Lovely platitudes

One of the things that I find quite interesting is thinking back on sentences that I have said in the past. Especially the weird and completely wrong and horrible ones. Doing philosophy at university has helped me a lot in being able to analyze them and say how completely rubbish they are. Giving myself good reason not to say them again. One of these sentences that has peaked my interest over and over again has to be a semi-common one that hopefully people will recognize. This is the typical love platitude of: "honey, of course I don't want to change you, you are great, perfect even, the way you are!". This all done on one of those special quiet nights when looking lovingly into each others eyes. Of course, she replies back with more or less the same thing.

I know many others than me know that this is a rubbish statement (sometimes it seems that everybody but me realized it was rubbish straight away), but if I ask for a show of hands who has done this I would not be surprised to see most people have. I definitely have unfortunately. Worse still, at the time I meant it completely. But then again, back then I did not think very much. Reading philosophy, especially the post modern philosophy, that I really struggle with, has actually given me terminology to be able to explain myself and make sense of even a sentence like this. Since, well I would find it pretty hard to imagine someone, anyone, not wanting to change the person you are going out with. I do not mean completely change, but little things, smooth the rough edges if you like. I would even go so far as to say something cute, like saying that even the most hard-hearted thug would like to change their other half to love them more.

As Jeff Foxwothy (I think it was him and that that is how you spell his name) from the Blue Collar Comedy Festival explains in his one section. Is that he imagines himself being constantly and slowly changed by his wife, even imagining his wife calling her mother to explain how well the changing is going. Something else interesting is that people do want to change as well. I would go so far as to say that the couple changes themselves constantly to suit the other, and if they get to a point where both refuse to change themselves anymore is actually where the couple splits up. Basically that it is the point where the individuals decide (Subconscously) that changing themselves any more would mean that they are not themselves anymore, so they have to leave to maintain their identities.

By changing I also do not mean the complete and sudden change. That is why I brought in the thing about even only changing how much the person loves you. You want the person to be intrinsically the same person, because well, that is the person you decided to go out with and like, maybe even love in the first place. The good post-modern philosophy word for this is iterability. It means that things are repeated, but that they never stay exactly the same, yet there is always enough to recognize something as that something. Take for instance writing, and even typing. I can easily say that I have written the letter "t" countless different ways, and that each time I can still recognize it as a "t". The same with typing, and one can even do this themselves, type a word, and then change the font. No two fonts are exactly the same, but in each font one can still recognize the word written (and I do not include the different language or symbol fonts).

The same thing is true about people. They age, they get haircuts, dye their hair, change clothes even. Each time they are different, yet enough stays the same that one can recognize them. I would say the same is true about relationships. You want to change the other person, but not so much that they cease to remain to be that person.

Jon