The difference between being loved, wanted and needed

I have pondered this question for a very long time. I’ve heard people talk about how its not healthy to be too attached to being needed. That can lead you to being used. But is being loved enough either? Christianity often touts love as being ultimate. However, given that I believe love is more of a choice than an emotion, I believe you can be loved but not liked, which doesn’t feel great. In my own thinking, I’ve often stated that my greatest desire was to be wanted. To me, being wanted is a step beyond being liked. Someone can theoretically like me but not really miss me when I’m not around. But to be wanted, to be sought out and desired…that is a very special feeling.

I know that I am needed. I’m too good at too many things to not be needed. I’m needed to fix my parents technical problems, to babysit for my brother and sister-in-law, to counsel and advise my friends and labmates, to design graphics for the group I volunteer with, etc. I know these people view me as indispensible in some ways, but these are just skills. They aren’t me. I am technically replaceable.

I know that I am loved. I know my parents love me. They support me. They help me out of jams. They put up with my annoying traits. I know my brother loves me and would be there for me if I ever needed him (although he’ll probably never say the words out loud). I know that there are lots of other people who care for me. Again, the definition of this kind of love seems to be that if you call on them, they will help. Even if its inconvenient, even if you’ve had an argument – there’s something about love that bypasses all that and chooses to be there for the other person. Love and sacrifice seem to go together.

But I’m sometimes not sure if I’m wanted. If I show up at a party, people are happy to see me, but if I don’t, I never get the sense that I am missed. I’ve had numerous occasions when I’ve been present when different events are being organized but then never been invited. I have friends who may be happy enough to go to lunch with me if I do the inviting, but never seem to think of me and initiate such activities on their own. This is puzzling to me.

Any thoughts? Is there a particular element in the triad that is more or less important to you? I’m guessing it depends on each person’s own experiences and what may have been lacking growing up. Again, as I've expressed, I’ve had love and been needed, but sometimes that love was expressed as an obligation (the whole ‘choice’ thing can be turned into a negative). And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an element of self-fulfilling prophecy happening in that when I don’t feel wanted, I act like someone people wouldn’t want to be around.

But I have hope, because the journey that I’ve been documenting in this blog has brought me to a place where I like myself more than I ever have before. I like how I look. I like how I feel. I like who I am. I've had numerous people comment on how I appear far more comfortable with myself. And generally speaking, those who are comfortable with themselves make others around them more comfortable as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if this liking turns into better connections with other people that help balance out my perceived imbalance between being loved, wanted and needed.

Note: For those who know me in real life, I am not thinking of any specific person or incident as I write this. I can trace this theme through journal entries as far back as high school. Its just something that has been on my mind lately. Being involved in a new community and making new friends has given me many opportunities to observe my own behavior and others' reactions to it - and as is typical, I over analyze everything, including myself.

Grieving the loss of critical thinking

When I saw this short article asking the question “Does social media make us lazy?” I felt affirmed. One of the topics I can get really heated up about is the educational system. As a teaching assistant at a university, I get to answer students’ questions and mark their assignments. This gives me a front line look at what skills (or rather the lack thereof) that four years of high school have instilled in these kids. Supposedly, the students that come to university are the cream of the crop (lowered admission standards are another whole topic). And yet, they can’t think…and they certainly can’t express what they are thinking in any coherent form of writing.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve marked papers that have been lifted from Wikipedia or have basically been pieced together bits of other people’s thoughts without any traceable theme running through them. And when students come to office hours and I try to help them reason through a question to find their own solution, they look at me blankly, baffled as to why I’m not simply telling them what the correct answer is.

As the article I linked to above states, it seems like information is viewed as enough. There definitely seems to be the perspective that if you can just get the right piece of information, you’ll be good to go. Add to that the growing trend towards evaluating information based on ‘likes’ and the responsibility of the individual to critically assess the information, compare differing views, and come to their own conclusion becomes viewed as a quaint hobby from a bygone era.

One of the biggest issues I have with the education system is that they are still teaching content. The model still seems to emphasize providing kids with facts about history, science, literature, etc. (Granted, I haven’t actually been in a high school in over a decade, but that is my impression and was my experience.) While its possible one could argue that the information imparted in schools is more reliable than information imparted via other sources, it is still just information, and we are drowning in information.

What schools don’t seem to be providing is training on how to evaluate that information. Don’t ask kids to memorize a list of facts about an historical event – instead, teach them about the process of reconstructing what actually happened in history and how to determine the reliability of sources. Instead of having them memorize a bunch of chemistry formulas, let them use a cheat sheet and instead give them more time to grapple with the scientific method. The information is never farther away from us then the nearest cell phone (why store it in our heads), but the ability to critically think about that information seems to be an elusive art.

I think it used to be that going to school and having access to the information imparted there was a privilege. There was no easy way to get access to expertise other than to sit under the tutelage of a teacher. Today, that is no longer the case. Today, I think the model of passively consuming the information of a supposed expert is actually detrimental. While teachers may in fact be more reliable imparters of knowledge than other sources out there, this pattern establishes an uncritical acceptance of information.

When was the last time you heard of a student challenging a teacher’s opinion? On the rare occasions that it happens, it seems to cause an uproar and the student is punished for being rebellious. Oh, I think there are some teachers who try to implement carefully controlled projects where a certain level of challenge is okay, but outside of those, I believe challenges are still viewed negatively.

Instead, I think school should be very much about challenges. I think students should be encouraged to question everything. But, you say…if they did that, nothing would ever be accomplished in the classroom. Every discussion would take forever. So? As I said at the beginning, they can get the information on your teaching checklist anywhere (in fact, its probably in that cell phone in their backpack that has been banned from the classroom). In my opinion, the critical thinking skills that would come out of such discussions would be so much more valuable and would serve them far better in the future. Note: I am not criticizing teachers. I think they are doing their best and probably share many of these same opinions. I am critical of a system that is way too slow to change with the time. Also, I am not saying to get rid of classes such as math and English – in my opinion, those are about skills, not just information.

What is attraction?

Attraction is a funny phenomenon. It’s so difficult to pin down. Over the years I’ve heard bits and pieces of psychological explanations for why we find certain people more attractive than others. There’s the evolutionary explanation that certain features signal greater reproductive potential. There are theories about pheromones and a woman’s monthly cycle. There are social explanations such as mere exposure. And so on. But none of these seem to take away from the mystery.

And then add homosexuality to the mix, and the question becomes even more complex. The whole evolutionary explanation goes out the window in some respects. I don’t know much about the men’s side of things, but in terms of ladies being attracted to ladies, there’s such a huge spectrum – there’s femme on femme, butch and femme, butch on butch…and a bunch inbetween…and a bunch that don’t fit these labels at all.

Sometimes I look at couples walking down the street and have the knee jerk reaction of how did he end up with her, or how did she end up with him (or various other pronoun combinations). There’s always the joke that after years together, couples start to look alike, but there’s also a whole passel of combinations that are surprising.

And then of course there are the stories of people who weren’t attracted to each other at all until they got to know one another better and then all of a sudden, sparks flew. There is definitely something that personality and identity add to the combination. Someone you know and really like is more attractive to you than they may be to a stranger who doesn’t know them as well.

I don’t actually have any answers. It’s just a topic that I find really interesting. Part of realizing I’m gay has opened up a new world for me in terms of viewing people as attractive or not. I’ve gone through the majority of my life not really reacting to those around me – I didn’t find guys attractive and didn’t give myself permission to look at girls that way. So now I’m finally looking around for the first time and collecting my own data.

I seem to have certain expectations and stereotypes that affect what I think I might be attracted to but reality has a way of confounding that. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked what my ‘type’ is. Sometimes I’ve said I don’t know and sometimes I’ve listed certain characteristics. But I’m discovering that an itemized list kind of goes out the window when it comes to actually encountering someone who makes you stand up and go “wow”. During such an encounter, you aren’t consulting your list. It’s not even on your radar. There’s just some undefinable ‘something’ about the person you are looking at or interacting with that is attractive. And sometimes, after the fact, you go back to your list to compare notes and shake your head and realize just how useless the attempt to define attraction really is.

Can you believe what you don't believe?

I’ve been wanting to write on this topic for awhile now but haven’t found the words. Then a few weeks ago I saw this article which stated ideas very similar to what I’ve been thinking and motivated me to give it a try.

When I think about how the churches I grew up in talked about evangelism and about being saved, it seems to me that belief is viewed as a choice. You can choose to believe in Jesus or you can choose not to and face the consequences.

But since I’ve walked away from faith, I’m not sure any more that that is actually the case. Given that the main reason I walked away was that the various doctrines and edicts and so forth of the church just no longer made sense and no longer seemed to fit with historical and scientific evidence, I don’t think I could re-believe if I tried.

Can you as an adult truly believe in Santa Claus anymore? Can you believe that the world is flat? Or that unicorns exist?

So then, what is happening during conversion? I know Christians talk about the spirit of God moving in a person’s heart and bringing conviction, but they also talk about people choosing to believe. I was pondering the conversion experience awhile back and mentally cataloguing the reasons people choose to believe in Jesus (this type of conversion and my discussion about belief here apply more to strongly evangelical approaches to faith than perhaps to those in more mainstream churches who are there for the tradition and mythical meaning inherent in the Christian religion – discussed in another post here).

In my experience (which given my 30 years in the church is considerable), people convert during times of emotional crisis. It could be an internal crisis of conscience or an external event that has led to pain or need. I think in many cases, the draw is more the community of the church – they are lonely, they need support – than about the actual tenets of the faith. There are exceptions such as the journalist Lee Strobel who wrote the book, The Case for Christ. He apparently set out to investigate the claims about Jesus and became convinced that Christianity was true. But if you examine his writings closely, he too had emotional reasons for converting. Even altar calls are emotional appeals – sometimes hope based, sometimes fear based. Oh, evangelists sometimes try to address more rational concerns with apologetic arguments, but if the person isn’t convinced, the explanation isn’t that the argument wasn’t convincing, instead, it’s that the person is choosing not to believe. Or they are choosing to live in sin because they don’t want to give up their pleasures.

For me personally, as I walked away from faith, there was this cry in my heart for many months that I wanted to believe. Oh how I wanted to believe. I didn’t want to break with my past, with my family, with all I’d ever known. I wanted God to be real and the promises preached from the pulpit to be true. And when I tried to express my questions, my doubts, my uncertainties…I was accused of choosing not to believe. Apparently, if my questions were leading me away from Christianity, I was supposed to stop asking them.

Part of what makes us human seems to be this need to find explanations, to understand why, to be able to fit our experiences into a big picture that makes sense. For me, growing up in the faith, my beliefs made sense out of my experience – until they didn’t. And if one’s beliefs don’t make sense, I think human cognition is set up to justify them…but one can only do so much justification before the worldview shatters and one can no longer believe.

In developmental psychology, we find that children learn either by assimilation or accommodation. In assimilation, children adjust their views of the outside world to fit what they already know. For example, a child who has experience with horses and meets a dog for the first time might try to ride it, assimilating the dog into his/her concept of a horse. But in accommodation, children change their internal view to match what’s in the outside world. For example, when the dog reacts badly to being ridden, the child may have to adjust their concept and create a separate category.

In essence, I’ve been trying very hard to assimilate all the things I’ve been learning about psychology, about history, about how the Bible was written, about the different beliefs of various denominations, about the variety of people who don’t fit the stereotypical ‘sinner’ category, etc. and failing. I can no longer assimilate the knowledge and thus I must accommodate it by adjusting my worldview. I’m not choosing not to believe. It’s just that the lack of fit between the real world and my internal views have become disparate enough that my natural, psychological need for equilibrium has caused a recalibration. It’s how we humans learn.

The process of getting to know someone

So I went on a first date the other day. Presumably it was a fairly typical first date - lots of questions about jobs, families, hobbies...that kind of thing. And I started thinking about where the transition starts to happen from getting to know 'about' a person to getting to actually know them. Instead of acquiring facts, you start to get a sense of who they are, their personality, values, what matter to them. These things can't really be deduced via a question and answer session.

Part of what got me thinking about this was that I was comparing the conversation on this date to my conversations with another friend who I've only known about six months or so (I could have chosen any other friend for this comparison process, its just that this particular friendship was the most recent). With the date there were occasional awkward moments where we both racked our brains for another question, whereas with this friend, we never seem to run out of things to say. I was trying to figure out if this should worry me (I decided it shouldn't - it was only a first date after all...but it did send me off on this slightly philosophical rabbit trail).

When this friend and I chat, we are no longer asking each other 'get to know you' questions. Instead we know each other well enough to share the events of our day (we know why something is important to the other person and can commiserate) or simply joke around (we have a sense of what will amuse the other person). So how did we get there? We did start by being part of a social group where we got to see each other in action a bit before starting the one-on-one 'get to know you' process, so that may have helped. But otherwise, I really don't know. I can't recall where that transition might have taken place.

And of course the main reason I'm asking myself all these questions and making these comparisons, is because I want to take the right steps when dating. But how does one go about it? I'm sure a lot of it is just a matter of time. But I feel a certain level of pressure because its a 'date' and not just two people hanging out. There seems like there's a heightened expectation that we are scoping each other out and evaluating suitability - but how do you do that at the 'about' stage before getting to the 'know' stage.

Its a weird conundrum. No answers today...just questions.

Proud by association - SYTYCD Gay Particicipant

So, I watched "So You Think You Can Dance" for the first time this year and got totally hooked. It's really the first reality contest type show that I've gotten into and really rooted for participants along the way (I enjoyed The Voice this summer as well, but it wasn't long enough to delve into personalities as much). I've watched a few episodes of American Idol but have always been turned off by how much of the show seems to depend on having fun at the expense of others - the judging can be quite cruel. However, I found that with SYTYCD, the judges were really rooting for the dancers and it felt like a much more positive experience. And I just love choreographed dance.

Anyways, all that to say, I found myself wondering about the strong heterosexual bias of the dances. There were lots of romantic pieces but they were always with male/female pairs. There was the occasional gay judge, but the material being danced seemed to emphasize mainstream themes. I found myself a bit disappointed, especially because I had a stereotype that the arts were one area in which gays flourished. Near the end, there were a few dances in which same-gender participants were paired, but the themes were neutral. I'd love to see a show like this push the envelope a bit.

And then, much to my surprise, I read an After Ellen interview with Sasha Mallory, this year's runner up and found out that she's a lesbian. My fledgling gaydar clearly failed me. In the interview, Sasha states:

It’s not important for America to know that personal side of me. They just needed to know if I could dance and if I had a personality. They didn’t really need to know if I was gay or straight. Who I’m sleeping with is not important. This is my craft, my art, it’s what I do and who I sleep with doesn’t really change that, I don’t think. I’m not afraid to tell people I’m gay. I’m proud all over the place. Ask anyone! [laughs] It’s just something that never needed to come up because it would just take the focus off of my dancing and it will put it into "I'm gay," ya know?

I know there's been a bit of a fuss made in the blogosphere about gay participants in these various shows being asked to keep quiet about their identity. I have no idea whether that's true or whether its just a personal choice on their parts.

In one sense, I totally agree with Sasha's statements here. The ultimate goal is for a person's sexuality to be no big deal. She's absolutely right that in that context, she should be judged on her dancing alone. But in another sense, because visibility and equality are still being fought for, there's a sense of victory every time another successful person comes out as gay. Each additional outing makes it so much easier for people to accept themselves and others.

I think in some ways Sasha achieved a good balance here. She didn't make it about her 'gayness' while competing in the show, but she is out and open now that the show is over. She's expressing this part of who she is while her 'fame' has not yet abated but after such an expression may have influenced her success. Would I have rooted for her more if I had known that she was gay prior to the results being announced? Maybe. But I seriously loved Melanie so maybe not.

I do have to admit though, that I have that kind of proud-by-association feeling when I think of her now, after the fact. And I think that's valuable to the community at large, to all the kids out there that need heroes to look up to and all the adults who need to know we are just regular human beings in all walks of life. So thanks, Sasha!

Early clues to my lesbianism

Just recently I read this post on Butch Wonders about signs from childhood/adolescence that the author was a lesbian. I could relate to many of them so I thought I would make my own list (blatantly copying some points...and in no particular order).

1. I absolutely loved it when I got the part of a male newscaster in a school play and had to wear a suit jacket.
2. I panicked at the thought of changing in front of other girls in the locker room. I distinctly remember grand efforts to avert my eyes for fear they'd think I was 'looking' at them.
3. No concept of flirting. No understanding the dynamics between guys and gals in high school.
4. Absolute befuddlement at my friends crushes.
5. From the above-mentioned blog: "Avoiding premarital sex never struck me as all that difficult."
6. I always wished I could shop in the men's departments - cargo pants, polo shirts, and sweater vests, oh my!
7. I craved physical contact from my friends (who were girls) and thought there was something seriously wrong with me. I tried to blame it on a lack of hugs from my mom or some such childhood issue. Simultaneously, I studiously avoided any such contact.
8. I felt like a fraud whenever wearing a skirt and a klutz when it came to applying makeup. I absolutely detested pantihose. 
9. I developed instant 'crushes' (then described as a desire to be mentored) on several older women in my life.
10. When watching romance films, I always focused on the woman during the kissing scenes. When fantasizing, I always pictured myself in the male role (which I've since realized doesn't mean I wanted to be a man, but that I wanted to be with a woman).