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Marriage as a symbiosis
Nov. 10th, 2013 10:02 pmFor Halloween I went as Tony Stark, which included an eyebrow penciled goatee. Mr. F also sports a goatee, so my mom cracked that we're were starting to look alike. I replied, "Well, people do begin to look like their pets."
The koan there is: who is the pet? The zen answer is: no one, yet both.
There's an old Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode where Kang and Kodos run against each other for POTUS, and during the campaign are seen walking along holding hands, to which they reply, "How else are we going to exchange long protein strands?!" There's a biochemical component to our relationship (aside from the one you're thinking) that we refer to by this shorthand. I really do think we communicate physical states of being to each other through our skin.
American English really doesn't have many terms for describing touch that don't also imply sex. Families and groups either have a working vocabulary of nonverbal touches or they don't, and there's not a lot of cross-cultural exchange we'd have to verbalize or describe.
So our local dialect has a lot of different touches and contact. And just like you sometimes don't understand until you teach, or don't know what you think until you speak, sometimes we aren't really present in our physical selves until we're touching the other person. This can be disconcerting, when a tender hug in the evening makes you realize you've been clenching your jaw against a headache for hours; or glorious, when the reflex relaxation of touch drains tension from the muscles, and joints crack and snap on their own like damp pop rocks.
We tune each others' nervous systems like pianos, adjusting tensions and getting the frequencies lined back up again.
The koan there is: who is the pet? The zen answer is: no one, yet both.
There's an old Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode where Kang and Kodos run against each other for POTUS, and during the campaign are seen walking along holding hands, to which they reply, "How else are we going to exchange long protein strands?!" There's a biochemical component to our relationship (aside from the one you're thinking) that we refer to by this shorthand. I really do think we communicate physical states of being to each other through our skin.
American English really doesn't have many terms for describing touch that don't also imply sex. Families and groups either have a working vocabulary of nonverbal touches or they don't, and there's not a lot of cross-cultural exchange we'd have to verbalize or describe.
So our local dialect has a lot of different touches and contact. And just like you sometimes don't understand until you teach, or don't know what you think until you speak, sometimes we aren't really present in our physical selves until we're touching the other person. This can be disconcerting, when a tender hug in the evening makes you realize you've been clenching your jaw against a headache for hours; or glorious, when the reflex relaxation of touch drains tension from the muscles, and joints crack and snap on their own like damp pop rocks.
We tune each others' nervous systems like pianos, adjusting tensions and getting the frequencies lined back up again.
