I started a list in my last post about the things I’m looking for in a partner. My first need today seems in direct contract to one of the things I said I needed yesterday. Let’s get on with it.
4. Not too much of an empath. One of the weird things on the RKG Discord is that most of the Americans who comment late at night are empathetic people. It’s very odd that there are at least four of us whto chat away after midnight (Central Time).
The problem with being highly empathetic is that you sometimes overstep. I can tell what others feel in an instant–by the way, it’s amusing to me how some people want to deny this is a thing. THey think it’s made up just because they can’t do it. Apparently, there is an empath industry (as there is for everything), which…I don’t want to Google. I don’t want to know how people are exploiting empathy for gain.
Anyway, I don’t want someone who’ll anticipate how I feel at the cost of actually being there for me. Being able to sit with someone in all their emotions is a skill in and of itself. And, as good as I am at reading people, I am not infallible. I don’t always get it right, so I would not want my preconceived notions to trump other people’s actual lived experiences. In addition, I most emphatically do not like being told what I am and am not feeling; I would not want to do that to anyone else.
Granted, in my case, it’s because my parents have a history of disbelieving what I saylfeel/do, but still. It’s best to take people at face value unless their is overwhelming evidence that they are not being honest with you/are deceiving themselves. Which, by the way, the last is really hard to dispel. People need their coping mechanisisms, and one of the sayings of Pysch 101 that stuck with me is that you don’t take away a person’s coping mechanism (no matter how bad it is) if you don’t have something to replace it with.
5. The ability to sit quietly. This sounds facetious, but it’s not. I could phrase it as preferring introverts, but that’s not exactly true. It’s more that I need someone who is comfortable in their own skin and who does not feel the need to talk all the time. I like just chilling with someone, both of us on our laptops, doing our own thing.
6. They must support my passions, even if they are not passionate about them themselves. Here’s the thing. Taiji weapons are my life. I practice them every day, and I am going to keep teaching myself new ones over the years. I currently know several, and a few are from teaching myself. My teacher does not like the weapons, so she does not practice them that much. I teach myself by watching the videos of her teacher. I taught myself the fan by watching my teacher’s teacher’s student (in another state) do it.
I don’t expect someone else to be able to speak about it knowledgeably, but they must be able to listen to me talk about it and be enthastic. Genuinely. Not just tolerate it because that’s the bare minimum I expect from acquaintances. I’m not going to go on and on about it, but if someone can’t listen to me mention it without rolling tehir eyeballs, then they’re not for me.
7. They must have a strong passion for something. Relating to the last point, they don’t have to be into martial arts or martial arts weapons, but they have to be passionate about something. I would rather it be something artistic, but it doesn’t have to be. I would prefer it not be cars, sports, makeup, or fashion, but that’s because I have absolutely no interest in any of those.
I find people who are not passionate about something in their lives to be not people I want to be friends/intimate with. Social justice issues are important as well, but that’s a given. I can’t date someone who doesn’t care about the world around them. Those people are narcissists, and we all should know by now how well I do with narcissists.
8. They must be able to look at things from different points of views, angles, and levels. This is a difficult one. For much of my early years, I felt like an alien beacuse most people had a simplisttic view on things and weren’t able to see other points of view. I thought they were just not trying hard enough, but my last therapist pointed out that they literally were incapable. It wasn’t a matter of try harder, it was that that level did not exist for them.
That sounds bleak, and it is, but it’s also a relief. It’s not me. I don’t have to try to explain myself harder because they will never get it. I need someone who will get it. And get that I can’t break my life up in chunks. I am one messy whole, and I can’t just isolate one characteristic away form the others. If we want to talk about, say, environmentalism, I can’t separate that from me being a female-shaped person or me not having kids.
My brother and I were talking about our most important issues at one point. His is environmental issues. Mine is repro justice. (Choice). He was trying to argue how his was more important because without the earth, we wouldn’t be here. He’s not wrong about that, but my point was that when you focus a more specific issue the way I was, you got more done for a tangible subset of people–one that is often overlooked, marginalized, and harmed.
He said that by focusing on environmental issues, you were helping everyone. I said, “In theory.” But in reality, the issues that are tackled the more often are ones that benefit rich people who can afford EVs and solar panels, for example, more than people who are just living from paycheck to a paycheck. In addition, the heavy emphasis on recycling is a way for corporations to make it the problem of the individual. The saying is ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. Notice how the first two ar efocused on not spending more money. That’s not acceptable to corporations, obviously. So they put all their energy (heh) for the last, which is the least effective.
So the mania for recycling was pushed to the point where people were stressing out if they threw one piece of plastic in their garbage. But, it doesn’t matter. China has started refusing to take our plastics because it’s too much. So they’re just sitting in a landfill, anyway.
I’m not saying not to recycle, but I’m saying it’s a panacea that isn’t really doing much to help the environment.
This is my point. I can start talking about one issue, but then veer off wildly to another tangent that is relevant in my mind. I need someone who can go with me on this and not get flustered along the way. My mom recently said that she had married my father, knowing he wasn’t smart. That blew my mind because i had assumed that he was smart (and just stubborn about his backwards points of view). But, thinking about it, it’s so obvious in retrospect. That’s not to excuse his sexism and nationalistic bigotry, but it does explain why he could not understand some of the deeper philosophical ideas behind the isms.
I do not understand that mentality (my mother’s, I mean), because I want to date someone who is my equal. I had a roommate in college, though, who had the same mentality. She was very proud of her smarts, and she could not handle dating someone smarter than she was. She also freaked out because I got better grades and studied half as much as she did.
I would be thrilled to meet someone who was as smart as I was and had the EQ to match. I doubt I will, but I can dream.