There’s a particular kind of pattern that I experience, that I’ve taken to calling a social stance. You could say that it’s a special case of a pattern that one wants to either experience or avoid, where other people’s behavior is also included in the pattern.
Suppose that I’m mostly only aware of two possible relationship patterns that I can have with my friends. One is that of a somewhat emotionally distant friendship, and the other is that of an emotionally close romance.
A friend now pulls me towards the “romance” pattern, so I start doing things that I feel are associated with that pattern—being vulnerable, telling the other person how much I like that person, and so on.
And now I have the expectation that the other person will reciprocate—that when I act in ways I associate with romance, the other person will also do similar things. For a physical analogy, if friendship is walking with each other and romance is dancing together, then I might start leaning towards the other person and extending my hand—expecting them to grab the hand and join in a dance, hopefully before I lean forward so much that I fall.
I’m using this metaphor because in my experience there’s something of an almost kinesthetic feeling of different “stances” people might be in, in different social situations. And someone not sharing the same vocabulary of stances may mean that I feel metaphorically “out of balance”, stumbling until I get back to some more recognizable stance.
I lean towards another person, intending to settle into a “lover” stance. I’m expecting the other to likewise lean toward me, into a “lover” stance. But suppose that the other person instead takes the “close Platonic friend” stance and only leans forward a little bit, and then stops—then I might be caught off-balance and not know what stance I am expected to take.
In this situation, if I lack the “close Platonic friend” stance, I can only see the other person as being in either the “friend” or the “lover” stance. To me, it may also feel like they started moving towards the “lovers” stance, only to then pull back and go back to the “friends” stance. [...]
I suspect that these things feel to me natural to describe in terms of “stances” because they are in fact employing some of the same machinery involved in physical stances.
A very physical kind of stance might be someone aggressively yelling and coming at you. You might respond to this by getting startled and instinctively drawing back. The aggressive person has something like an attacking stance, while you have a defensive stance. Or you might respond more aggressively yourself, in which case you might go into a fighting stance.
These stances mobilize different kinds of reactions and processes in your body because they are preparing you for different kinds of physical responses (attacking or defending/fleeing). You orient to them differently, both in terms of literal physical orientation and what kinds of things you pay attention to (a person in an aggressive stance might look for openings in their opponent’s defenses, and a person in a frightened stance might look around to find help or an escape route). [...]
If you are a trained martial artist, you may have been taught to maintain different kinds of explicitly defined stances. They have become patterns that your body seeks to automatically maintain and to transition between them in the right circumstances. And if your opponent goes into a particular stance, you may know to react by going into another one yourself.
Separately, in dance, you have various positions where you hold your body in a particular way while trusting your dance partner to hold their body in a compatible way. If the other person doesn’t move in ways that are compatible with yours, the dance may fall apart. It’s collaborative rather than confrontational, but it still involves responding to the other person’s pattern with a pattern of your own.
Social stances feel to me analogous to physical stances in that people learn to experience themselves as being in one stance and another person as being in a different stance. They also learn various expectations about how to transition from one stance to another. These transitions may be collaborative or adversarial. And like physical stances, it may feel acutely unstable and uncomfortable to be in a position that’s partway between two stances.
Yeah! I think we’re talking about similar things here. I vaguely remember reading that actually and it might have been buried in the back of my head as I was writing this. I edited in a link to your list of examples, they’re great, and I hope you don’t feel like this is too derivative of your piece.
Thanks! And not at all, I thought this was nicely complementary since it was talking about stances more from an individual perspective while I had a more social one.
Oh nice, I was playing with similar ideas here:
Yeah! I think we’re talking about similar things here. I vaguely remember reading that actually and it might have been buried in the back of my head as I was writing this. I edited in a link to your list of examples, they’re great, and I hope you don’t feel like this is too derivative of your piece.
Thanks! And not at all, I thought this was nicely complementary since it was talking about stances more from an individual perspective while I had a more social one.