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Noah -> RE: for you wonderful couples out there.... (12/20/2006 5:45:43 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: crouchingtigress
a friend of mine used to have a saying...i dont remember it verbatim...but she felt a good pairing was when both people feel like they "got the better deal" by just a smidgeon....
i laughed at this ..cause it is funny, but now i wonder is there any truth to it you think?
please feel free to answer whether or not you are in a couple, (or triple or or a quad) ...[;)]
I just don't see relationships in terms like that generally. I guess I would include consideration of who got the better deal under a broad heading with the word Economic somewhere in it's title.
Sometimes the economic relationship talk involves explicitly economic terms, like "better deal" or "investment." Most often these conversations seem to be kindled around the word "fairness" (or "unfairness") and involve what seems to me to be a quasi-economic analysis of a relationship: who is putting what in; who is taking what out. It all seems to presume that some sort of balance sheet is an appropriate tool for relationship analysis. To me a balance sheet seems no more helpful in viewing a relationship than it would be in listening to music, say, or in riding a bike.
People can adopt whatever metaphor they like. My point has to do with the economic metaphor being so foreign to my sense of what a relationship is that it (the economic view) just doesn't have enough of the right ... isomorphisms ... to seem useful.
Notions like "better deal", "investment" and "fairness" are just too foreign to the way I see relationships. They don't feel like words that belong in relationship talk at all--unless perhaps the relationship in question is quite impersonal. It seems like welding rod in a carpenter's kit. What's that doing there?
This is true for me in terms of power exchange relationships and loving relationships--and so of course also for loving power exchange relationships.
I mean if you asked me what kind of tree I think my relationship is, I'd find that not-particularly useful, too. But the economic talk, besides that, actually strikes me as distasteful, demeaning, even, as a rule, though I suppose the rule might have exceptions.
I hope a little bit of commenting on the question, in lieu of answering it, isn't taken amiss, crouchingT. I have been enjoying your posts a lot lately, and I don't mean enjoying them just aesthetically. Beyond that, I'm grateful for a range of insights you have shared and impressed by the evident care with which you consider the questions and comments of others.
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