There are some nasty words that I live with being called. Bitch? Fine. Insecure? Aren’t we all. The “C” word? I’d rather you didn’t, but doesn’t that say more about you than it does about me?
Still I cringed a few months back when, during a lighthearted discussion with my boyfriend, when we were constructively describing our perception of the other’s weaknesses, a word came up, the worst one I think has ever been used to describe me: Needy.
I envisioned a woman with dripping, seaweed-like appendages, draping them around her tree-trunk of a man, weeping for him not to leave her. I felt a pang of nausea and felt my cheeks turn crimson. I was embarrassed, HUMILIATED, by this designation.
Jesse saw my look of terror and realized our playful conversation was over.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t get bent out of shape about this. There’s nothing wrong with being a little needy from time to time.” His efforts at placating me felt cruel.
We were driving on the Bay Bridge; he was fiddling with the radio station so nonchalantly. How could he say something so brutal and then respond by turning up the Black Eyed Peas?
I tried to hold onto my rationality. I had, after all, started this little game by suggesting that we be honest with each other. Of course, I had no intention of hearing anything new about my shortcomings; I figured I knew them already. I’d wanted to create a forum where we could discuss his annoying tendencies. Was he on to me? Was I subconsciously fishing for compliments and hoping he’d say something like, “Sometimes you are overwhelmingly powerful; it intimidates me.”
The way he was tapping my right thigh to the beat of “Let’s Get It Started” he seemed to say to me, “Yeah, intimidating…as IF.”
For the next few hours I tried to understand why I was so hurt by the word “needy.” We all have needs, right? Being needy at times doesn’t mean that I’m not independent, no? Perhaps Jesse wanted me to be needy, to fill that need in him to be needed.
Maybe not.
It was clear that I was perturbed about something by the way I got into bed that night, turning away from him and balancing on the edge of the mattress as if to say, “see, I don’t really need my half of the bed, dig?” In the morning I still felt out of sorts, misunderstood. I felt I couldn’t go on unless I asked.
“What did you mean last night when you said I was needy?” I said, trying not to indicate that the relationship and the bulk of my self-esteem rested on his answer. He winced, knowing he was facing a Pandora’s box.
I really wasn’t angling for a fight, or even to win. I really wanted to know: What makes a man think a woman is needy? I had a job, goals, friends. I didn’t need him to take me out places and oftentimes paid my share or more. I had no qualms with the activities that he did on his own, without me. I didn’t monitor his whereabouts. Granted, I had some problems getting places, even with a map, and fixing the toilet, but I managed to live by myself, with plumbing, for five years. What did he mean?
He didn’t have an answer, nor did he didn’t want to provide one.
“Just give me an instance,” I said. “Tell me when I’ve been needy.”
He said, “I honestly can’t at the moment.”
“What would I have to do differently, then?” I said. “Not care about your whereabouts? Not ever worry about you? Not bother to call you when you’re working late and wonder if you want me to make dinner?”
“There,” he said.
“There what?”
“Right now,” he said. “Right now you are being needy.”
I felt condemned from the start. By trying to understand what Jesse meant I was entering one of the famous Chinese Finger Traps of relationships, where resistance to the other’s opinion only intensified the branding. Resist any more and I would have been borderline neurotic; any less and I would have been accepting of his perception, but the pressure would recede, and we could slip out, back to ourselves.
I slunk away to read, dissatisfied. And as I began to drift into my book, I caught myself for a moment immersed in the material, and then falling out of it as I became conscious of that immersion. The immersion scared me a little, transporting me away from my perturbed state; away from anger and resentment.
In this state there was no one to blame, no one to rely on for a cause or a reason to rise up.
It was silent. It was boring. It was a state of independence.
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