"It's nice to feel seen"

I'm traveling again, visiting with Marie and some of her family at the summer cottage they all own (I talked about this place a little six years ago in my post "On the beach.") It's been pleasant and relaxing. Her aunt is there, who resolutely doesn't cook; but if Marie and I cook, she's happy to clean up. Such a deal.

Last night Marie and I were talking over a spot or two of whiskey, and I came to a realization. 

A little background: you may remember that the defining moment of Marie's life, in some respects, was a night when she was about twelve years old when her mother molested her. (See some discussion in, eg., " Long and angsty" and "Lovingly molested.") Also Marie's mother was very much a woman who relished -- and worked at! -- the arts of being female. She made herself pretty, she flirted with men, and for a period during Marie's adolescence (after her husband, Marie's father, died) she drank through the days and then slept around through the nights with complete abandon. Marie, by contrast, has never tried to make herself pretty, and through most of her life had a conflicted attitude towards sex.

Anyway I was talking to Marie about a photo of her mother that she had shown me some months before, and remarked that in some respects it looked almost exactly like Marie while in other respects it looked nothing like her. Naturally she asked what I meant. I explained that many of the physical features -- the hair, the nose, that sort of thing -- were almost identical between the two of them; but the animating spirit that you could see in her mother's eyes was very different. Even though her mother was fairly old in the picture, she was a lot prettier than Marie had ever been even in her youth. But that prettiness was all in her look and attitude, not in anything overtly physical. I didn't say it quite that way to Marie, but I did say that you could tell her mother wanted to look pretty, and that the same thing had never been a priority for Marie herself.

And then I saw what must (at some level) have been obvious for years. Marie has steered her whole life by a single cardinal principle: For every life-choice her mother made, Marie chose the opposite.

Her mother always made herself pretty; Marie has spent her life almost aggressively plain. Her mother courted men as protectors, both chivalrously and financially; Marie has consistently made her own way. Her mother flirted and slept around; until she got involved with me, Marie believed herself permanently anorgasmic.

I pointed this out to Marie, and added that she had clearly treated this principle AS a principle. In other words, she stuck to it consistently, regardless of outcomes. It didn't matter if the principle led to success or failure; it didn't matter if it made her happy or miserable. All of that was secondary, and nigh to irrelevant. It was as if she had made a vow to the gods, or a grand bargain with the universe, back when she was a teenager: regardless of any outcome, and at any cost to her personal happiness, she would live life as the opposite of her mother.

And it worked. But be careful when you make a vow to the universe to achieve a goal regardless of your personal happiness. Often fate takes you literally.

We discussed this for a while, and the conversation meandered through a number of by-ways. But shortly before we turned out the light, Marie whispered, "It's nice to feel seen."