Bipolar Ambigamy: On not admitting you're sending mixed messages




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Summary: Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. I don't see any way out of it. I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it. How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view. The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change. How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution. So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it. Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this? Should I be open to this? Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship. The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice. Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar. Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition. They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other. For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance, or at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive. They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals. They give each other room to breath and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open. In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership. In contrast, bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romanti