Not A Love Letter, But A Thank You Letter
Context: Each day on her blog Letters To Boys, Gretta Duleba has been posting things she once sent to men she dated. One of those, recently, was a love letter to me, which she “sent” me by posting it on the blog.
With a setup like that, it would be an absolute waste not to respond in kind.
Gretta,
I don’t love you in the usual sense of the word, or in the sense you defined at the beginning of your letter. Nor do I feel limerence or a crush toward you. But I feel something toward you, something subtle but strong, something which wants to be expressed, and I know no better words for it yet. So I can’t honestly call this a love letter, but I have no better name for it yet either; it is an attempt to explain what I do feel. Be warned, it is largely a stream-of-consciousness as I probe my own feelings.
When I query my own feelings, the first words which bubble up are “thank you”. I feel very, deeply grateful toward you.
Thank you for entering my life. Thank you for inviting me into yours. Thank you for… and then I struggle to find the right words. Being you? Being sane? Being trustworthy, in some idiosyncratic sense which is native to my mind and probably not whatever that word summons in your head or other peoples’ heads?
Thank you for… not letting me down.
(I had to pause, at this point, because I cried a little. That’s… pretty unusual for me, to put it mildly. Guess I must have poked the right feeling.)
You (and others) have noticed that I emanate a lot of… poorly-concealed contempt or disgust or condescension or something like that for basically everyone around me, by default, all the time. I don’t want that feeling. There’s a part of me which really desperately wants to work as a team, wants teammates I can trust, teammates who can agentically optimize alongside me, not just act as drones but also not just do their own solo thing. But for thirty-some odd years, over and over again, I keep… not having that. There have been exceptions, and they’re rare and precious. But the main experience has been a sort of emotional scar developing over that want for a team, for that trust.
An example: in the domain of romantic relationships, I instinctively tried to wingman for both of my previous long-term partners anytime they expressed interest in a guy (and I succeeded at least once!). My instincts are poly, and I instinctively try to treat a partner like a teammate, to play a team game. So when it turned out that my previous girlfriend of ten years couldn’t even think about me seeing other women without having an outright anxiety attack… well, you can imagine how that felt. I can see her perspective when I try, of course, but emotionally… it felt like even the person I was closest with was not just unwilling but emotionally unable to be on my team, even when I’d been on hers.
That’s why it means so much that you clearly pass that test. And not just you, but your primary partner too; these little exchanges where Eliezer and I set each other up for better experiences with you mean so much, because again, it feels like being on a team.
It’s not just about wingmanning, though. Just a few days ago you asked why I wanted to spend this weekend with you and the kids, and I replied:
I expect to have a lot of little moments where, like, you watch the kids while I go grab something (or vice versa), or we both sneak around a corner to make out for a few seconds, or we’re both going back-and-forth in a conversation or a story with the kids, or one of us notices the other’s overwhelmed and just gives a hug or tells them to take a break, or I’m fingering you under a table and you’re trying to keep a straight face, or we’re coordinating how to move all the bags. Where the unifying theme here is something like, we have a team activity of spending the weekend together and managing the kids and are working together on lots of little moment-to-moment things toward that team activity. And the prospect of all those little moment-to-moment coordinations with you feels really yummy.
I can work with you, and it actually feels like working with you. It doesn’t feel like I need to carry the team. It doesn’t feel like you’re emotionally incapable of handling your part of the team game. Your needs don’t exceed what you bring to the table.
And that means the world to me right now, because it penetrates a little bit of that emotional scar tissue. It gives me a little bit of hope in other people—a hope which had previously run out. It gives me a little bit of something I’ve wanted very badly for a very long time.
So thank you, Gretta, for… being the sort of person who can be a good teammate for me. And thank you for being my teammate.
I find myself suddenly less sure that you don’t/can’t experience the same companionate love that I do, which may or may not be the same as everyone else. Being on a team in the way you describe here, with the expectations and predictions of what that means as you describe here, “those little moment to moment coordinations,” etc, seems like a typical sample from the distribution of what I write when someone asks me to try to describe what the value proposition of relationships/love is. It reads to me like a pretty fair description of what I mean when I say (an idealized form of) “companionship.” I think my version might have included more retrospectively non-central accounts of specific forms of emotional support (which I think you’ve metaphorically quirked an eyebrow at in the past) but right now it seems like those are implementation details of this core thing. (E.x. I’ve said things like “a promise to be there for the other, to pick them up if they need or want the help, etc” but that’s only actually a warm thought when underlying that dynamic is the belief that the two are a team in the way I interpret what you describe above.)
This post has good vibes. It feels a bit personal but I think it is nice to share this sort of thing publicly.
I feel this way a lot. Especially about the want for a team and feeling like teams I have been a part of in the past haven’t really felt genuine.
I feel like I have shifted a great deal of my contempt for others to a contempt for the difficulty of communication. Many times when I disagree with someone or think they are stupid it turns out that we had different assumptions and were misunderstanding one another. But I do feel like I have tried to encourage this perspective in myself because it is more pleasant not because it is necessarily accurate.
Surprisingly to me, people often describe me as kind and genuine, which may mean that I am good at subconsciously projecting that impression, or people giving me this feedback just don’t want to hurt my feelings.
If you find people you feel you are genuinely seen by, that is a lucky thing. It’s probably worthwhile to ensure you are genuinely seeing them as well… If they are anything like me, it may not be as obvious as it seems.