As I mentioned in private correspondence, I think at least the “willingness to be vulnerable” is downstream of a more important thing which is upstream of other important things besides “willingness to be vulnerable.” The way I’ve articulated that node so far is, “A mutual happy promise of, ‘I got you’ ”. (And I still don’t think that’s quite all of the thing which you quoted me trying to describe.)
Willingness to be vulnerable is a thing that makes people good (or at least comfortable) at performance, public speaking, and truth or dare, but it’s missing the expectation/hope that the other will protect and uplift that vulnerable core.
I find the “mutual happy promise of ‘I got you’” thing… suspicious.
For starters, I think it’s way too male-coded. Like, it’s pretty directly evoking a “protector” role. And don’t get me wrong, I would strongly prefer a woman who I could see as an equal, someone who would have my back as much as I have hers… but that’s not a very standard romantic relationship. If anything, it’s a type of relationship one usually finds between two guys, not between a woman and <anyone else her age>. (I do think that’s a type of relationship a lot of guys crave, today, but romantic relationships are a relatively difficult place to satisfy that craving.)
And the stereotypes do mostly match the relationships I see around me, in this regard. Even in quite equal happy relationships, like e.g. my parents, even to the extent the woman does sometimes have the man’s back she’s not very happy about it.
To be comfortable opening up, one does need to at least trust that the other person will not go on the attack, but there’s a big gap between that and active protection.
I see it as a promise of intent on an abstract level moreso than a guarantee of any particular capability. Maybe more like, “I’ve got you, wherever/however I am able.” And that may well look like traditional gendered roles of physical protection on one side and emotional support on the other, but doesn’t have to.
I have sometimes tried to point at the core thing by phrasing it, not very romantically, as an adoption of and joint optimization of utility functions. That’s what I mean, at least, when I make this “I got you” promise. And depending on the situation and on my or my partner/companion/intimate-other’s available actions/capabilities, that manifests in various and possibly-individually-distinct ways.
Also, aside, in practice I really think of it as a commitment to doing one’s level best at a much messier process, because there’s a delicateness to inferring the other’s utility function and also trying to infer your own and jointly optimizing both, with some effective weighting arrived at by a partially opaque process that may not be equal, but not too strongly because you’re probably somewhat wrong about everything, and often there are no direct conflicts of values but often enough there are and you need to develop some resolution mechanism for that, probably by pressing the “cooperate” button again and popping up to discuss how to resolve best with partner etc etc.
Also, another aside, I would argue that the standard romantic relationships I see portrayed very often seem lacking in the portrayal. I see lots of infatuation, sexual attraction, and symbols of romance (candles and flowers etc,) but only in the rare depictions that include at least strong hints at the stuff you quoted me saying in the OP do I get a little tug at my heart and believe/believe-in the relationship I’m seeing. This goes for film/TV/prose as well as the people around me, now that I think about it. …I kind of wonder sometimes if most people (including writers and actors) don’t really know what the really good thing consists of, not even intuitively, and only stumble upon it / partial instantiations of it, without full recognition, by chance.
A tangent: Often when prospecting for friendship and always for companionship, I used to say that people either did or did not have any “Peter Pan” in them. I coined it when thinking back at watching Peter Pan as a kid and how immediately afterward I ran around the house pretending to be Peter and trying to believe myself into flying etc.. When talking about this I’m bringing a lot more than the current topic into it because this is also supposed to capture a “named character” energy, and an unbrokeness in terms of will-to-joy and other things I won’t get into, but also (relevantly) a “romantic soul.” And with that last thing I think I was gesturing at this stuff we’re talking about here. Joy and desire at the idea of finding a(t least one!) compatible soul to entwine with and make their happiness yours as they make yours theirs.
Also, another aside, I would argue that the standard romantic relationships I see portrayed very often seem lacking in the portrayal. I see lots of infatuation, sexual attraction, and symbols of romance (candles and flowers etc,)
I think this is evidence that supports the hypothesis that “I got you” is male-coded.
Romantic movies are mostly made for women; it makes sense that they would portray female preferences.
Fair enough, re: romantic movies showing female preferences*. (Though I don’t watch many romance movies and would guess my gestalt impression is therefore more made up of romantic elements in the non-romance movies I do watch...)
*...maybe See below.
Two main thoughts: 1) I think I’ve lost track of what “male-coded” means and am not sure why it matters. I know that the women I’m closest too see it similarly to me. (Obvious selection effects there, of course.) 2) This aside you’re replying to is a pet theory I haven’t given much thought to that both men and women are frequently confused about what the main value proposition of romantic relationships is, and I think the main value prop is a unified thing (viewed at the appropriate level of abstraction, like higher than laundry vs car-repair) that both are looking for. So, even if romance movies are aimed at women, most writers will be writing the meme of female-romance, and writers of macho-romance movies (were there such a thing) would be writing the meme of male-romance, and those things may well diverge, and both are misrepresenting the thing that is most good about good relationships. That’s the pet theory anyway.
I think the stereotypes for choosing a (heterosexual) partner are the following:
The ideal man is strong, street-smart, agenty, high-status, rich.
The ideal woman is pretty, emotionally sensitive, sexually inexperienced.
How this relates to supporting each other?
The attributes of the ideal woman are unrelated to needing support. Actually, when a woman needs support, that is a perfect opportunity for a man to demonstrate his strength and resources; this is what the “damsel in distress” trope is about.
But when a man needs support… well, apparently he is not strong/smart/agenty enough to help himself, so it kinda ruins his value on the dating market.
So the situation is not symmetrical. Loyal partners will support each other, but for the man, it has a flavor of “by supporting you, I demonstrate my value, which makes our relationship stronger”, while for the woman it has a flavor of “you lost some of your value, but I will support you loyally anyway”. (That is the “she’s not very happy about it” part. She now has to work harder than before, to get less of what she wanted.)
This is also my experience, so I wonder, the people who downvoted this, is your experience different? Could you tell me more about it? I would like to see what the world is like outside my bubble.
(I suspect that this is easy to dismiss as a “sexist stereotype”, but stereotypes are often based on shared information about repeated observations.)
(I didn’t downvote, but my experience is different)
In my bubble, people in committed relationships get married and make marital vows and those vows include words to the effect of “I got you”, in sickness and in health, and much else besides. And then they stick to those marital vows as hard as they can. (cf Parfit’s Hitchhiker, but my bubble isn’t familiar with that). In my bubble, myth-stories of successful couples include Adam and Eve, where Eve was literally created to support Adam. In my bubble we hear the statistics about married men living longer and happier than unmarried men and presume that this is large part due to having the support of a wife.
In my bubble, wives sometimes complain about their husband slacking off and not pulling his weight, and sometimes are unhappy about that, but it’s not because their husband is failing to fulfill gender stereotypes by needing support but because of the immediate problem that now they have to do more. (cf when your partner plays Defect in the Cooperate/Defect game, but my bubble doesn’t put it in those terms). In my bubble there is a feminist suspicion that husbands are more likely to try to slack off. (cf evolutionary psychology, which my bubble thinks is nonsense). But even when husbands are slacking off there is still a ton of support going in both directions.
In my bubble, single people, and people in non-committed relationships, stand on their own feet, without needing the support of their partner, and thus signal that they can stand on their own feet, and thus signal that they are less likely to be a liability or an unequal partner in the future. It also signals that, once a relationship becomes committed, if their partner becomes sick they will be able to keep everything going until s/he is better. A lot of this discussion makes more sense if I read it as a discussion of people who aren’t in a committed relationship, or of a broken culture that cannot make relationship vows.
Specifically: both parties start considering each other a central part of each other’s lives. They make major decisions about their lives together, they aim to be together as often as possible, they constantly keep each other in mind, they directly incorporate each other in their models of themselves and their relation to the world, et cetera. That is: it’s the “life partner” thing.
Seems like two different things, although positively correlated:
how much you care about the other person
whether you want to be with them as often as possible
I mean, if you care about someone, you want to spend time with them, maybe regularly, but it does not have to be as much as possible, even if we do not mean that literally.
“Life partnership”, in my characterization, involves “cranking up various positive relationship-variables to the maximum”, among which is the ability-to-be-vulnerable. I. e., this type of relationship is distinguished not by having a distinct unique Thing going on, but by a specific extreme parameterization of a whole bunch of Things.
If I understand correctly, David says there’s a number of other interesting Things which are ramped up in a(n idealized) romantic relationship, that they form a cluster with the ability-to-be-vulnerable, and that there may be some latent relationship-variable mediating all relationship-variables in this cluster.
I would agree with that. But my definition doesn’t really interact with David’s search for this “compact generator”. There may be some emergent quality that we get as the result of the simultaneous ramp-up (e. g., the “centrality in each other’s lives”), but I hadn’t attempted to nail that down.
Not a full response to everything but:
As I mentioned in private correspondence, I think at least the “willingness to be vulnerable” is downstream of a more important thing which is upstream of other important things besides “willingness to be vulnerable.” The way I’ve articulated that node so far is, “A mutual happy promise of, ‘I got you’ ”. (And I still don’t think that’s quite all of the thing which you quoted me trying to describe.)
Willingness to be vulnerable is a thing that makes people good (or at least comfortable) at performance, public speaking, and truth or dare, but it’s missing the expectation/hope that the other will protect and uplift that vulnerable core.
I find the “mutual happy promise of ‘I got you’” thing… suspicious.
For starters, I think it’s way too male-coded. Like, it’s pretty directly evoking a “protector” role. And don’t get me wrong, I would strongly prefer a woman who I could see as an equal, someone who would have my back as much as I have hers… but that’s not a very standard romantic relationship. If anything, it’s a type of relationship one usually finds between two guys, not between a woman and <anyone else her age>. (I do think that’s a type of relationship a lot of guys crave, today, but romantic relationships are a relatively difficult place to satisfy that craving.)
And the stereotypes do mostly match the relationships I see around me, in this regard. Even in quite equal happy relationships, like e.g. my parents, even to the extent the woman does sometimes have the man’s back she’s not very happy about it.
To be comfortable opening up, one does need to at least trust that the other person will not go on the attack, but there’s a big gap between that and active protection.
I see it as a promise of intent on an abstract level moreso than a guarantee of any particular capability. Maybe more like, “I’ve got you, wherever/however I am able.” And that may well look like traditional gendered roles of physical protection on one side and emotional support on the other, but doesn’t have to.
I have sometimes tried to point at the core thing by phrasing it, not very romantically, as an adoption of and joint optimization of utility functions. That’s what I mean, at least, when I make this “I got you” promise. And depending on the situation and on my or my partner/companion/intimate-other’s available actions/capabilities, that manifests in various and possibly-individually-distinct ways.
Also, aside, in practice I really think of it as a commitment to doing one’s level best at a much messier process, because there’s a delicateness to inferring the other’s utility function and also trying to infer your own and jointly optimizing both, with some effective weighting arrived at by a partially opaque process that may not be equal, but not too strongly because you’re probably somewhat wrong about everything, and often there are no direct conflicts of values but often enough there are and you need to develop some resolution mechanism for that, probably by pressing the “cooperate” button again and popping up to discuss how to resolve best with partner etc etc.
Also, another aside, I would argue that the standard romantic relationships I see portrayed very often seem lacking in the portrayal. I see lots of infatuation, sexual attraction, and symbols of romance (candles and flowers etc,) but only in the rare depictions that include at least strong hints at the stuff you quoted me saying in the OP do I get a little tug at my heart and believe/believe-in the relationship I’m seeing. This goes for film/TV/prose as well as the people around me, now that I think about it. …I kind of wonder sometimes if most people (including writers and actors) don’t really know what the really good thing consists of, not even intuitively, and only stumble upon it / partial instantiations of it, without full recognition, by chance.
A tangent: Often when prospecting for friendship and always for companionship, I used to say that people either did or did not have any “Peter Pan” in them. I coined it when thinking back at watching Peter Pan as a kid and how immediately afterward I ran around the house pretending to be Peter and trying to believe myself into flying etc.. When talking about this I’m bringing a lot more than the current topic into it because this is also supposed to capture a “named character” energy, and an unbrokeness in terms of will-to-joy and other things I won’t get into, but also (relevantly) a “romantic soul.” And with that last thing I think I was gesturing at this stuff we’re talking about here. Joy and desire at the idea of finding a(t least one!) compatible soul to entwine with and make their happiness yours as they make yours theirs.
I think this is evidence that supports the hypothesis that “I got you” is male-coded.
Romantic movies are mostly made for women; it makes sense that they would portray female preferences.
Fair enough, re: romantic movies showing female preferences*. (Though I don’t watch many romance movies and would guess my gestalt impression is therefore more made up of romantic elements in the non-romance movies I do watch...)
*...maybe See below.
Two main thoughts:
1) I think I’ve lost track of what “male-coded” means and am not sure why it matters. I know that the women I’m closest too see it similarly to me. (Obvious selection effects there, of course.)
2) This aside you’re replying to is a pet theory I haven’t given much thought to that both men and women are frequently confused about what the main value proposition of romantic relationships is, and I think the main value prop is a unified thing (viewed at the appropriate level of abstraction, like higher than laundry vs car-repair) that both are looking for. So, even if romance movies are aimed at women, most writers will be writing the meme of female-romance, and writers of macho-romance movies (were there such a thing) would be writing the meme of male-romance, and those things may well diverge, and both are misrepresenting the thing that is most good about good relationships. That’s the pet theory anyway.
I think the stereotypes for choosing a (heterosexual) partner are the following:
The ideal man is strong, street-smart, agenty, high-status, rich.
The ideal woman is pretty, emotionally sensitive, sexually inexperienced.
How this relates to supporting each other?
The attributes of the ideal woman are unrelated to needing support. Actually, when a woman needs support, that is a perfect opportunity for a man to demonstrate his strength and resources; this is what the “damsel in distress” trope is about.
But when a man needs support… well, apparently he is not strong/smart/agenty enough to help himself, so it kinda ruins his value on the dating market.
So the situation is not symmetrical. Loyal partners will support each other, but for the man, it has a flavor of “by supporting you, I demonstrate my value, which makes our relationship stronger”, while for the woman it has a flavor of “you lost some of your value, but I will support you loyally anyway”. (That is the “she’s not very happy about it” part. She now has to work harder than before, to get less of what she wanted.)
This is also my experience, so I wonder, the people who downvoted this, is your experience different? Could you tell me more about it? I would like to see what the world is like outside my bubble.
(I suspect that this is easy to dismiss as a “sexist stereotype”, but stereotypes are often based on shared information about repeated observations.)
(I didn’t downvote, but my experience is different)
In my bubble, people in committed relationships get married and make marital vows and those vows include words to the effect of “I got you”, in sickness and in health, and much else besides. And then they stick to those marital vows as hard as they can. (cf Parfit’s Hitchhiker, but my bubble isn’t familiar with that). In my bubble, myth-stories of successful couples include Adam and Eve, where Eve was literally created to support Adam. In my bubble we hear the statistics about married men living longer and happier than unmarried men and presume that this is large part due to having the support of a wife.
In my bubble, wives sometimes complain about their husband slacking off and not pulling his weight, and sometimes are unhappy about that, but it’s not because their husband is failing to fulfill gender stereotypes by needing support but because of the immediate problem that now they have to do more. (cf when your partner plays Defect in the Cooperate/Defect game, but my bubble doesn’t put it in those terms). In my bubble there is a feminist suspicion that husbands are more likely to try to slack off. (cf evolutionary psychology, which my bubble thinks is nonsense). But even when husbands are slacking off there is still a ton of support going in both directions.
In my bubble, single people, and people in non-committed relationships, stand on their own feet, without needing the support of their partner, and thus signal that they can stand on their own feet, and thus signal that they are less likely to be a liability or an unequal partner in the future. It also signals that, once a relationship becomes committed, if their partner becomes sick they will be able to keep everything going until s/he is better. A lot of this discussion makes more sense if I read it as a discussion of people who aren’t in a committed relationship, or of a broken culture that cannot make relationship vows.
Do you think Thane’s value prop identification captures it?
Seems like two different things, although positively correlated:
how much you care about the other person
whether you want to be with them as often as possible
I mean, if you care about someone, you want to spend time with them, maybe regularly, but it does not have to be as much as possible, even if we do not mean that literally.
I don’t think it quite does.
“Life partnership”, in my characterization, involves “cranking up various positive relationship-variables to the maximum”, among which is the ability-to-be-vulnerable. I. e., this type of relationship is distinguished not by having a distinct unique Thing going on, but by a specific extreme parameterization of a whole bunch of Things.
If I understand correctly, David says there’s a number of other interesting Things which are ramped up in a(n idealized) romantic relationship, that they form a cluster with the ability-to-be-vulnerable, and that there may be some latent relationship-variable mediating all relationship-variables in this cluster.
I would agree with that. But my definition doesn’t really interact with David’s search for this “compact generator”. There may be some emergent quality that we get as the result of the simultaneous ramp-up (e. g., the “centrality in each other’s lives”), but I hadn’t attempted to nail that down.