connection - CoupleDumb

          We are writing about attachment this week because we hope to make a connection without being attached to the results. Did that make any sense? Only to some guru in India. How is this for a reason to keep reading; Paul reveals just how crazy he is. You knew that already?

          Paul says: When psychologists talk about attachment, they use the word as a good and healthy thing. When they want to denote unhealthy behavior then they use words like enmeshment and ill-defined boundaries. But that is their highfaluting talk. For those of us who are not in the mental health field (and paying a therapist does not make you a mental health professional), when we think of attachment we think of Siamese twins, the human centipede, and all forms of freakish disturbing images. Attachments in our world require a scalpel and forceps.

          For us, being connected is a bit more palatable. Having a connection brings to mind romantic attractions, bungee cords, and good cell phone reception. We are in control of our connections but are forced into attachments.

          Why am I going off on this semantic distinction? Because for my particular form of crazy this is very important. As you may recall, my issues tend to revolve around fear. I am the classic ‘the other shoe is about to drop’ kind of person. For example, if Lee does not answer the telephone, my first assumption is that she is dead. Not that she is on the toilet. Not that she is having an affair. Not that she is masturbating wildly and thinking of me. No, I think that she must be lying on the floor with the phone clasped in her hand, one numeral from 911.

          Admittedly, I should have written that last paragraph in the past tense because I have done a whole hell of a lot of work around it. The conclusion being that attachment leads me to fear whereas connectedness gives me insight into myself and others. Attachment, the thing that a psychologist might call enmeshment, is that painful blending of yourself with someone or something else. It is the part where your house becomes your children in that they grew up there. The conclusion that your mind makes is that, if you lose your house, you lose your family (either in reality or metaphorically). Enmeshment is when you cannot distinguish yourself from your children, spouse or lover.

          When I am working on my attachments to Lee, I am usually in an unreal soap opera of my mind where nothing but drama lives. There is nothing real in this type of attachment. In Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, they all talk about this world being an illusion and telling us that we need to move from this attachment to a connection with what is truly important. Usually this is God.

          The attachment that a good therapist is looking for in your life is really a connection, an emotional bridge from one human to another. Being connected is not being attached. Being connected comes with an understanding that the person to which you are connected is safe and loving. This is one of the reasons that the religious promote a connection with God. We can also see the breakdown in the religious structure when the connection with God is supplanted with an attachment to church, but that is an editorial for another time.

          Back to me. When I am connected with Lee (and feeling safe with God) I know that I have her love for eternity, that she has a life outside of just picking up the phone in hopes that it is me, that that life is good for her to have, and that she is not dead, which is the best part of all of my therapy.

          Lee says: Usually when Paul talks about this I smile a lot and pat his head. Today, I think I’ll hug him and make sure to pick up the phone when he calls.

          Have you ever played six degrees of Kevin Bacon? In the game, you start with a celebrity then try to connect Kevin Bacon to that celeb through a series of connecting actors and the movies that they were in. Cher was in Witches of Eastwick with Jack Nicolson who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon. See, two degrees of separation from Cher to Kevin. What’s this have to do with relationships? Thanks to social networks like Facebook, you have six degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon… and 400 million other people.

          Paul says: When Lee had her issue on Facebook with the crazy family member, it started us thinking about how social networks are changing the face of relationship. People who, in the past, would have been relegated to a distant memory are now friends on Facebook. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have completely changed the nature of relationships as we experienced them in the past. So I started doing some research on Facebook and the connection that we make and can make through it.

          Let’s start with some perspective. The large hadron collider, one of the greatest technological achievements of the last ten years, has about 15 million GB of data running through it a year. This is a huge amount of info. By my calculations, Facebook has about the same amount. Admittedly, the LDC had to grab all of its data in a matter of seconds but it doesn’t take away from the sheer volume of information that 400 million users create. One any given day, half of Facebook’s users log on, play games, like stuff, and communicate with friends.

          Social Network Analysis has been around for several decades, generally analyzing groups of people in a more traditional setting like friends talking about a tv commercial that they enjoy. Then came places like Facebook and Twitter. The math associated with the connections that we can make rivals that of quantum mechanics. Just because it will make the nipples hard on my science geek brethren, here is one of many mathematical equations that govern the connections we can make with internet social networks:

equation 300x66 Six degrees of seperation from everyone

The variables in this equation are the number of times a person logs in and the number of friends that they have. Now that I have given myself a huge algebraic erection, let’s get to the point of all this sexy math.

          We are connected to everyone in the world in a way that we have never been before. We are friends with grade school acquaintances. And, more amazingly, we are friends of their friend’s friend. Suddenly the whole idea of relationship has been turned over and inside-out. Yet all of the same rules apply, only on mega scale. We establish boundaries by liking, ignoring, direct messaging and commenting. These are things that we would do face to face in the old days and it would take us months or years to build the courage to say. Now we do it with a click. We create intimacy. We communicate. We are faithful or disloyal. We do all of the things that are routinely written about on CoupleDumb but with the possibility of affecting multiple millions of people.

          I find it all mindboggling. In high school, I had like three friends. Now I have more than three hundred. Yes, I’m a stud.

          Lee says: I think all this Socialist Media needs to stop. We are America G-Damn it! Pretty soon everyone will be wearing grey and reading Marx….wait a second…just got poked …what?….social media?…..oh…..Nevermind!

sharebookmarx Six degrees of seperation from everyone

dtywm t shirt 300x225 Do I Know You?

        It’s Monday and if you are anything like CoupleDumb today, you needed an extra weekend added to last weekend. We have been so busy lately that our daily coffee intake has suffered. As writers, you realize that caffeine is like a muse so if we seem uninspired, don’t blame us. We are proud to announce our Facebook username, making it easier to keep in touch with us. Our fans tend to get a little extra from us since we aren’t beneath putting out for attention. This is the point that we start discussing our topic for the week and we decided we would go old school; getting back to basics. We are a relationship blog and it has been a while since we broke it down for everyone. So this week, we will dissect the relationship and come up with some rules to live by for healthy coupling, parenting and general relating. Are you ready?

          Lee says: A relationship is an association or involvement. To say that you are in a relationship is to admit that there is a connection between you and the subject. Why the Webster’s? It has become quite fashionable to deny relationships with people when there is an obvious connection. The defense mechanism of denial is an insidious one but also extremely immature. It is the equivalent of saying ‘na-uh’.

          In breaking down the association or connection between two people, we will first dispense with familial or genetic relationships like parents, siblings, cousins and extended family. Then we have associations such as friendships or work buddies which are also in relationship with you. When you do the math, you will find that you have hundreds of relationships and, for the sake of dysfunction, we are in a constant state of negating our connection to others.

So the first rule of becoming healthier in relationships is:

Acknowledge all your connections with people.

           Wow, that sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But the issue arises with people that we deem indefinable. Like the guy your work with that you think is an asshole. Or the barrista who makes your coffee and you have a nice chat every morning. How about your bus driver or the person you see everyday on the train? I’m not saying to profess your love but acknowledge that you have a connection with these people. You need to admit that somehow you created a connection with another human being. How would this simple thing affect people?

          I believe much of our loneliness is created by this inability to recognize the existence of a connection, no matter how insignificant, to another human being. When we admit to an association with someone, we also begin to see our connection to the world around us. We are never alone and this realization is both frightening and comforting. But most of all, it teaches us that we are created to relate. We flourish in relationship because we were built for that.

          A million years ago, I was in a training where the first thing the trainer asked was whether anyone in the room was in relationship with anyone else present. Those in relationship stood as asked. One of the people in the group was the daughter of my brother’s god-parents. I had grown up with her. She sat there calmly looking forward. When I was asked who I had relation to, I acknowledged my husband, of course, a couple of friends and that girl. The trainer looked at her and asked why she was sitting. Her response, ‘Well, what we have is no big deal.’ I considered her family which she did not deny. That same individual has had a lifetime of tumultuous, serial affairs which have always ended badly and is enmeshed with her family.

          Point of the story, that chick could not acknowledge her connections thus could only seek satisfaction in sexual relationships. Does she sound familiar to anyone out there? Don’t deny it, my friend.

          Paul says: I deny any relationship to the author of the first part of this post. We only have occasional sex, raise children, work together, and drink a lot of coffee together. But no relationship.

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