affinity

Photo by Mackenzie

A guy once told me about how he met his girlfriend. He was dating this girl named Leah and it wasn’t going so well, so he started confiding in her friend Sarah, and he was totally unconstricted around Sarah, just said whatever he actually felt. He didn’t care what she thought of him since he was madly in love with Leah. Well, things fell apart with Leah, but he ended up becoming best friends with Sarah, and then she fell in love with him.

I always wondered whether the reason Sarah fell in love with him was because he was able to be so totally open with her. Like, if he’d been as relaxed and without agenda around Leah, would she have been more in love with him? Or was he just inherently more compatible with Sarah? What is it that makes one person fall in love with another?

It’s not irreducible, because everyone falls in love with certain people, right? But then sometimes I’ll see a pairing where all of the usual rules around attraction, socioeconomic background, maybe even personality are totally disregarded, and I’ll go back to thinking: it’s irreducible.

This is the kind of thing I can easily think about for, oh, 20,000 hours without breaking a sweat. Some time ago I came to the conclusion that it’s really not worth thinking about much else. By which I don’t mean the reasons people do or don’t fall in love, but rather the reasons people do or don’t do anything at all.

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It was never clear to me what kind of job you were supposed to get if your primary interest was watching, speculating and theorizing about people. Psychologist, maybe. Sociologist? Anthropologist? Journalist, poet, novelist? Robert Caro?

I am more interested in individual people than in society at large. And more interested in experiencing people than writing about them. I’m very interested in relationships, what makes them good and bad. And what makes people feel good or bad. What you say, on the page and off, to help someone really understand you.

This is my job, but also it’s my main hobby. Which can lead to certain questions:

Why don’t you write about me? Why do you write about me? Is that a veiled anecdote about my girlfriend, can you please remove it? Should I feel uneasy around you because I told you my deepest secret and you seem reliable but are you really reliable? Do you really love me, or is this just a thing you do? Why don’t you like to volunteer things about yourself? Can we be closer? I think we’re too close. There’s something about you that makes me uneasy. There’s something about you that makes me feel safe.

Sometimes people are neurotic about our relationship but not my writing, and sometimes about the writing but not the relationship, and sometimes both, and sometimes neither. Mostly everyone is fine with it or doesn’t care, which is nice.

My goal is to be accepting of other people’s reactions and feelings but have a very simple personal relationship to what I love. I want to get to a place I think of as “pure affinity,” where I’m able to pursue what I’m interested in without overthinking. Cue the Feynman line about “studying hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

For instance, most of why I write on Substack is because I’ve always loved journals. (Over the years I’ve tried and failed to convince several people that reading Anais Nin’s complete journals is the ideal summer activity.) I understand now that the correct order of things is that I unquestioningly accept and embrace my love of journals which leads me to writing online and then some years later I can write a reflective piece about how my life has been shaped by the private-public nature of journaling on Substack and do a deep dive into various journals throughout history, The Pillow Book et al. But there’s no need to start off by interrogating why I love journals so much.

I guess my motto is that in the beginning you might not know why you have an affinity for something, but you should run after it anyway.

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The idea that affinity can free you is simple. But people have complicated relationships with knowing what they actually like. Yesterday at dinner J used a metaphor for having the wrong job that went, Sometimes people think they should play basketball because they like dribbling. Which I interpret as, It’s very easy to think something is right for you because parts of it are pretty awesome. But what about the other parts? And what’s the main part, the crux of it all? Do you like that? You can like dribbling and shooting and passing and not actually like basketball.

Whenever a friend is trying to make a decision, I generally try to ask something to the effect of, Do you really like this? (This being the person or the relationship or the job or the city or just generally the life they’re living.) And the thing I find striking is that people find this question amazingly difficult. They usually say something to the effect of, Well, yeah, I like parts of it. But they often cannot, or will not, even when I press, answer the question of: Does your heart and body basically say yes to this right now?

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Obviously, I’m interested in the question of affinity because like everyone else in the world I am prone to internal conflict and indecision. And I hate feeling stuck. C was making fun of the way I constantly run these experiments to try to free myself from stuckness. I’m always coming up with a different plan of attack, and most of the time it’s sort of a harebrained plan that ends up not working, and I just keep going until one of my plans works. And I think over time I have gotten faster at understanding whether I truly feel an affinity for something and whether I should pursue it.

Sometimes it’s more obvious than other times. Like, I’ve never been able to stop thinking about people a day of my life. Any given hour of any given day I’m obsessing over the details of someone’s psyche. Like, why did she tell me what she wanted in this extremely indirect way? What was scary about being direct? What could I have said to make her more comfortable being direct?

It would never occur to me that I should do that less, or focus more on something else, not because there’s no logical argument for doing that, but because the logical argument doesn’t matter to me at all. I’m compelled by something that I don’t fully understand, and all I can do is recognize the compulsion.

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Here’s a thought: when you ask someone whether they actually like something, and they start listing the parts of it that are so great like dribbling and shooting and passing, and then they say But…, they don’t have a real affinity for the thing. People who actually like something are like, Obviously I like it. But god, dribbling is so fucking annoying.

You can dislike so many individual things about someone and crazily love them. You can like every single thing about someone and not really love them in that way at all. The answer lies not in the many things you may question but the part of it you never, ever question. Is that the main part, the crux of it all?