The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

Can I have a lover and not know it?

At the Center lots of relationships are always in a state of flux. People are ending a courtship phase, or beginning to break up, or just not sure where they stand. Very few feel certain they're really lovers.

I think it's good that we don't have a ready-made label for relationships that are in various stages of [de-]construction. It shows we're beyond conventional roadmaps in our explorations. WAY BEYOND. (Think Star Trek: The Final-Revolution-in-Human-Consciousness Generation.) But maybe we're being too hard on the word "lover".

Paul said that many a problem in communicating comes from semantics: the need for new words, improved (i.e. redefined) words, and agreement on what words mean. Just as legal fictions like "All men are created equal" turn out to be socially useful, so too may psychological fictions of a certain sort. You could include in this category beliefs that are usually termed "items of faith" — stuff like "everybody's potentially gay," "everybody wants to grow," "I'm more of a good person than a bad person," etc. (None of these can be said to have been truly deduced in any scientific sense.)

One improvement (or "fiction") that I think may come to be used in the future is just to accept the image or model that each of us does in fact have a lover at any point in time — as long as we define "lover" as whichever other person we're closest to. This model gives people no excuse to feel sorry for themselves for not having what "everybody else has". But it also contains the profound implication that, for example, your last lover remains your lover today — even if there's no direct communication at the moment. Even, in fact, if they've gone on to other people and aren't thinking about you at all! The work we do in having a lover, after all, is done inside ourselves regardless of what our lover is doing inside themselves. "Loverhood" in this sense covers everything from the vague pubescent longings of children to my ongoing and changing relationship with Paul Rosenfels.

I prefer the simple word "lover" to a more precise term like "significant other" for the same reason I prefer the term "talk group" to "discussion group" — such precision is unnecessary and potentially restrictive. Perfectionistic prissyness corrupts lots of human activities, remember. In software development what I call "premature optimization" is an example — sweating the elegance of your algorithm when you haven't envisioned the overall function yet. In architecture you'd be elaborating the ornamentations of your building before you've laid the foundation.

Terms like "intimate" and "confidant" are good, but they leave out the essential "love[/power]" idea. I share intimacy and confidentiality with my lawyer, after all. It's so easy to lose sight of the love/power dynamic and talk in sterile terms like introversion and extroversion rather than feminine and masculine.

I guess the bottom line here is to respect the psychological work you do even when you have to do it all alone by yourself in the middle of the night and the silence of an empty room. Let's make that a tenet of Hannotte's forthcoming Millenium Two Declaration of Independence:

1. Learning more about human nature than anybody you've ever heard of is easy. Learning what matters is the hard part.

2. Building a world fit for people to live in means lots of tentative steps, a willingness to make mistakes, the honesty to admit when you've taken a wrong turn, and the courage to trust a helping hand.

3. Respect the psychological work you do even when you have to do it all alone by yourself in the middle of the night and the silence of an empty room.