read Ch.1 : life is your love laboratory

SUBJECT: The Overthinker (OT), female, age 30 years-2 months-28 days

HYPOTHESIS: If the subject publishes no data on the topics of sex and love, the data she does eventually present will be met without preconception.

ABSTRACT: The human species demonstrates a propensity to categorize and sort the behavior of fellow humans as an evolutionary efficiency. However, there appears to be limited impetus to update categorization even in the face of new data. In attempts to avoid bypass this Static Definition Vortex, the subject has remained silent for 30 years on the topic of mating behaviors. This experiment will reveal whether she has successfully avoided initial categorization.

METHOD: sibling re-con, a cocktail feint, an escape vehicle

EXPERIMENT 140.07.3:

 “You know, Mom is convinced you’re coming out to them.”

“What!?”

“She kept asking me why you wanted everyone to come down for the Fourth. I told her you just wanted to see us for the holiday, but she knows something’s up. Now she’s telling me that I have to tell her if you’re going to tell them you’re gay. So she can prepare herself.”

I was genuinely taken aback. I thought I’d been totally cool when I had suggested to my parents that they come out to visit me for the fourth of July weekend. It hadn’t been an unusual request. They came to visit the family orchard on holidays all the time. And with my Granddad’s passing a month ago, they’d been planning a return anyway to deal with his affairs.

I’d known, of course, when I asked my younger sister to come down it would send up red flags for her, but I didn’t really have much of a choice there. I needed the emotional back up. She and I had had a rough relationship growing up, but as is often the case, as adults we’d become allies of sorts. I was relieved she’d be sitting beside me that evening.

 “I can’t believe she actually said that to you.” I was almost amused by this report of my mother’s frankness. Certainly, I’d known that there was an unspoken wondering around my lack of boyfriends, lifelong virginity, and general disinterest in dating, but to hear that Mom had so boldly verbalized what I took to be one of her biggest fears was a new development.

“I know, right? So, how are you doing?”

I shrugged in response. “I’m okay. Ready to just get the whole thing over with. They think we’re going to dinner, so if you can suggest cocktails around six, I’ll do it then. I figure you and I really should go to dinner as soon as it’s done to let them process.”

“How do you think they’re going to react?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. Do you?” I asked with genuine interest, “I mean, I keep trying to get my mind to conjure up some sort of possible outcome here, but it’s just blank. It’s like this is so outside of the realm of any conversation I ever thought I’d be having with them that even my imagination has thrown up its hands and said, Don’t ask me!”

Kathryn’s gaze rolled upward as if consulting her own imagination, “Nope, you’re right. There’s no point of reference for this one.”

I tried to keep myself busy, but the hours ticking down to six o’clock were excruciating. By the last half hour, I was consumed by my visceral need to tear of the band-aid. With each minute the freight train of my reality barreled forward on its collision course with that in which my parents resided. I anxiously anticipated the moment of impact while my mother and father sat sipping tea in the metaphoric dining car, blissfully unaware of our merging tracks.

As planned, while everyone was getting dressed for the evening, my sister made the loud suggestion that we all have a pre-dinner drink on the patio. I was jittery, holding my tongue with a white-knuckled will as my sister herded both of them out the door. They each wandered toward a different rattan chair, my mother telling my sister some story, my father distracted by his phone, finishing up whatever had his attention, neither of them noticing I held a bottle of water rather than a glass of wine. The back of their thighs had just barely touched the cushioned seats, and my brain took that to be my cue. I abruptly and awkwardly blurted, “Well, I don’t know what your plans are for January, but you’re both going to be grandparents.”

Seriously, that’s how I said it. For all of my overthinker’s tendencies, I hadn’t managed to wrap my brain around this one, and had just left it in the lap of the moment.

My father somehow seamlessly, without ever changing facial expression nor looking towards me, stood back up, walked a few steps toward the tree line of the orchard where a large pile of cardboard boxes sat waiting to be broken down. In black leather driving shoes and pressed slacks, he began to slowly and methodically rip them into flat sheets one-by-one. -Riiiip- My mother’s gaze shifted to my younger sister sitting beside me – my married sister who had always planned on having children – expectantly. Kathryn didn’t say anything, but made a deferring gesture in my direction. My mother’s eyes followed the direction of her fingers to my lap, up to my face, and looped back to my sister. Again, expectantly. Again, my sister remained silent. In the lightening crack of understanding that passed through her, I released a breath and felt the impact of our realities slamming into one another and merging. Okay, we were all riding the same train again.

“Who’s the father?”

“Jonah.”

 “Does he know?”

“I told him yesterday.”

My answer was punctuated by the sound of my father’s progress on the cardboard deconstruction project: -Riiiip-

 “Is he going to be involved?”

“It looks like it.”

-Riiiiiiiiiiiiiip-

“Are you dating?”

-Riiiiiiiiiiiiiip-

“No, we were never together. We don’t want to be. We’re friends.”

“How far are you?”

“Three months. I’m through the first trimester. I’m due the second week of January.”

My mother looked at me as though she was meeting me for the first time, her hands in her lap, considering, digesting, or maybe just slipping into shock. “I’m almost relieved it’s someone we know.”

-Riiiiiiip-

“And we know he’s a good guy, and educated, and good looking.” Her eyes welled.

-Riiiip-

“If you want to,” I ventured, “I have an ultrasound – ” She quickly waved me off as I went to reach for the grainy black and white photos I’d tucked into the book on the coffee table with a sharp, “No, no. I can’t. Not yet.” I retracted my hand, a little stung, and returned to answering only the questions that were asked of me. I knew I had to give them time, let them set the pace.

“Have you told any family yet? On facebook or anything?”

“No.”

“Okay. Don’t, okay? I just want to deal with telling Aunt Robbie. And Ruthie. And Klint.” My mother’s face spoke dread, already suffering the imagined chastisements of our more conservative relatives. Consumed in the moment more, I thought, with the shame of having raised a daughter who went and got herself knocked up than by how I’d be judged.

“I’m okay with you being the one to tell the family if you want to.”

 My mother continued to ask questions in fits and starts, tears and disbelief both playing large roles. As topics turned more toward the logistics of pregnancy, however, I noticed a shift, as though she’d become a mother speaking to a mother-to-be rather than her baffling daughter.

My father eventually rejoined us, though he remained more or less a silent participant. “Well,” I took advantage of a lull in conversation, “Kathryn and I were thinking that we would go to dinner and leave you two to have some time alone.” I knew there was going to be a lot to process between the two of them that night, and for my own sake, I wanted to be out of earshot of their grief. When my sister and I were safely in the car, I slid the keys into the ignition and turned to her. “Well, that went well!”

“Yeah!” Her head bobbed in agreement, “Plus, now when you do come out to them, instead of being upset they’ll just be relieved you’re not pregnant again.”

DATA ANALYSIS:

Love is the most complex simple concept for an over-thinker, and as culture shifts and options abound, more and more of us are overthinking it. The concept of romantic identity has begun to feel elusive to many of us. As a young person I was eternally curious about love. But I was curious about what it felt like, not what to call it. Perhaps even then some part of me innately understood that un-defining love was the only way I’d ever actually get to experience it.

My experience with relationship left me feeling fundamentally misunderstood. As fellow overthinkers, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that defining where I stood in the landscape of love left me feeling as bewildered as a math problem without a solution. I couldn’t accept that I couldn’t rationally understand it, that I couldn’t think myself to the solution. I was aware, however, that I seemed to be lacking this basic compass called ‘sexual desire.’ This tool was potent enough that it provided my peers direction in their romantic pursuits and provided them clarity in their identity in the world. I marveled that they so easily seemed able to distinguish between sexual experimentation and their stake in the ground. I felt way too uninformed to play with these permeant monikers.

As I grew older, my lack of interest in dating and boys inspired the L word to be thrown around often enough. Growing up in the 90s, being gay still felt new and edgy. Most of us Midwestern kids only had reruns of The Real World as a point of reference for the gay lifestyle. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Real World. But I imagined at times it would have been easier if I simply had been gay because at least I’d be defined. I’d ‘make sense’ to people. But, alas, I felt no more desire to kiss girls than boys. So, even if I had been growing up in today’s high schools full of gender rainbows and sexual spectrums, I don’t know that I would have found much relief because it all still would have hinged upon labeling love.

Now it was 2014, I was thirty and pregnant, and still I didn’t recognize myself in any of the myriad of recently minted relationship constructs or sexual pairings. Still I failed to fit in. Still the way I approached love was chronically misunderstood by those around me. And my failure to find my relational categorization was all the more profound for the sheer number of labels now available to me.

That day I sat my parents down to tell them I was pregnant I saw just how strongly our categorizing nature runs. Despite the fact that I’d consciously neither defined nor discussed my affinity, or lack thereof, to any category of sexual pairing, my family still had come to some strong conclusions. I had never proclaimed myself gay, never dated a woman, yet it took a nearly immaculate conception to break my own mother’s brain of how it had sorted me. It was reinforcement of a warning I’d sensed my whole life: Define at your own risk.

This is not easy wisdom by which to live. Our desire for belonging is a formidable force. Stumbling across a definition in which we recognize ourselves is exhilarating as much as it is confining. There was a day when I finally stumbled across a category of sexuality that seemed to resonate with my experience. In that moment, some part of me leapt with joy at the recognition, thrilled to finally be seen. There was an immense sense of connection. The part of my being that longed to be understood, find community, safety, build social connections so that I’d be less likely to starve or be eaten by a saber tooth tiger – something primal in me – let out a whoop at the prospect of having possibly found my tribe. I am not a freak! I am not the only person on this planet having this completely anomalous experience! There are others! I have a tribe!

I felt an un-self-conscious consequence-less impulse to announce to everyone immediately, “I’m okay, guys! I’ve found my category. I’m sorted.” That feeling lasted about .005 seconds before the backlash arrived, a thrashing, caged lion voice that roared, You don’t know me. Don’t try to box me in! The thought of owning this label to another, thereby concretizing in their minds who I was, how I behaved, how I would always behave, giving them the right to call me out as duplicitous or mistaken if ever I felt or said or did something that fell out of alignment with this self-proclaimed identity (which I inevitably would, for no label can be all-encompassing of individual nuance), this thought threw me into terror. My eyes flitted back and forth as though simply thinking this new self-definition too loudly had somehow leaked it into the ether, and I was now irreversibly subject to everyone’s scrutiny. My impulse to belong and the desire to be free felt at odds. So, I shut my mouth and remained in the inquiry.

CONCLUSION:

Life is our Love Laboratory. It is the lab in which we run our experiments and discover how and who you might be in love. And never have we more needed to tackle this grand experiment we all love than now.

Romance & sexuality used to need very little sorting. Heterosexual pairing off was the socially acceptable form of coupling. Period. Then around my parents’ generation Western society began acknowledging a kind of binary system of straight and gay. Simple enough. Now in my generation, in an attempt to expand our understanding and articulate that love is not just one thing, dozens if not hundreds of new non-vanilla-straight categories have been coined. From there we’ve seen each of these different categories develop into its own spectrum, meaning that now there are literally an infinite number of places a person could fall on one of dozens of lines and still find themselves neatly tagged and sorted.

Evolutionarily we’re hardwired to find the shorthand understanding of those around us so we can quickly and instinctually assess our safety in any given situation. Predator, prey, friend, threat, family, tribe, potential mate, potential competition for a mate. We love a good definition because they keep us alive and thriving.

The flip side of that efficiency is our brains’ tendency to check the ‘done’ box once a categorization has been found. Once we’ve tagged a person, there is no longer a need to re-evaluate. To reassess someone every time we met them would be inefficient. For this reason, a proclamation of identity should be taken on with great caution. We may know that our declarations carry an implicit ‘for now,’ but our listeners’ ancient brains likely hear ‘forever.’ (Don’t believe me? Think about that one time you mentioned you liked purple when you were 5, and your aunt gave you something purple every birthday for the next thirty years). It is to you I am writing, my fellow un-defineds, you defined-for-nows, you want-the-option-to-change-my-mind, my fellow explorers and experimenters. If we want the freedom to be malleable, to change direction as new data comes in, we should be slow to self-label to the world because it takes an immense amount of energy to overcome the inertia of another’s now set understanding of us.

I hope (and believe) that definitions of romantic and sexual identity are getting so specific at such an increasing rate we’ll be able to recognize the commonality of our individuality. Then we can get back to just calling love ‘love.’

RUN YOUR OWN EXPERIMENT: CHALLENGE EXTERNAL DEFINITIONS

Experimental Procedure

1. At the top of a piece of paper, write the header How Others Define [Your Name].
2. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
3. Complete the sentence below as many times as you can before the timer goes off. Do not stop your pencil, do not edit, do not consider, just write as fast as you can. [Your Name] is        the definition someone else holds of you    .
4. When time is up, review the list and circle any definitions you resent or find displeasing.
5. For each circled sentence, write a list of ways you have allowed or encouraged that definition of you to persist through your behavior, language, silence, etc.

Bonus Steps

1. Go to a person who holds one of these incorrect definitions of you.
2. Take the first step in disproving their definition. For example:
   • Recommend an intellectual article to that man who defines you as an air head
   • Show up 5 minutes early to a movie date with your girlfriend who defines you as chronically late.
   • Pick up the check at lunch with that co-worker who defines you as cheap.
   • Do something kind for that girl at school who defines you as a bitch.

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