When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy.

some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed.

would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws?

In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.

But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp!

When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood.

Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value.

Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying.

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control.

I spent so many years of my life trying to live mostly in my head. Intellectualizing everything made me feel like it was manageable. I was always trying to manage my own reactions and the reactions of everyone else around me. Learning how to manage people was the skill that I had been lavishly rewarded for in my childhood and teens. Growing up, you’re being reprimanded in a million different ways all the time, and I learned to modify my behavior so that over time I got more and more positive feedback. People like it when you do X and not Y, say X and not Y. I kept track of all of it in my head and not in my body. Intellectualizing kept me numbed out, and for a long time what I wanted was nothing more than to be numbed out, because when things hurt they hurt less. Whatever I felt like I couldn’t show people or tell people I hid away. I compartmentalized, and what I put in the compartment I never looked at became my shadow.

So much of what I care about can be boiled down to this: when you’re able to really inhabit and pay attention to your body, it becomes obvious what you want and don’t want, and the path towards your desires is clear. If you’re not in your body, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. "I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m so frozen out of my body I can’t feel a deeper certainty.”

It was so incredibly hard when people gave me negative feedback—withdrew, or rejected me, or were just preoccupied with their own problems—because I relied on other people to figure out whether everything was alright.

When I started living in my body I started feeling for the first time that I could trust myself in a way that extended beyond trust of my intelligence, of my ability to pick up on cues in my external environment.

I can keep my attention outwards, I don’t direct it inwards in a self-conscious way. It’s the difference between noticing whether someone seems to having a good time in the moment by watching their face vs agonizing about whether they enjoyed something after the fact. I can tell the difference between when I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well versus tired because I’m bored versus tired because I’m avoiding something. When I’m in my body, I’m aware of myself instead of obsessing over my state, and this allows me to have more room for other people.

Real life doesn't start tomorrow, or on the weekend. It doesn't start when you graduate, or when you land a job, or when you quit your job. It doesn’t start once you get a handle on your anxiety, or fix your sleep schedule, or finish all the tasks in your to-do list.

Real life is made of moments like this. It’s waking up with dread and clutching at your phone for relief. It’s being mildly frustrated at all your friends for the various ways in which they don’t understand you. Real life is wiping the lint from your dryer, it’s scrubbing the same pan clean for the hundredth time, it’s being surprised that even with all the fun of a friday night, you’re just as sad to say goodbye, just as sad as when you were a child.

We spend most of our time waiting, and very few precious moments feeling like we’ve finally arrived. We defer our willingness to bask in reality to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next, until we forget we ever deferred anything.

But what if you don’t need to wait until you’ve meditated for decades, what if you’re closer to that than you think? What if you were more often baffled by the fact that you’re still alive, if you began to ask of this moment, of every moment: what do you have to teach me?

You know that feeling you get when you hear the good news you’ve been waiting for, or when you’re so enthralled in conversation you forget that you haven’t checked your phone for hours, or when the rain has settled and you step into the forest and the freshness of the air wrests your lungs open and everything feels perfectly in place?

You’re inflight, you’re falling through the sky, everything feels half-complete, there is so much more you meant to do, there are so many things you’re behind on, so many things you haven’t said. I’m right there with you. This is it, the madness we were born into and have no choice but to face. Real life is more and more of this and then it’s over.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Robert Pirsig’s definition of Static and Dynamic Quality:Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It’s an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.

Words can only approximate Quality, but never fully encompass it. A static thing can never fully capture a dynamic thing.

We create problems for ourselves by using static language (e.g. judgements) to capture a reality that is dynamic & ever changing — by mixing observations and evaluations.

The caveat to keeping your identity small is when you want to identify as a positive trait – “I’m a kind person” – so that you’re forced to live up to it, especially when this is an unchanging desire.

Gatekeepers could see themselves not only as talent hunters for their own organization, but also as managers of society’s collective supply of ambition. We could demand that they consider it a responsibility to waste as little of their applicants’ ambition as possible. That they strive to redirect and allocate that ambition wherever it is most needed.

In practice, there isn’t any single solution. Rejection is a facet of life, and everybody needs to figure out their own strategies to cope with it. The most I can offer is that it’s better when you’re aware of how it works. It isn’t enough to know, on an abstract level, that rejection is typically random and impersonal — but it helps.