I hate the word "Metrics." It is connected with work.
The title is based on this article on Metrics of Attraction - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/the-advanced-metrics-of-attraction.html?ref=science&_r=1
I went ahead (as they say in the office also) and looked up Alain de Botton and liked that his website has a section on Art as Therapy:
I also looked at his article The Madness and Charm of Crushes: http://thephilosophersmail.com/relationships/on-the-madness-and-charm-of-crushes/
So I made some notes.
I liked that he described crushes with expressions such as "explosive interaction of limited knowledge... outward obstacles to further discovery and boundless hope." From only a few cues the brain makes up a picture of a potential mate - it fills in the blanks and is advising you on anticipating "years of happiness bouyed by profound mutual sympathy."
Without even noticing that we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts. The missing parts form that exhaustive work in the love affair you're not yet having - maybe never going to have. Brains are trained to take tiny visual hints and construct entire figures from them. And we do the same with it comes to character.
Much like in painting class, where our brain insists on filling in the blanks and leaving us unable to paint exactly what we see, our brains fill in parts for the people we develop crushes over. Overall, this made me question the brain's reliability!
The summing up of the article was that a relationship brings both pro et contra. A crush won't tell us which contra elements we can learn to live with. We are slightly destroyed by the contra qualities that all people have (just as we have some destructive to others).
Upon reading the whole article I felt that crushes were positive things that tell us more about ourselves - what we should look for more in our lives. And as I thought about the crush I have, I thought about the crush my friend has on someone other than her husband, and I reached the same conclusion I had before although I could couch it in a more caring and comfortable perspective. We need more creative stimulation. We need more time spent with creative people. I need to have contrary opinions and more laughter in my life.
At one time today, just before I got into the phone call meetings of work, I took five minutes to myself in the bedroom and imagined a conversation with my best friend. And in it, I told him that I felt as though under all my thoughts, something else had a cold and dark grip on me. There is some nagging beast in my psyche that won't let go. It is a type of fear that has grown over time - even before the crush.
The crush is a temporary escape into a fantasy that takes me away from the real world. The grip is there in the real world somewhere.
But the crush feels more important than that. I don't believe it would save me from the grip but I do feel that it is a way for me to deal with the type of isolation that I feel. I feel isolated in a number of ways. An important one is that I am struggling with the lack of a physical relations. And now, I'm not attracted to or feeling attractive to my partner. I honestly can't say which is worse. Today, I felt unattractive to anyone. It teared at all the other thoughts. It coloured all my feelings. It saddened my whole mind so that each small component was downtrodden and sluggish.
In the last section of the article, I read it as though it was a comparison between a crush and a relationship with a partner. It served as some sort of moral that asked whether the grass was truly greener. But when something changes that is important, I feel myself argue, does that not cast a different light.
Patience is the virtue that I need here, I suspect. Waiting once more.
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