A musing on long distance amorous relationships

I wondered today whether I, living in a long distance relationship with my partner (¿ligados al infinito?), who lives across the ocean, en el ultramar, was living naively. Do I really know whom I’m in a relationship with? It is not the first time I have wondered this, even in close-distance relationships. But the ultramar highlighted the profile of this conundrum.

Really, the conundrum arose after climaxing. I had been imagining her (she has given me permission to do so at my leisure). Whom was I just imagining? This was especially prudent to wonder because my fantasy had been a few years in the future, the sacred moment when we should decide to conceive.

I was just imagining conceiving with this woman whom I had only lived a few months with in person! Was I not getting carried away?

My questions led me where many of my questions do: Leibniz’s nonidentity principal, Levinas’s concept of otherness (“alterity“), transmission loss in self-expression¹, the definition of the self (should it exist), and the discipline of psychology–whether it bears promise in informing these questions.

Simply put, what seems more naive than my optimism about her and my relationship is the idea that we should ever know the internal workings, or the “self” we choose to date.

That is OK. It is not a sad state to know at best the tip of the iceberg of our partner’s personality. I find it one of the mysteries of life; we should marvel at the person in bed with us as we to the distance universe or distance past. We may come to know some facts and like what we see. We may piece together a narrative we like. We may experience troubling periods of decomposition and confusion. Through love, we’ll march on.

1. “Transmission loss in self expression” is a concept I’m working on and to my knowledge have developed.  The basic idea is that a sentence is not that to which it refers and therefore we are limited in the extent to which we can transmit facts about ourselves, assuming that we are capable of learning them.  Sentences are most often the contact one has with our selves; they transmit parts of us, our thoughts, and feelings, but not the whole thing and perhaps not even a sufficient amount for understanding.  At best, sentences, even spoken and embodied, omit relevant data or information.  I call this “transmission loss” as it reminds me of various physical transmissions, like energy through a chord, some of which is lost as heat through the chord’s base, genes or traits through conception, data through satellite, and so on (I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand the mechanisms of transmission loss in the latter two but that data through satellite should be similar to energy through chord).  While it may be true that a practical level of sufficiency in transmission is reached, it is interesting that something should be lost necessarily.  Furthermore, just because something is practical does not mean that it is correct, right, or ideal.  A useful…metaphor…is between metaphor and that which it represents; the metaphor can never fully describe that which it represents.  (Turn metaphor on itself for some “meta” fun).