Symbol & Object: ‘Distance’ Balance

I might encourage her to unchain and release her interior kraken, encourage her to stop differentiating between loving me and loving what I do for her …

…when symbol confusion leads one to love power exchange instead of loving one’s partner, the resulting relationship becomes philosophically untenable if not functionally untenable as well.
~ OH, Monsters

And though many of us may be “addicted” to symbols involving behaviors less than physically or mentally healthy or sometimes to behaviors and symbols that do not actually fulfill the interior ‘hole’ [need] very well at all [too much 'fetishizing], yet when a symbol really works for our interior need and desire, it really works and we know it.
~ OH, Passion Addiction

I’ve written before about what happens in intimate relationships when symbols and their objects get too close, but I’ve missed putting such objectification in perspective with having symbols and objects too far apart.

The fact that objects are more easily dominated (used) than people is perhaps the heart of the “objectifying fetish”: I am so without objection (so submissive) that I am like unto – nay, I have become – an object. And I can imagine for some people the feeling of being dominated (manipulated, used) like an object (or the experiential movement from personhood into the “objecthood” of a “tool”) is an important part of their submissive experience, either for a more masochistic sense of dehumanization or simply for the meaningful sense of perfect use of thing/person (or other senses and combinations).

Of course I can also imagine that fetishistically having less distance between symbol and object like this might be accepted, functional and welcomed in an individual’s interior and even in a couple’s relationship. However for me there’s a point at which tend to feel more as if I’m an actor on a stage, too aware of ‘playing’ a ‘role‘ to experience the meaning I seek. This is why I rather think my ’electric’ uxory is more interactively communicative dynamic rather than objectifying symbol fetish and is why I believe I understand and maintain the difference between ‘being the object of her desire/passion’ and ‘being an object/tool that gets used by her’.

But of course on the other hand it’s about aspects in a spectrum with abstract poles and about finding and negotiating a range of symbol functionality (a ‘sweet spot’). For if on one hand there is the symbol-object ‘distance collapse’ of  fetish, on the other end there is symbol-object ‘distance mismatch’ of miscommunication, where intimacy or significance is entirely lost because symbols don’t seem to carry enough (or the ‘right’) meaning either among partners (relationship dissonance) or within one individual (interior dissonance). And if every individual is likely to have a slightly different comfort zone so also will every couple have a slightly different ‘distance range’ in their negotiated love symbols; yet what works, works – and when it does, we know it.

So in putting my “electric” response to my wife’s fiery self in the perspective of such a spectrum, an awareness rises of purposefully treading a balanced middle ground between symbol and object:

While I am comforted by my constant effort to make love symbols clear and transparent (without ‘too much’ mis-communicating distance between symbol and object) and by my avoidance of fetishized symbols that stop the movement of meaning from one interior all the way through to the other interior (because they don’t have ‘enough’ distance between symbol and object), still yet I tread with fear and trembling as I differentiate and negotiate a balance that works for me, my beloved and us.
~ Rephrased from Monsters

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