He’s Just Had Coffee

Nearly a month since the last entry…

In the interim, I’ve been to Brisbane for a week to work and catch up with friends and had a very confusing, though short-lived romance. It feels like it’s over, but I’m just not quite sure…

The apple of my eye (let’s call him Mr Apple), started quite enthusiastically, started to get a little claustophobic within a couple of weeks and then stopped answering the phone to me (because he didn’t know what to say). Eventually, I managed to pin him down and extract some answers…

It’s all about time it seems, I want his time, he’s very protective of it, he perceives that I want more and he wants to give less.

As it turns out these two things I’ve been doing in the last few weeks are connected: it all went bad when I went to Brisbane. One whole week of not seeing each other left Apple on his own to worry, grow anxious and work on his relationship with my image rather than me.

Lacan believed that you never really have a relationship with another person, just with your mental fiction of that person. I’m a little more positive (I’m a scientist at heart) and I take an empirical view. I think we all have a mental fiction of the other person (whether friend, parent or lover) made up of history, stereotypes, beliefs… fundamentally, it’s a theory about who they are, a mental model of a kind. I’d like to think that by careful observation and by trying to test your model against the actual person, to find out who they actually are, what they actually believe, what they actually want - you can keep your mental fiction a little closer to reality.

I’ve discovered that some guys just don’t believe this at all, nor do they follow Lacan, they seem to think that their mental fiction simply equals reality. So they have a conversation with this imaginary person with your name and make decisions about how they feel about him and then later, finally, let you know what they’ve decided. This is obviously much more evident when you don’t see each other for a while…

And so it was with Apple, I think. He has other stuff going on in his life which makes space quite important for him, but he never seemed to shake the impression that I wanted a bunch of things which I didn’t - no matter how much I explained or clarified it never seemed to stick.

I just can’t help feeling that having a relationship with a real person, as far as that’s possible, is preferably to an imaginary relationship. But maybe I’m just a communication junky…