love

in which vincent uses his Favorite Trick of asking everyone the same question

thanks to many many people for conversations that contributed to this post, including AC, KQ, JS, EY, FL, GC, JZ, SC, CQ, AL, AC, AZ, KM, SP, JH, BL, KL, and others i can’t remember right now (sorry >_<)

i suppose in some ways this is the sequel to a thing i wrote 2 years ago

---

1. two of the main subjects on my mind recently are: a) why do i care about other people? b) what do i need from other people?

2. i’ve learned the hard way that these questions are important for reasons beyond mere speculation. if i don’t have a clear idea of why i care about other people it’s easy to accidentally commit to caring for someone in a way that isn’t aligned with what i really believe in; if i don’t have a clear idea of what i need from other people it’s easy to accidentally commit to spending time with people who can’t actually give me what i need. these were both true of my most recent relationship and i think that’s a big part of why breaking up was inevitable, even though said relationship was good in many other respects

3. in the last few months i’ve asked many of my friends why they care about other people. some of the common answers: it just feels good and i don’t feel a need to dig deeper into that. life would be pretty lonely otherwise. people are interesting. other humans are the most conscious beings we can interact with so befriending them feels more existentially meaningful than other things you can do. people are often altruistic for ego reasons. and, sure, i agree with all of these sentiments, but i don’t think they actually strike at the heart of my confusion. do we really care about people simply because being lonely sucks? are good feelings all you need? if that’s true then why do people care for each other far beyond what is necessary to feel good? if you could press a button to be happy and fulfilled all the time, would you still care about other people? i think i would

4. a slightly different answer i also agree with: really close relationships result in a lot of support and growth and other stuff that you don’t get anywhere else. of course it’s nice to be understood and cared for in deep ways, and caring about other people makes it easier to have relationships where this happens. but is that the source of the motivation for caring about other people, ie. at its core is it a transactional thing where people implicitly decide to care for others in order to satisfy this need? or is there a different source of motivation which everything else is a downstream effect of, one which isn’t being communicated clearly? i know these things can never really be disentangled, but i think the distinction is still a good one to keep in mind

5. an interesting answer from one of my coworkers: i pay a lot of attention to how people change over time, so when i meet someone i have a lot of narratives for types of people they could grow into. i love and support my friends because i think they can become really wonderful people and i want to help bring that out. i’m in a relationship with my partner because i think they have really good qualities and i want more of those qualities to exist in the world. i don’t relate very strongly to this view - maybe a little, but i definitely don’t have visions of ideal versions of my friends or anything like that. i think it’s interesting though that this answer focuses on something fundamentally different from the previous ones (and sure, it’s possible the underlying motivation here is still just wanting to feel good, but even if that’s true the shift in focus is a meaningful one)

6. what do i need from other people? many things, obviously, like hugs, attention, understanding, kindness, support, inspiration, wisdom, criticism. notably all of these are things i get from my close friends, which begs the question - what are relationships for? for the last few years i believed that the main difference between relationships and regular friendships was stronger and more explicit commitment (tldr i thought i might be aro/ace and wondered what distinguished relationships from friendships for an aro/ace person; this was the best answer i could come up with). lately i’ve been thinking this idea is probably wrong at worst and incomplete at best

7. “relationships are just friendships with stronger commitment” is incomplete because it seems to imply that you can have a healthy relationship with anyone as long as you’re sufficiently committed to each other and have a reasonably healthy friendship. i think in practice this is not entirely true, eg. it would be really unsatisfying to commit to someone who isn’t one of your favorite people to spend time with or who has very different love languages than you, even if you two are good friends, and nowadays i’m pretty skeptical such commitments can last

8. there’s more to love languages than i initially thought. on one hand, it’s important to recognize that you prefer giving and receiving care in specific ways, and it’s good to find people whose love languages are compatible with yours. on the other hand, it’s inevitable that you’ll have friends with different preferences than you, so it’s also important to learn to give and receive care in ways other than your defaults - otherwise you end up acting ungrateful towards your friends (because you can’t recognize when they’re giving you love) and unable to support them when they need it (because you can’t give them love in the right ways). i think learning more love languages is an important part of developing empathy and unfortunately i didn’t realize that until recently

9. my favorite answer i’ve heard so far: i choose to love obsessively because i think that’s the most beautiful way to live. i love my work and want to pursue it for the rest of my life, regardless of what that requires. i love people unconditionally because i think that’s what the most beautiful relationships look like. maybe not the most rational or relateable answer, but it also never pretends to be those things. instead it just says i choose to love because i think it’s the best way to do things and i have structured my life around this idea. i wonder if i will ever become like that. i think i want to, but i also think i’m kind of far from it right now

10. one of the new developments in my life is that my coworkers often bring their pets into the office, so i’ve been interacting with large dogs on a daily basis for basically the first time ever. large dogs can be kind of vicious - they have scary teeth and devour food in an instant - and yet my coworkers are comfortable petting them, giving them high-fives, hugging them, and so on. i think this is completely insane - to put it in perspective, if you encountered a stranger holding a pack of sharp knives who also didn’t speak any of the same languages as you, it’d probably take you a pretty long time to become comfortable with hugging them, even if a friend assured you that said stranger had been trained to behave well

11. and so it’s actually been kind of inspiring seeing my coworkers put so much faith in animals that are a) not their own b) potentially dangerous c) hard to communicate with. i didn’t have pets growing up and my friends from school didn’t either (and there weren’t many pets allowed in college dorms), so watching this up close every day feels… new. it feels like a different kind of social interaction, one where trust is given despite vast gaps in communication and values, one where you choose to let your guard down despite being in the presence of something irrational and uninterpretable. it feels like the basis for a purer form of love than what i am used to. from that perspective i can totally see how caring for pets would also make one better at caring for other people; i’m trying to get better at it myself and play with the dogs at work, and i’m making progress but it’s slow and takes time. it takes time to learn to let your guard down when you’ve spent your whole life raising it up

12. another new development in my life - post-breakup was the first time ever where i felt truly supported by other people. there was a moment where i realized i was getting everything i could possibly want from my friends without really having done anything to deserve it all and that moment was so fucking sublime i started sobbing. it dawned on me that maybe the les miserables lyric i’d been listening to for the last ten years - to love another person is to see the face of god - wasn’t an exaggeration after all, but a statement about how impossibly tender care from other people could feel, so tender it could only be described as divine. and then afterwards i felt the urge to become a better friend but for once in my life it wasn’t because of self-interest or moral obligation or social pressure or feeling indebted, it was simply because until then i hadn’t realized how ethereal interacting with people in the right ways could feel and if good friends can create experiences this beautiful for each other then from now on i want to try being a better friend

13. i asked another coworker and they pointed out that if you follow a principle for long enough then the principle becomes second nature and you stop noticing it; it becomes its own reason for doing things. that’s certainly something i agree with, and i imagine it’s why some readers of this post will be very confused - if you were raised in such a way that you’ve spent your whole life caring about people you’d probably read this post and think well duh, of course you should care about other people, why is vincent spending 2000 words trying to answer such an obvious question? i would guess this is part of the reason why so few of the people i asked were able to explain why they cared about others in detail - for many people that piece of consciousness has slipped out of sight and become an invisible fact of life, like air. i hope that doesn’t happen to me; i hope my principles fade enough that i don’t have to justify them to myself all the time but not so much that i can’t remember why i’m following them

14. so while i’m still unsure about quite a few things, maybe this is my answer, for now at least, a mix of everything everyone has told me in these last few months. i care about people for many reasons: some of it is certainly ego and some of it is certainly transactional; i won’t deny that. a lot of it is for personal benefit, because i like having friends. but i also believe that care can be transformative and friendship can be beautiful in a way that is hard for me to do justice with words - though i’ll try anyway, it feels like spending years thinking you have to deal with everything by yourself and then out of nowhere a stranger comes and helps you out, it feels like spending a decade keeping everything in and then finally spilling it all out and crying in front of someone else for the first time, it feels like spending your entire life not really believing anyone truly genuinely likes you and then finding out that oh so many people do, and if good friends can create experiences this beautiful for each other then from now on i want to try being a better friend