Tell Me How To Watch What You Eat

OK. Would you like to talk more about that today?

No, there's something else. I'm having trouble with my girlfriend when we're at a restaurant. I keep getting angry with her.

Oh?

She keeps offering me food!

I get horribly sick if I stray outside my rice-and-chicken diet. She knows this! She's seen me get sick when I cheat. And I've told her "honey, please, help me. Don't let me eat stuff I shouldn't."

But when we're at a restaurant and I say something like "Looks good, how is it?" she always says "do you want some?" and looks at me, eyes shining and expectant!

She thinks you want some of hers?

How could she?! I've told her I shouldn't break my diet.

And half of what she eats is mega spicy hot stuff. I've always said, I wish I could eat outside my diet, except for spicy stuff.

She is teasing you, then?

She must be! We've gone through this routine so many times she must have learned what I don't like by now. So she must be doing it on purpose.

Frustrating what you want from dinner-conversation.

Yes. She is omniscient and cruel. She inverts my desires for dinner talk, knowing this will frustrate me, twisting my emotions into a knot with her at its center.

She "inverts your desires?" What are those?

I need her to remember all my preferences. What kinds of words make me unhappy? Don't say "Do you want some?" You should be happy to have this assignment of pleasing me and strive to improve!

She inverts this by deliberately saying what she knows I don't like to hear: "you want some?"

She has to be my "food attendant." Turn "you can't eat that" into smiles. A king might delegate "keep me on my diet" to a trusted servant who can respectfully do so. It's her job to show me that she happily owns that assignment.

So instead she adopts that position but then knowingly tempts me with food I shouldn't eat.

Finally, mirror my affect, not my words! Mirrors are supposed to show you new angles! When I ask "How's your food?" she should say "It's OK!" and smile to mean "I'm so lucky to have a man who sees my preferences as a real thing!"

So she really enjoys frustrating you?

No, she's offering earnestly, somehow. She gets upset when I refuse.

So during your lighthearted dinner talks, it feels like she isn't aligned with you on points that feel foundational and intuitive to you.

Yeah. We can't even do algebra with our relationship because she forgets that the point is to solve for x.

Have you preferred a previous relationship dynamic you had in the past?

Well, I could think back to a previous girlfriend. She watched out for my diet. I got sick from eating a few corn chips once. She then kept reminding me "no more corn chips."

She was sweet about it. She always considered my diet when we were planning things. She wouldn't push me and she wasn't judgmental about it. I miss her. I felt cared for.

However, in my ex's case it felt like—I was just a pet. I don't think I could have said, jokingly, "Wow, what a cake! I think I'll have some!" And she could reply "Good idea! I know how much you love spending hours in the bathroom!"

That would be a special kind of interaction?

Yeah. My joke shows I'm tired and frustrated and I want things I can't have—but I'm still in control, and I'm putting effort in to this moment, right now, to still smile. And my perfect partner would see that. She would mirror my tone. She means "I understand exactly where you are and what you mean, and I'm still up here above water with you, having fun."

Your perfect partner is omniscient?

You mean, how does she know "exactly where I am and what I mean?" That should be downstream of good communication… downstream of her wanting to build up our love.

You are enraged because she doesn't plan towards more love for you?

Yes! For me! For us.

Hmm. Let's come back to the original issue. You don't like how she responds to "how's your food."

Right. When I ask her "How's your food?" I guess she must think I'm expressing attraction towards the food.

I guess I am "wanting" the food; a part of me wishes to eat her food. Since I can't eat anything. But I don't mean for that fantasy to come over into reality. I want her to show she understands this part of me.

Isn't it a sign of love to honor little fantasies together?

For me there's a little guy that would say "My partner doesn't like to be offered food. He must not be asking, can I have some of your food? So what does he mean and what should I say?"

So what do you mean when you ask "how's your food?"

That's part of a larger picture: I want her to "play ball" during meal conversations.

Play ball?

Yes. I'm prompting love through a… transient focal point in our environment. When she tries her food, that's temporarily the focus of our shared experience. When I ask "How's your food?" I'm tossing the ball to her.

"Tossing the ball" means prompting her somehow based on something that's happening to the two of you.

Yes. She's supposed to throw it back and our relationship chases after it.

Let me expand the metaphor to show what I mean. Ignore my girlfriend for a moment and let's say you and I have a dog and it needs exercise to stay healthy. So every day we go outside and toss a ball to each other, and the dog dashes between us, back and forth, until it flops. The dog has now been maintained. Its muscles are healthy, its blood is circulating. Now we're done playing and we all go home.

We wouldn't have played the game if not for the needs of the dog: has he had exercise today? Will he be too energetic to fall asleep later? Will he stay lean and healthy into the coming months? Will he keep loving me for caring for him? Has a moment come where he drops a ball in front of me and I think "this is a good moment to exercise my dog?"

However, remember I said we're just tossing the ball between ourselves. That is, we could play the same game with no dog. The little simulated world we play in, this pure game where the only rules are "throw ball, catch ball," has been initialized entirely for the sake of the dog. But the rules of engagement don't account for a dog there.

The dog is not strictly part of the game of catch, but without the dog there would be no need to play.

Yes! The dog lives outside of the game rules. But we start playing because of the dog, the way the dog reacts affects how we play, we stop because the dog is done.

There is a dog there in the rules, though. You essentially have a rule that says "if it looks like the dog is done, don't throw."

No! Tired-dog is an interrupt routine that's not part of the rules and which can be executed at any time.

The purity of the game is essential.

Yes!

But I see what you're saying. Why do I insist that there's no dog in our game of catch, despite there being two people and a dog all chasing the ball together? Well, that's because it's a part of this metaphor involving me and her at the table and really there's no dog.

I see.

Let's come back to me and my girlfriend talking at the table.

When I say "that looks good," just like the dog coming by and dropping a ball at my feet, at that moment I realize this is a moment to "toss the ball" and exercise our relationship.

Your relationship equates to the dog in your earlier metaphor?

Not exactly. In my ball-game example, there's a real creature that neither of us can perfectly understand, but which is simple to model because dog uses a basic bark-and-jump-based language to communicate its meaning.

But at the table, both my girlfriend and I act based on our personal models of each other and our relationship. "The dog" we're exercising can only be our shared understanding of our own relationship; that is, our shared conceptions of "us" as a unit.

And the purpose of your at-the-table ball game is to exercise this dog?

To maintain the dog, expand our understandings of each other… yes. With the goal of making "the dog" to cover that entire Venn diagram.

Like this?

That's right.

When she eats and I say "looks good, how is it?" it's such an easy set-up to exercise the dog. It's not new. We play with the dog in the same way all the time. Honey, that looks good. I'm happy you have something that looks good. How is it? There goes the ball. Now she just has to throw it back.

Hmm!

I know I said earlier that she must be doing all this on purpose.

Rationally, I know that probably isn't true. But what else could cause this state of our relationship? Here, I drew it:

There's some reason that the "shared us" zone isn't growing.

Hmm. Perhaps you could walk me through what her experience of a "how's your food?" could be.

Well, shit, I don't know. It feels like she's empty-headed about it. Like this:

Can you break that down any more?

He's looking at me expectantly. He expects me to do something. He likes when I offer to him like he's above me. Since he's asking about the food he must want me to offer him food. Do you want some?

Again.

I'm below him and can't respond by offering anything other than food so I'll offer him food. Do you want some?

She sees herself as below you.

Fuck off. I know you pushed me to say that on purpose. Trying to make me admit that I'm lying about equality because I only see her as below me. What's next? You'll claim it's all projection and the low one is me.

Hmm.

Come on, don't judge me on this. I'm not saying that's her actual experience. I can't possibly know.

Let's just say I feel there's some equality imbalance and I want to feel like we're equal, okay? Maybe both of us need some change but ideally we'd be working on that together! But we can't because she hears "how's your food?" and asks me "do you want some?" Me! Her partner!

I guess I envision her feeling like I'm the proxy for a test question from god. To her it's not really me that's asking. She could receive the question from anyone—the server, me, a friend, a survey delivered by an angel—and it would feel the exact same way to her. Like there's a "correct way to respond to this question in the general case" in her head, which my query activates.

But then again, her responses also remind me of another friend of mine who can really piss me off with how he inverts all my words. If I say "It's nice weather!" he'll always say "Could go bad soon!" He does the same for anything. If I say "Yuck, this tastes bad," he'd say "someone might like it!" Inverting the polarity of my meaning every time but saying so with a positive tone.

I tried to model his behavior and came up with this: You know how, in physics, two waves with opposite amplitudes get canceled out? Imagine a sentence's affect and meaning mapped to a point (X, Y). Something said positively (that is, with happiness, excitement, or a smile, or whatever) but which is negative in meaning would be (+1, -1). "It's nice weather!" is (+1, +1) and "Could go bad soon!" is (+1, -1). A conversation would start at (0, 0) and change as partners talk.

All of my friend's responses try to increase or maintain X, the net affect, but, to a fault, he always drives Y towards zero.

I used to do this as a teenager back when I thought cruel sarcasm spoken with a smile was equivalent to a net positive interaction! Until someone stopped being my friend because I was mean all the time. I had no idea. Of course to them it sounded like I was happy in my meanness, not happy in my sharing of the moment. I thought the words didn't really matter.

So coming back to my girlfriend, I feel like she's doing the same thing. "Do you want some?" doesn't have a purpose except to cancel out "how's your food?" simply by returning a question for a question. She maintains zero on the non-affect side of the conversation. The non-affect side has all the potential depth!

It's like she's trying to control the situation down to this known-flat environment where every question is a test question that she's comfortable with answering. So she doesn't have to process anything too different or unexpected—but that feels like she doesn't want me at all!

Hmm. Rather than pursuing your interest in equality together, she prefers to keep everything meaningful exactly as it is, while engaging only on surface-level affect.

That's exactly right!

Like she doesn't think! Or thinks she shouldn't have to do anything even though I do so much to try and improve our life together!

Hmm!

Shut up! It's not like that.

Some people say they feel like they're a kid watching the world go by, through a screen made of eyes—but no. The person is the voice that crafted those words: A flat-faced observer standing behind a dumb child at the glass, tut-tutting and saying: this idiot has a long way to go.

I think I'm afraid that she's like that. She's watching "herself" watch life through a screen. Everything out there is two-dimensional, a projection, not even something you could reach out to and touch. The only agency she can employ is caring for that creature in front of the screen. To her everything outside is all the same, transient smears on glass.

Hmm.

Then the other part of me insists she's an omniscient succubus who'll ditch me as soon as she's finished draining the light from my eyes.

I see. It's scary to think that she's attached to something about you that you can't control, which might expire.

Huh.

Yeah.