You are nowhere

October 21, 2017 1:07 PM

One night, early in the season, I asked Jamie how long he thought I could last. “Out there,” I said, gesturing toward the TV. “Alone.”

A short memoir by Emily Lackey.
posted by Rumple (9 comments total)

Oooof, that is brutal. Thanks for posting.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:18 PM on October 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yes, reality TV is the true measure of a person.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:37 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

How you feel about dealing with bears on a daily basis might tell you something about how your relationship is going....
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:40 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

This was great--thanks for posting it. What it reminds me of is Curtis White's novel (more like linked stories) Memories of My Father Watching TV in which social relations are similarly mediated by the narrator's reflections on TV shows, except they're more like dreams or fables, e.g. in this excerpt [PDF], "In the episode of 'Combat' titled 'Command,' my father was a German pontoon bridge built over a narrow French river ... [A]s a strategic priority of the Allied forces, he had to be 'taken out.'" People routinely explain media in terms of familial archetypes and allegories, but I liked this essay and White's book for putting media consumption at the center of self-understanding. Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women comes to mind as well.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:24 PM on October 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Was he watching as they pushed past all those obstacles—all those obstacles that you’d think would be the thing to break a person—only to see them tap out after a long night of thinking about the sound their kids made when they got up in the morning, only to see them call it quits after an hour of remembering the way their wife’s hair felt against their face? Didn’t he see what I saw: how a person could survive the unthinkable and still be broken by something as soft and uncertain as loneliness?

This really rang true for me. I have never met a guy who, unprompted, can or will try to imagine what the emotions of someone else (real or fictional) might be due to a given situation, and then use that information to understand the person's actions. If you try to explain that it's possible to do this and that you do it all the time like second nature they act like it's some kind of sorcery. All kinds of guys. A person's actions can only rationally come from outside circumstances and there's nothing else that might possibly inform them. The inside of another person's mind is an empty box.
posted by bleep at 2:30 PM on October 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

A person's actions can only rationally come from outside circumstances and there's nothing else that might possibly inform them.

Unless they're doing something because of an emotion - then that feeling they're feeling becomes an objective truth about the world that all must bend to.
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 3:28 PM on October 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

If only "tapping out" was something I could purchase with body hair.
posted by Brocktoon at 5:33 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't know. I enjoyed reading this but I don't think the message was "Men are incapable of empathy." After all, it's the author who fails repeatedly at imaginatively understanding her boyfriend's inner life - she's oblivious to his unhappiness in the relationship until it's explicitly laid out for her, she doesn't recognize the things that are bothering him, she wants him with her even though it's obvious the relationship makes him unhappy.

I think this is a really true and painful experience - to love a person and want to keep them with you, even though you know they're suffering. It's tyrannical in a way, right? Even though it's understandable. It requires you to shut off the part of you that recognizes and respects what's truly going on, and replace it with what you want to be true instead. And of the two of them, she's much more like the contestants who decide to stick it out - "We've got everything we need! We're good communicators and we like the same TV shows and we know everything about each other - we've easily got enough supplies to last us through the winter" - and he's more like the contestants who tap out for no explicit reason, just because of an "ineffable loneliness" that's inexplicable to people watching from the outside.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 7:36 AM on October 22, 2017 [11 favorites]

I wouldn't invalidate her feelings unless she's an out of control narcissist. Invalidation of your partner's feelings is also a sure-fire way to damage their ego and many people do not know how to cope with that or even recognize that It's happening. That may be what she has done here in the relationship. It's impossible to tell if either of them possess the empathy required to sustain a healthy relationship. That's why the reality TV comparison is not so great, even if she is projecting herself onto the contestants. It's a completely abstract exercise with no consequences.
posted by Brocktoon at 11:52 AM on October 22, 2017 [1 favorite]