Thursday, August 04, 2005Gear RatiosI had dinner the other night with Jill, my ex-husband's girlfriend, and we came up with a great metaphor: gear ratios.I was trying to figure out a way to express what I saw between them, and how it differed so much from what I experienced in my own relationship with him. They work well together. They seem to be in sync with each other's rhythms better. They don't annoy each other on a molecular level by just being so different from one another. It isn't so much that she's a better person than I am. It's that she's a better person for him. They seem to move through the world at a similar pace. Me, I kind of, well, blast through the world. I have a lot of energy (or so I've been told; I tend to notice the times when I'm in reverse a lot more often than I notice the times I'm in fifth, but maybe that's because I simply feel more comfortable at the higher speeds.) I cut big swaths. I see something neat I want to do and then I just kind of fix my mind and do it. I have a difficult time with not getting things done. Gavin and Jill also get things done. They survive in the world with just as much success as I do. They just move at a different speed. Not bad, but different. It's like we're built with different gearing. I finally saw the metaphor while I was talking with her. I am kind of a big gear with lots of teeth. I'm complex and when I move through life I have big strides and cover lots of territory. Their gears are smaller. They move through life but at a different pace. They tend to stop and savor and rest a bit more than I do. What's important is not the size or configuration of your gear; it's how you match up to the person with whom you've chosen to be linked. So me with my big wheel and lots of teeth just never could match up very well with Gavin's particular configuration. Still doesn't. Sometimes the teeth mesh and we get some traction and forward movement, but much of the time it's just a lot of grinding and sparks. None of this is a value judgment. What attracted me to Gavin in the first place was the fact that he was configured differently from me; and I suspect the same was true for him. He liked my way of doing things just as much as I liked his. The problems occurred when we couldn't figure out a way to hook the two different methodologies together and create a machine that was mutually beneficial. Because that's the point of a relationship, right? To find someone with whom you are well-linked and join forces. A good relationship is a machine that, in theory, makes life easier for both people (or more if there are other family members involved). The goal is not to just each individually spin our wheels for our years on the planet, but to find a mate that can successfully entrain with us and make our lives smoother and happier. Requiring less motive force. There are many sets of wheels involved. There is the moving-through-life gear that I described above. But there is also the spiritual questing gear: sometimes a person is wired to be a spiritual seeker, sometimes that question is of scant interest. There is the creativity gear: obviously someone like Gauguin (who took off to Tahiti to paint) and his wife (who stayed behind to mind the house) were not enjoying a mutually-beneficial gear ratio together. There are gears for all aspects of it. Food, child rearing, housekeeping. All of it. Will we ever find anyone who meshes up perfectly? Of course not. That would be impossible and, probably, pretty boring in the long run. When things go badly, I think the teeth of one's gears start wearing down. Things stop mattering. The ability to hook in starts slipping away. If it goes on too long, the teeth eventually wear down and disappear. That aspect of your life becomes smooth and incapable of connecting at all with anything else. That gear just spins freely, alone. I think the goal is to find someone who meshes in enough of the basics that together you create a machine that functions. The more the gears fit, the more smoothly the operation of the machine. And when it's running well, then everyone has time and energy to spend working on the places where some maintenance is in order, or a bit of oil, or some machining so the gears work just a bit better than they did before. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 3:53 AM  
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