Feelings Are Rarely Mutual Quotes

The one thing I know for sure is that feelings are rarely mutual, so when they are, drop everything, forget belongings and expectations, forget the games, the two days between texts, the hard to gets because this is it, this is what the entire world is after and you’ve stumbled upon it by chance, by accident––so take a deep breath, take a step forward, now run, collide like planets in the system of a dying sun, embrace each other with both arms and let all the rules, the opinions and common sense crash down around you. Because this is love kid, and it’s all yours. Believe me, you're in for one hell of a ride, after all––this is the one thing I know for sure.

I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies. I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony. And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean.

This is simply the long history of the origin of responsibility. That task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as we have already grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more immediate task of first making man to a certain extent, necessitated, uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable. The immense work of what I have called, "morality of custom", the actual work of man on himself during the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work, finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats, was made genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually-exclusive terms),—in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise, and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really competent to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes—he "deserves" all three—not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters? The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his standard of value: looking out from himself upon the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises),—that is, every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers honour by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the "teeth of fate,"—so with equal necessity will he have the heel of his foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct—what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it—the sovereign man calls it his conscience.

Because the family is our first and in many ways our most important social environment, quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable. For no matter how strong the ties biology and culture have forged between family members, it is no secret that there is great variety in how people feel about their relatives. Some families are warm and supportive, some are challenging and demanding, others threaten the self of their members at every turn, still others are just insufferably boring. The frequency of murder is much higher among family members than among unrelated people. Child abuse and incestuous sexual molestation, once thought to be rare deviations from the norm, apparently occur much more often than anyone had previously suspected. In John Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” It is clear that the family can make one very happy, or be an unbearable burden. Which one it will be depends, to a great extent, on how much psychic energy family members invest in the mutual relationship, and especially in each other’s goals.

While in some circumstances giving can feel incredibly good and lead to a mutually satisfying relationship, when giving comes from a place of fear and needing approval, it almost never works. This is because the giving is coming from a belief that I am not enough and I must win you over with gifts because you would not love me for who I am. This is a form of avoiding rejection, and rarely leads to a satisfying result. Even if the other person does not reject you, these kinds of social interactions are often one-sided and unfulfilling. Worst of all, they do not allow you to fully be yourself, which is essential for feeling connected and accepted in relationships.

When our groups are focused on getting important things done "out there", there is rarely room to process our strong feelings or admit that we do not know how to navigate our roles "in here".

In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.

There is very little that is not wasteful and dismal about war. The only clear, deep, good is the special kind of bond welded between people who, having mutually shared a crisis, whether it be a shelling or a machine-gun attack, emerge knowing that those involved behaved well. There is much pretence in our everyday life, and, with a skilful manner, much can be concealed. But with a shell whistling at you there is not much time to pretend and a person’s qualities are starkly revealed. You believe that you can trust what you have seen. It is a feeling that makes old soldiers, old sailors, old airmen, and even old war correspondents, humanly close in a way shut off to people who have not shared the same thing. I think that correspondents, because they are rarely in a spot where their personal strength or cowardice can affect the life of another, probably feel only an approximation of this bond. So far as I am concerned, even this approximation is one of the few emotions about which I would say: It’s as close to being absolutely good as anything I know.

Other people might experience these feelings all the time, whatever they are. Strong, powerful feelings of happiness, satisfaction, protectiveness. It could all be very ordinary, in the aftermath of mutually pleasant episodes like just now. Or even if it's rare, to have a few times in life and no more, still worth living for, he thinks. To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.