Repeating it doesn't make it truer

My husband and I have an acquaintance who he met through one of his former graduate school classmates. He was her boyfriend at the time that he first crossed my husband's path and is currently her fiance. At my first meeting with the boyfriend, I accidentally embarrassed him and he has carried a little grudge ever since.

The nature of that mistake was that we were all sitting in a bar at a social gathering during the first month of my husband's first year at his school. The girlfriend set up this informal little to-do, and we went largely so my husband could make some social connections at this early stage. I had previously met the girlfriend, so I knew her slightly from a potluck held about a week earlier. I figured that an easy way to relate to him was through his relationship with her so I asked how they met. He said it was at a party full of people and he saw her from across the room. I asked what I thought was a reasonable follow-up question given the situation and that was, "What drew you to her in particular?"

This question stymied him. He seemed dumbstruck for an answer and I'd just come off of years of teaching English in which I'd dealt with students who were often at a loss for words because they couldn't express themselves, so I tried to "help" by asking if it was this or that about her (attitude, style or whatever). He continued to be confused and then, after "thinking" for awhile, he switched to an ad hominem attack and said something like, 'you know the problem with you psychology types is you think about "why" too much instead of just taking things as they are.' At that point, I dropped my line of questioning on this issue, and it was hardly a probing attack. It was one question and a few suggestions and then he got defensive.

Fast forward a year and a half or so and my husband is having a conversation with someone else who felt that I had an aggressive way of carrying on a discussion. In her case, she had a point as we were debating a political point and she was being an idiot about it (the short version of it is that she suggested that vandalizing public advertising was somehow going to help undermine the effects of white privilege). The girlfriend from the previous scenario got caught up in this and remarked that, "Oh yeah, she (meaning me) is like that." She meant that I was too tenacious and she said that based on my (well-meaning) attempts to make conversation with her boyfriend from a very long time ago.

What I took away from this was that the boyfriend was more than embarrassed by his inability to come up with what attracted him to his girlfriend. He was humiliated and it stung enough for him to make a big deal out of it such that the girlfriend made this remark about a brief exchange from nearly two years previously. This told me something more than I'd already speculated on. One thing was that my guess is that he could have answered the question, but the answer was too embarrassing (like he saw her wearing a corset with her big boobs heaved up - she designs them and does wear them from time to time). The other was that he is deeply insecure and hates to feel as if he's been somehow been bested. This was not my intent on either count, but I think that is how he felt.

Fast forward to a graduation party for my husband's graduate school class and both girlfriend and insecure boyfriend are there. Given my knowledge of how fragile his ego is, I planned to be extra careful about whatever I said to him and planned to avoid any questioning of any kind. When we arrived, most of the seats were taken and people needed to sit on the ground. Boyfriend was sitting in one chair and his girlfriend in another. I told my husband to take the remaining one because he had had to stand a lot during the graduation ceremonial activities and I was sitting.

The boyfriend offered me his seat and I accepted it. My husband made a joke and asked him if he gave up the seat to me because of "Jewish guilt" (the boyfriend told us he was Jewish). Since I was concerned that someone with such a fragile ego would be offended by this, I cut in and said, "I'm sure it is just an act of courtesy." The boyfriend then went on to say that courtesy was a way for people of superior intelligence to make those of lesser mental capacity feel comfortable. He essentially insulted us by saying he was being kind because we were dumber than him. Of course, I let this go as I saw this as yet another manifestation of his insecurity. My husband assumed it was his way of making a cutting joke.

After that party, the boyfriend asked my husband to friend him on Facebook, but he did not ask me. This did not insult me, but given the fact that he knows each of us equally well, the message was clear. He was snubbing me intentionally because he was still smarting from the initial exchange. Occasionally, my husband has read a comment here and there by the boyfriend because they are of interest for the way in which they reflect his issues. One of the recurring themes he has demonstrated is his condescension and his talk of being a "gentleman" or exercising "courtesy" toward people. He always speaks of it in a manner which asserts that a "gentleman" does such things for those who are less than him in some fashion or another.

Clearly, this man is far from a "gentleman" and lacks any real sense of what courtesy is. Such things are not mere hollow demonstrations, but they bring along with them a genuine intent to make people comfortable and declarations of the inferiority of the people you are exercising said courtesy toward vitiates the authenticity of the supposedly kind actions. Yet, this man not infrequently frames himself as a gentleman. He keeps saying it and I wonder if he believes that announcing who he believes he is somehow means that we should accept him as what he identifies as instead of what he demonstrates himself to be. He behaves like a rude, smug, and supercilious jerk while proclaiming himself kind and courteous.

One thing that I have noticed in America is that people have a sense of who they are. They "identify" as something or other and they feel it necessary to proclaim that identity repeatedly to the world.  There is a sense that the world doesn't get to decide for itself based on who you show yourself to be through your words and actions, but you get to choose a label and force it upon people. If they refuse to accept your self-determined identity, even when it is opposition to your behavior, then they are the ones who are in error.

This need to proclaim oneself as this, that, or the other is a manifestation of insecurity about ones sense of self. It is very much as if the people who make such proclamations, whether they come via Facebook status messages, tattoos, or personal dress style, are trying to convince you of something that they themselves are not the least bit secure about. Such messages scream "I'm totally insecure about who I am and how I'm seen so validate my self-image!" They, of course, don't even realize that they're broadcasting a psychological issue - a neuroses - for all with a perceptive mind to hear.

It's my opinion that Americans are especially prone to this sort of thing because there is no strong sense of identity common among us. Also, people are indoctrinated into the notion that being "an  individual" is important so there is a need to distinguish oneself as different from others in order to confirm ones individuality. The funny thing is that, the more people proclaim who they are, the more they become just like everyone else who isn't secure enough in their sense of self to just "be" who they are and let those around them reach their own conclusions. This need to force their self-image onto others unites them into an insecure tribe rather than divides them into individuals. I daresay that it is rarer to find someone who just "is" and allows people around them to decide for themselves than it is to find people who feel the need to bray, broadcast, and overtly advertise who they want you to think they are. These sorts of proclamations make such people part of the crowd, not stand-out individuals.

My husband is a very tolerant person and tends to be more sanguine about people's behavioral and psychological quirks than me. However, recently, even he got tired of the neurotic posting that this guy was broadcasting on Facebook and hid his feed. It wasn't that he was so pompous. It wasn't that he was so insecure. It was the fact that he couldn't see how he was coming across to others. This sad lack of self-awareness and awareness of how others see him was just more than my husband wanted to deal with intermittently. Frankly, I feel the same way. People don't get to weave their own reality and then hold up the tapestry in front of me and insist I accept that picture of them rather than the reality that is so clearly behind it. I get tired of people's issues being in my face and I especially am tired of being told repeatedly and obnoxiously who someone believes they are rather than being permitted to make up my own mind.

A Stolen Life

Since my early college days, I have been an enormous fan of Bette Davis. Sure, she made some clunkers, especially in her later years when she started to do ugly and strange horror films and much later when she was a novelty casting choice, but her early movies always offered something special in my estimation. One of the movies that she made on the trip down from the highest points of her career was called "A Stolen Life".

This movie was produced by Ms. Davis, who often fought with the studio heads who had her under contract for better projects. She never really developed much even after she had the power to do so, and this movie was an inauspicious start. The concept is a take on "The Prince and the Pauper," and Ms. Davis was neither the first nor the last to take the idea of twins and have one replace the other. In the case of this particular movie, one twin married the man that the other twin was in love with. When the married sister dies in a boating accident, the other takes over her life so that she can be with the man she'd always loved. I'd like to say hijinks ensue, but the movie is far darker than that.

This movie has popped into my head on occasion since returning from my 23 years of living in Japan and returning to America. It's important to note, in order to make my situation more clearly understood, that I studied psychology in university and worked as a counselor for two years before marrying my husband - before meeting him for part of my time in the counseling job. I have always had a passion for the topic and have studied it continuously throughout my life. It is equally important to note that my husband has a Bachelor's degree in business with a specialization in finance.

During the years that we were in Japan, I was a teacher, but psychology is not something that stands aside. It applies to nearly everything that one can do and helped me in my work as well as understanding the dynamics of Japanese culture. My husband initially had little more than a cursory interest in psychology, but, as the years wore on, he was drawn more and more to the idea of being a counselor.

One of the things about our teaching was that it wasn't unusual for the lesson to have a tone which was not so different from therapy. Japanese people were free from the oppressive nature of their culture - a culture in which showing feelings is looked down upon and opinion expression is dangerous. In English, and in the presence of a non-Japanese person, they could and would often let things fly that they'd never tell anyone else. I found that I spent as much time showing compassion, support, and understanding as well as helping people cope with their distress as dealing with English in no small number of cases. The same was true for my husband. By the time we'd left Japan, more than a few students had told each of us that we were more like therapists to them than teachers.

Though I have a hunger for psychological study, I am less certain that my future career path will follow that of being a therapist. It's not that I don't have the skills or lack a desire to help people. It's more about a sense of knowing too well about the futility in some cases. I worked with seriously ill people and I grew up around people with neuroses. There are things you can and can't do to help, and I'm not sure that I would be happy to go about my life living in that narrow band of effectiveness. I'm, perhaps, not temperamentally suited. My husband, on the other hand, is.

Since our return, my husband has completed graduate school with a Masters in Psychology. I took two classes with him. Both of them were selected because they were more hardcore in terms of their academic focus and less experiential in content. The two classes were Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse. As someone who has always had an interest in the role the brain plays in behavior, these were both going to be up my alley. Neither, unfortunately, were particularly challenging for me given how much study I already had under my belt, but I was happy to be able to take classes with my husband as well as form a better understanding of the friendships he'd struck up with his classmates. Those friendships are what led me to thinking about "A Stolen Life."

My husband's friends knew him before they knew me. They had heard about his background, but didn't really think about it much. When I entered the picture, various conversations made it clear that they felt that I was the one horning in on his territory. That is, they often seemed to regard my knowledge and interest in psychology as a failure on my part to develop my own interests and treated my intellectual prowess on such topics as inferior to theirs and his. It may seem egotistical to say it, but none of them could hold a candle to what I knew before I even set foot back in the U.S., and not one of them made much headway by going to a graduate school which largely focused on training people to be therapists, not in academic knowledge of psychology.

I've come to be quite annoyed that people are looking at me as if I'm a pathetic also-ran who can't form her own interests or develop her own separate life. I'm the one who has always been in the field. I'm the one who got my husband interested in it. I'm the one who finds the great books on such topics and asks him to read them, but when our mutual friends read my words about them on Facebook and later read his a few months after mine, he's the one they reply to about the book. They act as if he found it and I read it because of him, not the other way around.

Some part of me feels as if my life was "stolen" in a strange way. I have and have had this passion, and, at the risk of sounding childish, I had it first. That isn't the important part of this. I don't really care who is first. I care about being treated as somehow empty and second-rate by people who have formed an inaccurate opinion of me based on the order in which they got to know us. No matter what they are told, they can't see me as a whole person because they assume I stole his passion due to some lack of my own ego integrity. I was not some empty vessel leeching off of his interests. I transformed his interests, but I feel like I simply cannot be seen as a whole being by these people.

Of course, the solution is to find better friends. I need to find people who know me first and can see me as an individual without their need to form some sort of clique with my husband operating on the inside and me on the outside. That is precisely what I'm starting to do, and I've lost no small amount of respect for those who continue to regard me as a pale copy of him because of their need to see me in a diminished fashion - a need that I'm sure is fueled by their sense of "specialness" and arrogance at having gone to the same graduate school.