A Snail’s Shell, or What I’ve Learned So Far (part 2)

(A Snail’s Shell, or What I’ve Learned So Far, part 1)

Yet, although we have common goals and compatible life lessons, we are still different people with some slightly different goals, lessons, interior spaces, needs, wishes, desires, passions, etc. We are assuredly going to have some love symbols in common, but also some love symbols that are different. Of course by learning to effectively deliver the love symbols my wife understands I can get my love symbol of participating in her pleasure, happiness and life lessons – and of course she works to give me love in the symbols I understand as well. And I have found making these adjustments often affords us more opportunities for greater intimacy but also improves the accuracy of our already functioning love symbols.

Thus in these joint and individual goals, tensions and confluences in my own relationship, I’ve come to believe that all people ‘need’ to give, but that we also (in a way) give in order to get, get what we need, get the love we need in symbols that we understand. And so we do what we can, we compromise, we give and take, consciously and unconsciously do things in certain ways simply for our partner’s satisfaction. Yet I do not believe such things are solely widgets bartered, because we give out of our love and for our partner’s sake those widgets become love widgets, and become more than mere motions on a stage or mere lines we speak. They become the very currency of our relationship, the currency of our love, and as they become love symbols, we become a person who loves by those symbols.

In a real sense I think that a loving intimate relationship (only) becomes (‘feels’) ‘real’ to the degree to which two people codependently suspend their disbelief in the roles they ‘play’ for the sake of their partner.  We play (possibly are only playing) a part until we are no longer aware of ‘playing’ and either the ‘role‘ has become part of who we are or we are just being ourselves, or both.

And lastly and most largely, I think this relationship role playing model shows a helpful general truth about living life as well. One can also think of ‘life role playing’, that is treating life as a game in which one continually refines a role, or series of roles as the player wishes, interactively, with an exceptionally large cast. A useful definition of life might than be – “a very complex and interactive ‘game’ that is often most meaningful (and even best enjoyed) when we are most forgetful that it’s a game, when we most ‘suspend our disbelief’ in the experienced reality” – but of course one really has to wholly focus on the playing of the game to the utmost in order to forget, forget the fears, worries and concerns, forget the ambiguities and existential uncertainties of life and just enjoy.

For it may (may!) be that we can ‘know’ nothing more than the meaning we get from the very process of living life. Indeed, just as the ambiguity and imprecision of language and of symbols gives us the opportunity to create a fun and entertaining puzzle to express our selves and be happy ‘playing’ at and with, perhaps not knowing some key important things about life is (at least part of) the point in existing at all. A certain amount of existential ignorance and uncertainty might actually be important, indeed instrumental, to obtaining meaning and to the very reason we are ‘here’ in the first place.