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By All Means Step Over My Cold, Dead Body and Save Yourself, You HARPY!

by makeupandmirtazapine on April 30, 2013 in Family, Sex, Dating & Relationships

“Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.” ~ Mike Nichols

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to The Imposter from My Life As Imposter. She talked about her life as a British Asian, and how she struggles with the Muslim Guilt Monster over matters of love and sex. Now she’s back to tell us about how her older cousins and other family members reacted to her impending nuptials.

No no.. by all means, step over my cold, dead body and save yourself you HARPY.

Hello hello.So I had a very strange dream last night. I dreamt that my three eldest cousins and I were thrown into an Olympic sized swimming pool and forced to battle it out in a Gladiators/Celebrity Death Match sort of way. Every time we reached for the rails or the steel steps at the edges of the pool, all the screws unravelled and they came away in our hands.The dream basically ended with everybody banding together, drowning me, and using my body as a stepping stone to clamber out of the pool to safety.

It sounds crazy but this sort of underlying resentment is actually quite common in Asian/Pakistani culture.

The cousins who featured in last night’s dream escapade are 34, 35 and 37 and all unmarried. To me, this really doesn’t matter at all, in fact, I really couldn’t give a shit when or if anyone chooses to marry or not.

But what you have to consider is that culturally, and particularly when it comes to marriage, Pakistanis are old-school and traditional. Not in a cave man sort of way, more in a wafting fans, blushing brides, lovely Jane Austen sort of way.

Everyone is very proper about the whole thing and the engagement is a very formal step one takes when at the appropriate age and generally involves families at a much earlier stage than western courtships. Like the Jews, we tend to marry young (early 20s) and anyone left over after the age 30 is looked upon lovingly and with a great deal of sympathy.

Things aren’t quite as extreme as this in my family as my generation were all born in the UK. Everyone expects them to figure their own shit out and bring home their boyfriend/girlfriend when they want to tie the knot.

But what I find interesting is that some of the old ideology seems to have rubbed off on the women in my family. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m one of the youngest of all my cousins; so apparently this means everyone needs to get depressed and hate me if I marry before them. They have just become so goddamn bitter about it, as though I am robbing them of something. I am therefore avoiding all family events at the moment because I just get the stoniest glares and icy receptions.

One of my aunts (mother to the 34 and 35 year olds) actually grabbed me by the elbow and shoved me out of her way at the last family function. I turned to look at her, horrified, and she immediately started yelling, “I NEVER TOUCHED YOU… WHAT DO YOU MEAN??!!” (bearing in mind I hadn’t spoken yet) until one of her horrible henchman daughters sidled up to her asking what was going on, staring at me surreptitiously ready to pounce. I quickly had to smile and say, “Oh, nothing, I’m sure it was an accident!” and carried on making small talk with everyone while they secretly plotted my demise.

What the actual fuck? Who does that to their niece? She was fine with me before I was engaged, now it’s like I murdered her puppy then stole her daughters’ ovaries.

What is wrong with these people?? These girls are very attractive women. I’m sure they would have no trouble finding boyfriends……. So why haven’t they ever found boyfriends?? And why do they actively begrudge other people happiness? I have never understood this, “let’s compete and break each other down” mean girl mentality. And it’s an accepted thing to do… be scathing and difficult and outright bitchy and I’m expected to smile and glide through it all like a social ballerina.

Apparently the latest news is that my female cousins refuse to adhere to the dress code at my wedding because they “don’t want to do black tie” and were giving my mum shit about it over dinner one night at my aunt’s house.

Honestly… you can show up in a monkey suit for all I care. Even if you show up in a white dress I doubt I would notice you and your pathetic attempts at being obtuse and trying to get a rise out my family; because I’ll be marrying Bob not thinking about you at all.

Why on earth do they feel the need to actively bate my family with this crap? It’s such bad manners. Keep it to yourself people! Sometimes I just want to stand up and yell this, in true “Bridesmaids” style, at the top of my lungs:

I wonder whether, as progressive as they are, their families are just different to mine. I think my aunts and uncles are very concerned with their children marrying a Muslim person and, perhaps, enforce this fervently. Whereas my mother just wanted us to marry someone that was raised the same way we were. Obviously she would have preferred me to marry a Muslim man for simplicity’s sake, but she couldn’t have been happier about my relationship with Bob and the fact that he’s Jewish. It really doesn’t matter to her, as long as I don’t lose my identity.

I celebrate who I am and where I’m from and Bob does too; and that’s how we want to live our life together.

I am not sure that the girls who drowned me last night would be able to say the same and I therefore think it has bred a great deal of resentment towards my mum’s family.

I honestly think this wedding is going to make things a lot worse in terms of my relationship with my female cousins.

But, in the end, that’s just something I’m going to have to accept…

And smile through….

And gracefully pull the daggers from my back….

Whilst singing a little song.

Like Mary Fucking Poppins.

Fin.

Nobody Tells Anybody Everything

by makeupandmirtazapine on March 27, 2013 in Family, Life, Sex, Dating & Relationships

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

I’ve really not been as lax at blogging as it looks lately. I’ve actually written a few things but can’t post them just yet in case it somehow messes up something for me. I’ve just discovered that this blog comes up in the first page of any Google searches on the subject of those posts; and while that’s great from a, ‘go me, Google thinks I have something useful to say’ perspective, it’s made me slightly paranoid from an, ‘oh, this blog was originally supposed to be anonymous and now anyone can find it’ stand point.

So instead I’m going to write about honesty, and the value we place on finding somebody to whom we can tell, and who will tell us, everything.

Because that’s supposed to be the holy grail of any kind of relationship, isn’t it? Finding someone who’s straight forward, and honest, and we can be completely open with.

Except that nobody actually does that.

Nobody.

Well nobody over the age of about five anyway.

Because it’s impossible. There aren’t enough hours in the day to tell anybody everything. If you meet somebody as even a young adult you’d be there for the next few years of your life just to tell somebody everything about you and that’s happened to you so far. Never mind to keep them up dated about what happens from that point on.

We’re very busy people, all we have time to give anyone are the edited highlights. And we edit those highlights selectively depending on who it that we’re talking to and the image of ourselves that we want to portray to them.

And sure, if what we’re trying to convey to some particular other person is that we desire to create a level of intimacy with them, the edit we show them has information that we wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable sharing with the wider world.

But it still isn’t everything.

Because if we actually told them everything that we thought and felt in the course of a day most of it would be boring.

And we don’t want them to think that we’re boring. Because that would be completely counter-productive to the kind of relationship that we’re trying to create.

I mean, that guy who only ever wants to talk about himself, his obscure interests, and what he’s had to eat that day can’t get himself a partner for a reason.

They’re not called communication skills for nothing.

And maintaining openness and connection – which is what we really mean when we say ‘we tell each other everything’ – does take skills. Because it only gets harder.

It’s relatively easy to be honest at the beginning of a relationship. If it backfires on you all you’ve lost is a relative stranger who you thought might have the potential to be someone special.

But as time goes on you become invested in the relationship, it becomes a fabric in the patchwork of your life. You work other pieces around it. If things go wrong now it’ll mess it up. You stand to lose something real.

As the stakes get higher certain things become harder to say. And our insecurities come into play.

Take me and you for instance.

I said from the beginning that I’d be honest with you. That I’d tell you all the gory details of everything that went on in my crazy brain.

And I did. And I do.

But then you stuck around. You told me how much you liked my writing. You were supportive of my problems. You shared stories about your life with me as well.

And I started to like you. I wanted you to stick around.

So now I worry more about the things I say.

I don’t want to say something wrong, something that might make you decide you don’t like me anymore and to go away.

Despite the fact that my mental health problems are the reason for my being here. Despite the fact that I even named this blog after an antidepressant. I worry that if I keep sharing stories of the sadness in my soul you’ll go away again, and that to keep you I should try to write things that are more like what I think you might want in a blog.

Not to mention that it’s harder to feel able to share with you when I have an idea to talk about secrets that might be slightly out of left field. Things that aren’t related to any of the things we’ve discussed so far. Things that you might never have gleaned about me from what I’ve shared up to now. Like how maybe I once slept with a married guy but I can’t actually remember.

And our relationship, yours and mine, is conducted through a computer screen.

It’s not like we share a life, or a house, or a family, or in most cases even a social scene.

Working on this stuff with people who’d actually recognise our faces can be terrifying. And we can tend to respond to this by behaving cowardly. And holding back from sharing quite so much of ‘everything’ as we had originally intended.

Although withholding information, sometimes even lying, aren’t necessarily always the worst things you could do in the world.

You don’t need to know anything about my sex life in order to take any of things that you were supposed to from this blog.

And sometimes it’s just that the motives underlying what we say are more important than the veracity of its content.

Once upon a time I was involved with someone. And there was an incident between that someone and a close friend. My friend chose to lie about it, my flame didn’t. I knew this. Even so I chose to believe my friend.

The one who lied to me did so because they loved me and wanted to protect me, the one who told the truth was able to because they clearly didn’t.

In that scenario the one who wouldn’t just tell me anything was clearly the one worth hanging on to.

It’s a difficult balancing act, deciding what we should share and what it’s wisest, or kindest, to conceal. That’s where the skill part comes in you see.

But nobody tells anybody everything.

Alien Language

by makeupandmirtazapine on February 19, 2013 in Family, Life, Sex, Dating & Relationships

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships. ~ Henry Winkler

Often when we speak to each other we make so many assumptions about shared understandings and experiences that we’re basically speaking in code.

This became clear to me some years ago, while working as an office manager, when I supervised a young woman with a learning disability and asked her to post a letter to a client.

I had typed this letter but not put it in an envelope, nor written one out for the letter to be posted in. And the young woman ignored me. She ignored me because she didn’t understand what I was asking her to do. I should have explained the task to her in stages so that she could follow them.

In order to post a letter you need to put it in an envelope, address the envelope, take the envelope to the post room to be franked, then leave the franked envelope in the post out tray.

That’s four steps to a task that I’d never even realised that I’d been assuming people knew.

But a lot of our assumptions aren’t even as basic as that. When I wrote the post Jealousy Does Not Become You, I made the assumption that anybody reading it would be familiar with Shakespeare’s Othello, the man driven so crazy by unfounded jealousy that he murdered his wife, Desdemona.

If I tell you that something is legen- wait for it -dary, or that on nights out my friends and I often play a game we call ‘Have You Met Chris?’, I’m assuming that you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with the TV show How I Met Your Mother.

Nobody has ever been confused when I’ve told them that when I go on holiday my hair always ends up looking like Monica’s in Barbados.

On the other hand if I were to respond to something bad happening by telling you that at least you didn’t get eaten by a crocodile on your gap year in Africa, you’d probably think that was a bit strange.

At least you didn’t get eaten by a crocodile on your gap year in Africa, is what one of my college best friends and I used to say to each other to cheer us up. It started after we both found out we needed to resist an exam on the same day that a girl got eaten by a crocodile on her gap year in Africa. We consoled ourselves over a liquid lunch that at least our day wasn’t going as badly as hers, and the phrase promptly became our shared mantra.

It was a part of the code that people who are really close to each other share, with their own in jokes, and references to things outsiders don’t really understand. The code that means that you can sit down with two other people who speak no other language but your own and be as lost in the conversation as if they’d suddenly started speaking Icelandic.

That phrase is now part of a dead language. Code for a relationship that no longer exists. The home-made poster it’s printed on a startling reminder that someone I now have absolutely nothing to say to, once used to be able to read my mind. A linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact, as Brian Friel more elegantly put it in Translations, a play about this very subject.

And we don’t just encode our speech. We imbue objects and images with layers of meaning that aren’t apparent to the untrained eye. For example, I have a funny looking owl; which to most people is just a funny looking owl, but to me summaries my childhood relationship with my grandfather. And on a far greater scale, of course, the depiction of a cross for Christians, and a Star of David for Jews, mean so very much more than any other representations of geometric shapes.

But even my cat does this, on some rudimentary level. Pick up the box of tin foil in my kitchen and she’ll assume you’re going to play with her.

Foil balls are her most favourite thing in the world after sardines.

But you see, with all these assumptions and presumed understandings, it’s no wonder that communicating with one another can sometimes prove to be a mine field of misunderstandings.

That’s without even considering the frequency with which we describe things by likening them to something more familiar. Which inevitably leaves a little something to be lost in translation along the way.

Cultural shorthand can vary significantly between towns and age groups, never mind between people who were raised in distinctly different cultural traditions. We would do well to be mindful of this when we communicate with each other. To be conscious of whether what we think we are saying, is the same as what our interlocutor thinks that they are hearing.

It’s something that I shall be very much aware of in moving to China. Where I know the language required to ask someone to post me a letter, but am largely ignorant of the code to unlock the deeper meanings that foster relationships.

But at least there I will be faced with something that I know I need to learn. It’s the things that we think we already do know that can prove our biggest obstacles to clear communication.

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