Beautiful Mess: Proximity

Proximity: The state of being close to something or someone.

At some point in our lives each one of us has known what it feels like to have a sense of closeness with someone. When we feel like we know the person well enough to predict their behaviours, attitudes and feelings towards life, its gifts and burdens. It’s a beautiful state to be in. There exists a mutual understanding of who we are as people and what we expect from life. There exists a sense of proximity.

Proximity is a state in which the heart feels most secure, but it can also be a state that is filled with some tension or conflict.

I don’t think we can alienate emotional proximity from relational conflict. Have you ever wondered why conflict with the people we are closest to hits the hardest? It’s easier to expect the opposite. Sometimes we like to think that we should almost have no conflict with the people we are closest to. We sometimes tend to think that the gardens of intimacy with our closest ones shouldn’t have any thorns. Often, we perceive thorns as hindrances to intimacy when, the opposite can be true.

Thorns, spines, prickles, quills; These words all describe sharp pointed defensive outgrowths found on both plants and animals. One animal that we all know that has these sharp pointed outgrowths is the porcupine. Embedded in the skin of a porcupine are quills meant to protect it from predators. I know what you must be thinking, what do porcupines have to do with human intimacy or conflict? To answer this question, I’d have to borrow from hedgehog’s dilemma which explores how porcupines behave in the winter and its relation to human intimacy.

The Hedgehog’s Dilemma while having been popularized by Sigmund Freud, is originally a parable by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer contained in one of his last books before he died. The parable is laid out in one of his essays in his book “Parerga and Paralipomena”:

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter, but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However, the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way, the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse is the code of politeness and fine manners, and those who transgress it are roughly told—in the English phrase—to keep their distance. By this arrangement, the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied, but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

Arthur Schopenhauer (2014, p. 99)

There have been different interpretations of this Dilemma but allow me to give my own. I believe that people who are close to each other are more likely to hurt each other than people who are not. One reason may be because when we expose ourselves to people, they get to see us for all we are, our strengths and weaknesses alike. I recall hearing someone say, “Marriage exposed how selfish I can be”. And as expected, the result of being transparent as a result of closeness includes hurt, because as alluded to in the previous post, the fact that we are all unique guarantees that our relationships with one another will involve conflict.

So obviously, if relationship in this case is the basis for both calm and chaos, a close relationship of whatever form will most likely experience conflict that’s in a way proportional to the degree of closeness of that relationship. Queen Latifah once said, “People who are not around make very few mistakes”. No hurt hurts more than from the people you are closest to.

However, there is hope because a healthy relationship is built on the basis of mutual understanding and appreciation of another’s uniqueness. So, while being close to someone doesn’t automatically eliminate conflict, positions us in a place where we can question our ability to “die to self”. It gives us an opportunity to re-evaluate what we are willing to sacrifice for the sake of our relationships.

Like porcupines, when winter comes, we need warmth. We need those close relationships that we keep avoiding due to our fear of conflict. Having conflict may not always be a bad thing. In a way, it reveals how much we care. What we need is to realise that we will never not have conflict, and with the people we love the most, we need to learn to manage it. And if we ever get so close that we start to hurt each other with our quills, we may need to re-establish our sense of self. We may need to develop boundaries.

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Hey, thanks so much for reaching the end of this post. This is the second post in a series titled “Beautiful Mess” I hope you found it worth reading!

Be sure to subscribe to this blog so that you’re informed whenever I post and leave a like on this post. Also, I’d like to know what yall’s experiences with managing conflict with your closest ones has been. Let’s have a discussion in the comments! See you in the next one.