kinks in other people

From R. D. Laing’s Knots (1970)

I’ve always thought there’s something very powerful about Carolyn Elliott’s framework of Existential Kink. Sasha has a great post about it, but I’ll roughly summarize it as integrating your shadow (in the Jungian sense) by accepting that you might be into what you say you don’t want. Like, let’s say you complain all the time about your terrible job, but you’ve refused to quit over a period of years. You might actually achieve integration by realizing that you actually, in her language, get off on hating your job. In other words, you have what you want.

On TikTok I sometimes watch content by women who are in relationships or married to inmates. Some of them conceive children with their partners while said partners are in prison. Now, momentarily putting aside other concerns, it’s very difficult to date an inmate because you can’t see them that often and you don’t know what the relationship will be like when they are released from prison. But you might also be able to imagine how that could be a feature rather than a bug. So someone might consciously identify as desperately missing their incarcerated partner, but on some level they may also have chosen that partner precisely because they are in the most literal sense not available.