the essence of love is... annoyance? - by Ava

For everyone who’s participated in the matchmaking experiment—I will be sending out your matches tonight or tomorrow morning, thanks to Sophia’s hard work :) To everyone who didn’t get in this round: we will do another batch soon!!

When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy. How could you have known? Should you have known?

I find myself wondering how other people feel in relationships, or how they desire to feel. Jackson told me about the “bored or annoyed” test a few years ago—some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed. And then I realized: the essence of love is annoyance.

The bored and annoyed test is actually a question about closeness: would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws? I remember talking to Daria about this guy I was seeing, saying that the circumstances of his life seemed overwhelmingly complicated to me. And she said, well, people with complicated internal lives often have complicated external lives. Seen that way, feeling annoyed is a gift from god.

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