Media, Languages, and Relationships
Mar. 19th, 2007 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcepsaInspired by a conversation that I had yesterday and this post about acceptability of needs and preconditions, I've been thinking about how we tend to break relationships apart into physical and emotional parts and then compare them against each other. Usually emotional, at least in mainstream American culture, seems to be considered better than physical--a couple who says of each other "my partner and I send each other love notes every day!" is usually considered to have a better, superior relationship than a couple who says of each other "my partner and I have incredibly good sex every day!"
I think that such a dichotomy between physical and emotional is worse than useless; from what I can tell it implies that things work differently than the way they really do. Physical and emotional are two very different things. The first is a method of communicating with each other, while the second is an internal state.
From what I can tell, there seem to be three main senses that humans use to communicate with each other:
None of these, from what I can tell, is explicitly tied to emotions. In other words, sitting down to someone face to face and talking with them about feelings is not somehow inherently guaranteed to get the message across better than sending them a text message, or touching them in certain ways. To suggest that a couple who spent an entire evening together talking has a deeper connection than a couple that spent an entire evening snuggling and kissing and running their hands over each other seems ludicrous if done on the basis of those two observations alone. It seems similarly ludicrous to say that a couple who spent the entire evening making passionate love to each other must have had a more intimate experience than a couple who spent the entire evening sending instant messages to each other.
A telephone is not the same thing as the conversations that are being held across it: the medium is not the message. If there is an established language to support it, I think just about any message can be sent across any medium. It's important to be aware, however, that not everyone is good at communicating in the same medium. It's pretty well established that everyone has their own personal idea of what various words mean--especially when it comes to abstract concepts, where you can't just point at something and go, "That! That thing sitting right there on the table, that is a widget, and these specific things here and here are what give it its widgetness!" The details of what I consider the word "relationship" to represent are probably subtly different from yours. We can probably agree that it is a certain level of closeness between two people, but now we've got two things to worry about instead of one! What do you mean "closeness"? Usually it's not just physical (and sometimes it's not physical at all). Emotional closeness? Mental closeness? What does that mean? And just how high is that certain level of closeness needed to call something a relationship? With all this potential for divergence in language, and therefore misunderstanding, it's a wonder that people manage to hook up through talking at all!
The same holds true for those other avenues of communication. They have their own languages associated with them. A hug can mean anything from "I acknowledge your desire for physical contact, and I respect you enough to tolerate this" to "It's so fantabulously good to see you again and I missed you so much and I'm so happy that we're back together and I love you and I'm really looking forward to spending this upcoming time with you!" (physical contact tends to talk in run-on sentences...) Some people understand the hug as well as if someone were standing there saying the same thing to them. Some people understand the hug better than if the person were standing there saying the same thing--something about it enables the message to get through in ways that it simply wouldn't have if the person had used words to convey it. Some people miss the message because they're focused on disengaging as quickly as politely possible.
Some people can communicate certain things more comfortably through text than through voice. I'm having a lot easier time expressing this by writing it out than I would if I were sitting with someone and trying to talk them through it. Some people have a hard time with spoken conversations in another person's presence because while they may know all of the words the person is using, they may not be familiar with that person's body language or speech patterns, and therefore they might receive a completely different message than what the person is trying to communicate to them even though they are standing right there! They may have no problem going back and forth with this person on instant messenger, because then the only thing that they have to focus on is the words themselves without also having to know and simultaneously interpret the other person's tonal and body languages.
So, to go all the way back to where I began, I really don't think it's accurate for us to necessarily assume that the partners who send each other love notes are somehow closer or have a better relationship than the partners who have awesome sex.
They could be telling each other the exact same thing.
I think that such a dichotomy between physical and emotional is worse than useless; from what I can tell it implies that things work differently than the way they really do. Physical and emotional are two very different things. The first is a method of communicating with each other, while the second is an internal state.
From what I can tell, there seem to be three main senses that humans use to communicate with each other:
- sound (spoken word, other audible cues...)
- sight (body language, written word...)
- touch (hugs, kisses, cuddles...)
None of these, from what I can tell, is explicitly tied to emotions. In other words, sitting down to someone face to face and talking with them about feelings is not somehow inherently guaranteed to get the message across better than sending them a text message, or touching them in certain ways. To suggest that a couple who spent an entire evening together talking has a deeper connection than a couple that spent an entire evening snuggling and kissing and running their hands over each other seems ludicrous if done on the basis of those two observations alone. It seems similarly ludicrous to say that a couple who spent the entire evening making passionate love to each other must have had a more intimate experience than a couple who spent the entire evening sending instant messages to each other.
A telephone is not the same thing as the conversations that are being held across it: the medium is not the message. If there is an established language to support it, I think just about any message can be sent across any medium. It's important to be aware, however, that not everyone is good at communicating in the same medium. It's pretty well established that everyone has their own personal idea of what various words mean--especially when it comes to abstract concepts, where you can't just point at something and go, "That! That thing sitting right there on the table, that is a widget, and these specific things here and here are what give it its widgetness!" The details of what I consider the word "relationship" to represent are probably subtly different from yours. We can probably agree that it is a certain level of closeness between two people, but now we've got two things to worry about instead of one! What do you mean "closeness"? Usually it's not just physical (and sometimes it's not physical at all). Emotional closeness? Mental closeness? What does that mean? And just how high is that certain level of closeness needed to call something a relationship? With all this potential for divergence in language, and therefore misunderstanding, it's a wonder that people manage to hook up through talking at all!
The same holds true for those other avenues of communication. They have their own languages associated with them. A hug can mean anything from "I acknowledge your desire for physical contact, and I respect you enough to tolerate this" to "It's so fantabulously good to see you again and I missed you so much and I'm so happy that we're back together and I love you and I'm really looking forward to spending this upcoming time with you!" (physical contact tends to talk in run-on sentences...) Some people understand the hug as well as if someone were standing there saying the same thing to them. Some people understand the hug better than if the person were standing there saying the same thing--something about it enables the message to get through in ways that it simply wouldn't have if the person had used words to convey it. Some people miss the message because they're focused on disengaging as quickly as politely possible.
Some people can communicate certain things more comfortably through text than through voice. I'm having a lot easier time expressing this by writing it out than I would if I were sitting with someone and trying to talk them through it. Some people have a hard time with spoken conversations in another person's presence because while they may know all of the words the person is using, they may not be familiar with that person's body language or speech patterns, and therefore they might receive a completely different message than what the person is trying to communicate to them even though they are standing right there! They may have no problem going back and forth with this person on instant messenger, because then the only thing that they have to focus on is the words themselves without also having to know and simultaneously interpret the other person's tonal and body languages.
So, to go all the way back to where I began, I really don't think it's accurate for us to necessarily assume that the partners who send each other love notes are somehow closer or have a better relationship than the partners who have awesome sex.
They could be telling each other the exact same thing.
