Seminarios celebrados durante el Congreso
A/CONF.213/18 c) El Congreso debería alentar a los Estados Miembros a que reiteraran su
At last Tom and I were going away together for a weekend. It was my birthday and I wanted to celebrate with him. He had been travelling off and on for three months out of the last nine and missing him had been like nursing a permanent bruise. Besides, off and on had never suited me. To avoid those flickers of stranger-‐danger, even with the people I knew most intimately, I needed frequent close contact, a regular groove. It was a shyness thing. Or was it?
During my undergraduate degree one of my politics lecturers introduced me to a theory he had developed about social relationships. Back then I was working hard to find escape routes from my shyness. Any information that could help me predict how people might behave in social situations was of intense interest to me. The subject was
Psychosocial Politics and Graham Little’s theory posited that we all favoured one of three styles of relating to others; one of three distinct friendship modes.21
The first friendship mode he called ‘Self-‐vs-‐Other’. These were the people whose social relationships were essentially competitive and utilitarian. They were the strategists, looking for order and opportunity in friendship. ‘If you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours, and just quietly, I’ll prove I’m a better back scratcher than you.’
The second mode was called ‘Self-‐in-‐Other’. These were the people who sought a sense of solidarity and community with others. They avoided competition if they could and instead looked for security and social connection in relationships. They were the co-‐ operators, the empathisers, the communicators. ‘Solidarity Forever’ could well have been their theme song.
The final mode was called ‘Self-‐and-‐Other’. These were the people who were much more interested in inspiring or being inspired by their friends rather than in being helped, or helpful to, them. They were the confident, charismatic ones, the leaders whose
authority came from their ability to generate new, interesting and even risky ideas. My anxious brain was attracted to this neat little list. I was also sceptical about whether something as complex as friendship could be reduced to something so simplistic. The list had stuck with me, though, and over the years I had sometimes used it to try and work out whether I should feel safe with certain people.
I had never seen myself as belonging to the first mob, the Self-‐vs-‐Other utilitarians. When it came to engaging with other humans, back-‐scratching had never been my forte, nor 127hovelling127g. I had always been too awkward, or too direct. Too awkwardly direct. Or perhaps shyness had rendered me so socially underskilled that I couldn’t even try to turn a relationship to my advantage. I didn’t like these people very much, didn’t trust
them, didn’t want to have to compete with them. Besides, they were the ones who were usually most adept at small talk and I had never been good at that stuff.
Occasionally, though, I envied them. I watched them manoeuvring in the workplace, manoeuvring at the pub, manoeuvring others into place around them. Watched them figuring out how other people could help them to get what they wanted. I envied their breezy extroversion, their smooth-‐talking ways, their career ladder-‐climbing success. I envied the way they rarely wasted emotional energy on dumb things like fear of negative evaluation. They just got on with the business of life.
Self-‐in-‐Other, now they were more my kind of people. I met a lot of them in the environment movement and the trade union choir. Helpful people. People who believed that working alongside other people, rather than competing with them, was the best way to get things done. They were loyal friends, the ones who wanted to see you regularly and not because they wanted anything from you. They just wanted to stay in touch, to keep up with the soap opera of your emotional life. My grandmother Peg was part of the Self-‐in-‐ Other gang. Nothing gave her more pleasure than putting herself at the service of others. In a previous decade I had lived for nine years with a man who fitted this profile perfectly. Self-‐in-‐Other people made you feel safe.
The ones I was most drawn to, though, were the third mob: Self-‐and-‐Other. I could list them: Sally, Marie, Mieke, even Tom, in spite of his quiet ways. The charismatic ones who drew others towards them with an invisible force, like the magnets in Stan Prior’s printing shed. They were the ones I always hoped would notice me because I rarely found the courage to approach them. Too shy to make the first move. Too busy with what the psychologists would call my ‘safety behaviours’: avoiding eye contact; staying on the edge of groups; rehearsing an escape plan. I was an expert at all of those. Perhaps you could add to that list maintaining monogamous sexual relationships.
‘Vigilant and anxious reactivity to stressful or challenging situations’: this had been on the Chinese psychologist’s list of ‘shyness-‐inhibition’ symptoms. What could be more stressful or vigilance inducing than constantly wondering who else your beloved might be loving? Whose deliciously novel amorous repertoire might lead them to negatively
evaluate your own wearyingly familiar one? I couldn’t bear it.
When Tom and I first got together, the question of fidelity vs promiscuity had been one of the biggest knots for us to untangle. Nothing else caused us as much grief, except perhaps his heroin use.
I could find ways to cope with his frequent long absences. He always wrote to me while he was travelling and I wrote back, every day. Hundreds of thousands of precious words, each one a crumb on the trail that would eventually lead him back to me.
I could find a way to cope with the editors who rejected my proffered articles but would virtually go down on bended knee to ask Tom for some of his prose writing. I couldn’t promise not to grumble about it, but I would cope. There was a perverse pleasure in knowing that occasionally he used some of my writing, sometimes entire paragraphs from my columns (with permission), in the material he would offer to those grateful editors.
I could find a way to cope when I became invisible in his company, when the new people we met together became focused on keeping his attention and forgot to include me in the conversation. I understood the deep pleasure of winning his attention.
I could find a way to cope with the daily email inquiries from correspondents wanting me to forward their requests directly to Tom so they didn’t have to run the gauntlet of his manager. I knew I wasn’t his personal assistant, even if they didn’t.
I could find a way to cope with his multitudinous fans and their autograph-‐hunting, photograph-‐taking presence in our lives. Even the obsessed ones who sent me emails describing me as ‘Beyond Disgusting’ and a ‘Bitch Prostitute’ and threatening me with a ‘Bloodbath’ for my ‘Mountain of Faults’. I deleted their emails and told myself I was glad not to be living in their skin.
And I could even find a way to cope (just) when he took the morsels of grief I shared with him in the dark and turned them into songs.
But unless Tom gave up using heroin and fucking other women, I couldn’t feel safe. The choice was his: them or me.
He had been reluctant. By all accounts a needle full of heroin feels pretty good. I had never wanted to find out for myself. As for fucking other women, it wasn’t a moral thing for me. I understood the pleasures of wanting and being wanted.
There had been that one time, towards the end of an earlier relationship, the one-‐off that becomes the beginning of the end. Forbidden pleasures often turn out to be so much less pleasurable than you anticipate. Once you’ve broken the rules and gotten away with it, though, it can be hard to find a reason not to break them again. ‘Don’t pull on a thread’, my grandmother Peg used to tell me. ‘The whole thing could come apart.’ And it had. That’s when I realised I had to be monogamous. To stop things unravelling.
Of course I understood that charismatic Self-‐and-‐Other people usually get a lot of offers and that famous charismatic Self-‐and-‐Other people like Tom probably get more offers than they can poke a stick at. But it wasn’t something I could live with. I offered to walk away, no hard feelings, if Tom preferred those pleasures to being with me.
Eventually Tom had agreed, on both counts. Heroin had been killing too many of his friends lately. As for monogamy, he consoled himself out loud with the quote attributed to
the actor Paul Newman: ‘Why go out for hamburgers when you’ve got steak at home?’ Even if the feminist in me winced at the raw meat comparison, it was at least some kind of ‘positive evaluation’.
But after all our time apart in recent months, the old itch of anxiety had resurfaced. It had to be scratched. Over my birthday dinner at a country hotel I posed the question: ‘Monogamy’s not so bad after all, is it?’
It was a rhetorical question. We were the lucky ones, the ones who had found each other. Found ourselves-‐in-‐another. Tom looked away for a moment then smiled and took my hand across the table. ‘You needn’t worry’, he said. ‘I am true to you. You make monogamy a good place to be.’