Mating - to want more from people and life
on intellectual love, authenticity, and the book by Norman Rush for anyone who thinks too much
idealism
A long time ago, I had grandiose ideas about going to ‘help’ in the field of development and to build a career out of it. I checked out books from our local library, exchanged emails with the UNDP office in New Delhi, read Mastering Modern World History by Norman Lowe (sequestered from my 2016 Civil Services prep extended reading list) and made a list of International Relations master’s courses and deadlines. It would satisfy a social service aspiration inherited from my mother’s side, but it also came attached with the possibility of ambitious titles in a distant future and an intentional life. The subtext was ‘important’ of course. Then I read this Quora response that said everything my mom withheld when she distilled her displeasure with my plans into You’ll end up with a low-paying NGO job.
The Quora responder said - “You can go to any so called "developing country" and find a plethora of engineers. Some brilliant, some not. There is not a shortage of advanced skills in Brazil, India or China. So don't delude yourself that you can actually teach them anything useful.” If you can't work your ass off, he said, stay where you are, make money and take care of your family and the world will be better for it.
It was a rude awakening that exposed a lot of delusions I had while planning my future, the primary one being I’d never experienced poverty or deprivation - I’d probably squirm the first time I had to go without a bidet or toilet paper and use, say, newspaper instead. Armchair planning, let’s call it. Later I would also find out I wasn’t built for a full-time career in non-STEM roles.
This was of course before I volunteered as a data analyst for an NGO where I learned the only person you can rely on to have pure service intentions wherever you go, whether for-profit or not, is if you bring it with your own altruistic ass.
I share this background because my brush with development, however cursory, followed by a stint of trying for the civil services and being briefly enticed by a career in international relations all contributed to loving Mating by Norman Rush.
intellectual love
The narrator of the book is a pretentious, self-aware, overthinking anthropology PhD student from Stanford in Botswana, Africa. While absurdly smart, a lot of her takes are nevertheless idealistic. I do not present this as a vice - some of the best people I’ve met are former idealists harangued and brought to their knees by a world that turned them into realists with a healthy dash (who am I to judge but what are we doing here if not judging - this is a safe space) of leftover delusional optimism.
The book brought back what I’ve felt with my most beloveds - Ki jaise tujhko banaya gaya hai mere liye (it’s as if you were written for me).
The narrator discusses and dissects in depth the roles of man and woman in mating, and yearns for an equal love. An excerpt -
He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve. What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you.
I am told I was lucky to have once had a romantic partner who would indulge every little thought I had - that my friends have not experienced nor expect that from a relationship, not because it’s not a priority but because they didn’t think it was reasonable. I don’t know if it’s reasonable myself - 3 matches in 30 years, 1 of them unactualizable, isn’t exactly encouraging.
Of course I too have considered and dated men who don’t scratch that deep itch of talking and arguing to an end, and continue to do so, in case they make great partners in other ways. The pieces of you never legitimized by another human, and definitely not your partner in this case, along with a subliminal awareness of it only accrue over time - of course the gift of this book and other writings is often they become the only way we confirm ourselves.
In the end the narrator (spoiler) defies all her advertised feminist principles in response to the love-interest’s phone call a while after he replaces her with a younger woman. Because even given all that has transpired, here was a man that endlessly stimulated and confirmed her, one that eventually also aroused her nurture and the release of oxytocin in her system, she lets us know. She is painfully aware of the neurochemistry and how it affects her brain synapses, but that doesn’t stop her from replying, je vien - I come.
From California to Southern Africa no less.
This is the scene in the book - in my life - where a friend has intervened, or my brothers have called to say, Now why would you do that?
But what’s life without a handful of good stories and a few reckless pursuits?
good taste and the charm of vanilla
When I mention to men I dance, many want to know how long have you been dancing. What they really want to know is if I picked it up in the last 6 months or so as a charming addition to my dating profile, the way people volunteer at non-profits to beef up resumes for grad school applications. They want to figure out if you are one of those annoying self-aggrandizing LinkedIn personas that show up later on Hinge, although some of the 34 year olds asking these questions are the caricatures they try to avoid, who line danced for 2 whole months and made it their whole personality.
I get where they come from, a hobby is often touted as the best way to make yourself interesting, but I want to tell them that boring is fine, boring is so often great especially when it indicates there’s meat elsewhere. I fondly remember a time when listening to music was an acceptable hobby in slam books.
That there is such a thing as good taste is a hill I’m willing to die on.
But have you tried vanilla bean flavored Haagen Dazs ice cream, slightly gritty from the ground vanilla, over a chunk of carrot cake? What about vanilla flavored mochi? And while many a time a favorite flavor can reveal more than you think, other times it has nothing to do with someone’s personality. What about the missionary position? Well, you can see each others’ lovely faces and your arms get full access to grab each other’s everything if you’re determined enough and you get to kiss each other’s foreheads? (melts). There’s a reason cliches are cliches, and if you look you can sometimes find substance underneath the thin veil of boring.
I also want to respond to them, no I do not misrepresent myself and in fact my favorite line is When you lie, you steal someone of the truth. And lying by omission is still lying - it’s in the name - so the idea that I might pretend to be someone I’m not, someone arguably more interesting, is insulting when pouring my insides out is what I’ve tried to do through my writing for a decade.
Lie at your own peril, says the unnamed narrator in Mating, for she remembers everything and will catch any inconsistencies. That’s just most women in my experience.
our main entertainment was arguing
One of the low, defining moments with my ex was on the eve of the GRE exam I took in 2018, around the time of Sabarimala verdict. I had taken a week off work and had been preparing for the test for months. The night before, we started discussing the deity and whether and why women should be allowed in the temple. The argument got intense. At one point he was blithe and biting - I pushed back saying he seemed to rejoice in attacking my religion as if to offend, when neither of us were very religious to begin with (he was Christian). It was his attempt at provocation that enraged me than any of its content.
How it ended would come up later for years, but I always look back at how most people I’ve met would have dropped it way before we got there, how it would be “too much” for them. But following an argument to its end till you uncover each other’s true biases and opinions, as opposed to your surmised one, is important to me.
Discovering each other as intimately as possible is itself a passion, and to a lot of people this pursuit can seem like an attack or they could get defensive when really it’s just unbridled curiosity about your person.
To set expectations, I’d say 65% of Mating is well-fleshed out arguments between the narrator and the guy she admires/loves. They cover anthropology, history, politics, culture. Of course if good taste is subjective, so is too much, and there were times the discussions in Mating got too long-winded and intellectual for me, there were arguments that seemed aggressive (the aforementioned “attack”) where I felt I would’ve backed off. I admired the narrator for keeping at it.
I’m also not surprised I fell for a journalist, and when that fell through Uma said to me, You really tried to argue with a guy whose core competency is arguing? I quacked. Maybe Uma and I are each other’s intellectual loves! (I added exclamations to seem more enthused about it than I really am.)
I met the guy right after dating someone who introduced me to Blues Brothers that we watched on DVD, his good taste being the one redeeming quality given all his lies. Yet despite bad experiences and lackluster endings, among the most interesting people I have met in my life I would still list a few men whom I scoured for good intentions and for the promise of a shared future, and it’s always cos I loved their bents of mind. Mating legitimized all of it.
Of course interesting is never enough.
want more, be more
Life is too short to accept crap. But if you maintain low bars of expectation, you’ll also be disappointed less.
Ok, enough of pithy aphorisms on Substack.
But what if you did meet a partner who finds your mind and your neuroticism attractive? What if we didn’t have to comply or entirely override pieces of us with conventionally favored traits and quirks because we’re told that’s what’s desirable - that if not it may drive potential mates away? Like your sibling who says Life would be easier if you didn't sit and hyperfixate so much on things, or your friend’s mom who tells her, Let your brain rest for a bit. So we change the course of who we were supposed to be to be more palatable. Of course maybe then who we end up being is who we were supposed to be anyway, considering that there may be no such thing as free will. But enough of that, I’m worried this may be turning off a potential mate.
Mating was a confirmation that however neurotic you think you maybe, there will be someone to match - in fact its Goodreads page has 5k reviews, and there’s plenty more of us who never shared a rating - who had perhaps restrained their own thoughts because the world convinced them their minds couldn’t be let loose unchecked. And then of course a psychiatrist shows up saying, These thought labyrinths are your anxiety talking. (But seriously if a psychiatrist says that, please consider it if it impedes your daily life).
So if your expectations, assuming we still have them, fall in the face of the real world with real people 99.9% of the time, maybe it’s okay and not cause for concern. For when someone finally tells you that the way your mind works is enticing, sexy even, you get to respond, That’s what I fucking thought! Their interrogation of your ideas and mind only a testimony to how interesting they find it. To that end, maybe we should all want more - from people, from life, for what if you actually end up getting what you want?
dating advice
Henrik Karlsson wrote in his Substack -
“I wrote about the thoughts that passed through my head as if my thoughts mattered, unironically. And as if it didn’t matter if this made people laugh.
That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.”
Easy for him to say having found the love of his life this way, but it may not be a search that ends in fruition or meets any definitions of success for the rest of us, some of us may indeed have to settle for platonic intellectual love.
Of course I have eaten my words in the past. Once I posited that a messy room is not a red flag, that it’s fine. Yet it concerns me now, and if I had a daughter (or a niece) who was okay with keeping a messy room I’d sit her down, bake her a carrot cake (or order the one with diamond icing from Square One Trivandrum), top it with a dollop of vanilla ice cream (unless they have another favorite in which case have they tried Vanilla Bean from Haagen Dazs) and ask, So what’s really up with you, why the messy room?
Also at 30, which is my refrain in this substack, I cannot use arguing as an early yardstick for compatibility. That is reserved for later, and not least because petulant Peter Pans will otherwise indulge and waste my time while they have fun themselves simply because, per someone I know, that’s their core competency. Either way let’s see, I’ll keep you posted.
dessert/footnote (only if you want more)
I also loved Mating for its deliciously long sentences - something we are told is a deterrent for most readers and perilous to practical writers. But what do you leave for a not so lazy reader to discover then? How will they ever find out they in fact will follow a circuitously long sentence to its rapturous end and find it delightful - for the joy of surmounting it sure, the if-slight progress in plot accomplished let’s grant too, but ultimately the appeal is in the unclaimed intimacy of knowing that there are similar minds as yours out in the world that would engage in this quirk, hitherto unconfirmed, of following an (allegedly) unwieldy, meandering thought to close.
This was such an enjoyable read :)
Interesting read Parvathy, really liked how you tied your life to the book. And you've given me reason to go back and finish reading Mating, so thanks:)