Notes on normality and insanity

Before I started dating my first boyfriend, there were lots of outside-view, externally verifiable, socially sanctioned reasons not to date him. When we met, he was 21 and experienced while I was 17 and had never dated anyone; my friends all thought he was bad; he had anger issues; he had a history of stalking and physically abusing exes. I had inside-view reasons why this was okay (it was only once, and he felt reeeeeally bad about it …) and so I dated him anyway.

The actual relationship worked out much better than you’d expect. We dated for less than two months before he broke up with me, and it was basically just fine. (He said some hurtful things to me on occasion, and cheated on me, but I wouldn’t characterize the relationship as abusive.) 

The bad part wasn’t the relationship. The bad part was, after it was all over, I had no idea why I had done it. March 2014!me couldn’t identify with November 2013!me at all, and I still can’t.

The feeling of meaning in my life comes from caring about my past and future experiences, and continuing to exist, and the shape of my life as a whole. To the extent that I value these things, it’s because I experience some amount of continuity of identity. So the idea of ever having been November 2013!me, or of being her again, is scary! It’s scary in the exact same way as being dead!

So like, I understand that society is wrong about a lot of things. We should be able to improve on it, and we almost have to improve on it if we want to do anything good ever.

What I don’t understand is, without externally verifiable confirmation that the things you’re doing are reasonable, how do you know that you’re not just insane?

I started this post by talking about relationships, but I think this actually applies to pretty much everything in my life. Everything I do, unless it’s something my family and all my friends and a panel of normal people would agree is reasonable, I worry that it’s fundamentally bad in some mind-altering way that makes it impossible for me to see its badness. I do this with guys I like, companies I work at, books I read, charities I donate to, events I attend, ideas I believe–you get it. Which isn’t to say I don’t do weird or socially disapproved-of things–I do, in literally all those categories!–but they are really, deeply, scary.

Having written this, part of me is thinking, “Okay, cool, you’ve identified the problem. Things don’t have some fundamental property of badness–ideas can be wrong, and charities can be ineffective, and relationships can be unhealthy, but that’s okay. Maximizing EV means risking that you’ll make mistakes and those things will happen sometimes. What you need to do is get your current self and November 2013 self in a room to talk. Have them feel their feelings and package them up and send them back and forth. Get them to empathize with each other and truly understand each other, and maybe you can forge an identity that’s strong enough to withstand mistakes and changing your mind about stuff.”

and another part of me is like “… dude that sounds insane”

There’s this idea I have, I’m not sure where exactly it comes from, about the way relationships work. It says that everyone has different needs and preferences, and so to be in a relationship you have to figure out what your needs are, and express them to your partner; they do the same, and if you’re both willing to accommodate each other’s needs then congratulations.

I try to live by this, mostly. There have been many times when a boyfriend said or did something that upset me, I responded with the classic “when you do x I feel y,” and he responded with “oh okay, I won’t do x.” But somehow that exchange always left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

You know what feels great? Telling one of my friends that ugh, my boyfriend did x, and hearing her respond with “seriously? that’s so fucked up!”

I think there are a couple things going on here.

One is that no matter how relationship anarchist you want to be about things, there will always be some things that fall outside the realm of needs and boundaries and preferences and end up in the category of “normal things people are or aren’t supposed to do.” You’re not supposed to nonconsensually beat up your partner, or express discomfort at them having friends outside the relationship, or tell your partner’s mother to go fuck herself upon first meeting her. (I think “don’t sleep with other people” used to be on this list, but no longer is.) No one thinks these are boundaries that need to be expressed. And if you can get your preferences into this list, that’s a huge win. So it makes sense that, even if in my small ineffectual way, I push for my preferences to be codified into local social norms.

Another thing is–negotiating an entire relationship from first principles is exhausting. If you are a naturally mono-inclined person trying to date someone who’s never heard of the concept of monogamy, you will spend half your time trying to legislate edge cases. It makes sense to look for someone who shares your basic intuitions about interpersonal relationships.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here–certainly not that modifying traditional relationship structures is impossible or even undesirable. Maybe that I think it’s too easy to see the modifications and miss the social technology underpinning them.