Feedback Need

Actors choose roles, but those roles have planned end dates when the role is finished. No one wants relationship role playing because relationships with planned termination aren’t really relationships. What we do want is love from our partners in symbols we understand. While we need to give (period), we also give to get what we need, and so we do what we can: compromises, give and take, do things in certain ways simply for our partner’s satisfaction. And such things are not solely widgets bartered, because we do them out of our love and for our partner’s sake.

We choose like actors, but unlike actors our choice of roles becomes part of us. And as the relationship becomes a part of us, those love widgets become more than lines we speak or motions on a stage. They become the currency of our relationship, the currency of our love; they become love symbols and we become a person who loves by those symbols.

And yet there are always limits to what we’re willing to do for widgets, whether hard limits or soft parameters. I want my wife never to sell short of her desires, never to compromise, never to take less, certainly never for my sake. Of course this is unrealistic, so I have a soft goal with just enough of her active pleasure, to make me feel her interior isn’t changing too much for my sake. Yet even this requires me to know, guess, assume, how much desire she has for, how much happiness she derives from, any particular widget.

On the other hand, she doesn’t want the obligation to constantly tell me what to do and exactly how to do it; it’s a rather exhausting role, and one few people truly want to play. Thus quite quickly the loop becomes a matter of communication and feedback, in both directions, how to most effectively get everyone the love they want, in love symbols they understand, without role play artifice, in either direction. Perhaps the most difficult love symbol is to simply feel earnest and genuine with your partner while perceiving they likewise feel earnest and genuine with you.