHE AND DESPISE MANIPULATION. It's a cheap trick to win love that doesn't work except with girls who were nothing but loyal (as I was), it's a cheap trick in sex, and it's a good way for a workplace to get nothing accomplished. I imagine that there are people who love manipulation and can't admit to it--"manipulation, the characteristic you love to hate"--and those who claim to hate it and do it really well in spite of that claim. Manipulation is not an application of cost/benefit, it's an abuse of it.

It's the first distance that is applied by me going forward in terms of cost.

But I will lay all of my cards on the table first, so that the other person has a fair shot at avoiding any traits of manipulation that they may want to exhibit.

*****

In an earlier post I mentioned that I was all ready to give what I presumed were my costs and benefits to others, but I realize now that that might be unwise and even redundant. My advisor at the university said once that if you could describe a story in a couple of sentences it was a poorly written story. Same thing with cost/benefit. Let's just establish this. I know that I have my costs to others. I know that I contribute to them as well. As I said, being alone helped to establish my self-worth better.

And it also helps to put cost/benefit in play for me, despite meeting determined manipulation.

As always, more to come on this. Not quite in such a concentrated matter as this week, but more to come as I grow and tell a story, hopefully telling it well.