Couples You See In Rom-Coms
This piece is a writing experiment. Tell me what you think.
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They pause in the middle of the restaurant. Then he walks off towards the toilets and she chooses a seat. She sits on one side, checks her phone camera then moves to the other side. By the time he returns, she has settled in, a perfect picture. They smile at each other seconds before he even reaches the table.
The movie they’ve just watched was about gay conversion therapy. They start to talk about it, her words an eager jumble, his glances more considered. Abruptly, she picks up the menu. When the waiter comes, he places the order.
She looks slightly older but that could just be their clothes. His body language is more reticent, quiet, filling up his side. While hers, like her words flutter all over the small space she occupies. “I knew this happened but to see it depicted, I mean..” She shudders. Their order, peri-peri fries arrive and they munch on them with equal delicacy.
He takes pictures of her and she poses, laughing, smiling, looking. But when the camera is put away, he smiles and she responds with equal vigour. She asks him a question.
He tells her about coming out. She listens thinking about her own coming out memories, only no one ever calls them that. There are so many coming out conversations that each of us participates in. Statements of our identity, spoken like guilty confessions, asking for acceptance, bursting from us only when we can’t contain them inside any more. This is who I am. That is what I want. This is what I’m good at. That is where I want to live. This is how I breathe best. That feels like the best choice for me. Please accept. Please understand. Please look at me. Please see me. Please still love me.
I watch them exit. He lifts a crumpled piece of paper in one hand. She stops him, palm on shoulder. He stops mid-step. She takes the paper from him. Still talking, he hands it to her. Still listening, she straightens it out and tucks it away in her wallet, the movie ticket.
How sweet, I think. But who do they they’re fooling? Couples like these only exist in rom-coms.
Models: Ramya Pandyan & Anmol Karnik
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The Politics Of Smile
You should smile more, women are told, it makes you look good. This is said as a compliment but is erasure of the person & her emotions. What if she doesn’t feel like smiling? If you’re not a woman, try smiling at someone you don’t like or in a situation that causes you distress. Smiles must blossom on their own, not be demanded.
I grew up with dental issues – protruding, misaligned front teeth, overlapping canines, horizontal molars. I knew I was ugly. Nobody had to tell me, it was in how people responded to my smile (pity, disdain, awkward looking away, mean nicknames). By age 11, I knew I needed dental intervention if I wanted any hope of a better life. “It’ll change the way your face looks”, the orthodontist warned me. “Exactly”, I said and traded all the foods a child loves for years of painful metal braces, rubber bands, mouth plates, retainers. What a world we live in where a 11 year old believes that her worth is only in her smile and is willing to endure pain & sacrifice for it.
I know my good angles now & how to make others interesting. I have mastered the range of things a smile can convey – polite, charming, gracious, shy, confident, welcoming, impersonal. I am a woman in a culture of “Hasee to phasee”. This is why it is unwelcome intrusion when a man decides to advise me on a smile. I have a Ph.D. in the politics of smiles.
In my InstaStories conversation on #PeopleWeDontKnow, 2 men mentioned being complimented on their smiles. We overburden girls with an identity-price tag on smiles. We never let boys/men know that their smiles matter. We give them role models that are angry, brooding & unsmiling. Look at any film poster featuring a macho hero. We suggest that smiling is only aesthetic and the domain of the female, as if to smile is to not be male.
But a smile is a universal expression of all’s-okay. It’s one of the earliest forms of communication we learn. It transcends the politics of gender, age and geography. Finally it expresses joy and creates more joy. So, when was the last time you smiled just because you felt like it?
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Kiss Kiss💋
Do you remember your last kiss? Everyone remembers their first, like we remember our landmark birthdays. But kisses lose their significance as we get older and more experienced in matters of touch.
As our social rituals morph, we find our notions of personal space shifting. Once we gingerly raised clasped hands for a rendition of We Are The World. Now we find ourselves gripping strangers hands as ritual hellos. We shared tiffin boxes, school benches, computers and a football with the opposite sex so long as it followed the rules of ‘healthy not filthy contact’. Growing up in a Catholic school, I went to Christmas dinners & Easter feasts where I was routinely pecked on the cheek by babies, friends and adults of all genders. Touch was a confusing world to navigate.
A kiss is that absolute borderline between personal space and affectionate contact. It’s significant enough to remember the first time that was crossed. But is it no more than a gateway to more, a threshold that once crossed requires no further attention?
The 😘 passes easily between friends, flirting couples and all manner of non-professional conversations. Yet, those of us who remember all the things a kiss can mean are slower on the uptake. In reply to this emoji, I once sent a picture (like above but without dice). To my great dismay, there was no reply. To greater embarrassment, I discovered that the recipient had thought I was saying goodbye.
“But why??”
I demanded.
“Because that is a flying kiss.”
was the reply. FLYING KISS, that delightful gesture of ‘Goodbye but affectionately’ that we teach children. Why don’t we remember that a kiss can mean all these things but always, always affection?
Recently, a friend grabbed me in what was going to be a hug and laid a big SMACK. It reminded me of how lovely it is to be kissed. A kiss is a world of tangible more than smiling eye contact. It has the sweetness of “I LIKE YOU” before the politics of gender & relationship. Show your affection with a kiss (consensually, of course). Be sure to enjoy it because affection is good and so is a kiss.
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Where I Regret Doing The Right Thing
I met him at an event I was hosting. The growing crowds and reactions told me I was doing well. It was welcome respite from the morning’s fight, a common occurrence in the horror story I was living inside.
I was aware of him through the whole day, even as I juggled conversations and thoughts, feeling the headiness of a juggler who knows she’s good at it. He stayed in the corner of my vision, never intrusive, his questions informing the direction of my talk and my secret thrill at being understood powering me on. Then he stopped mid-question and said, “Sorry, I feel like I’m monopolizing your time.” That’s when I realised I wasn’t humming a solo.
When the event ended, I turned my back, willing myself down from the day’s high, steeling myself to return to hell. I turned again when I thought everyone had left. He hadn’t. He was moving to the exit, very deliberately not looking at me. He paused and said, “I feel like an Irish coffee. Do you feel like having Irish coffee?” That is the moment I want to pause. It contains so many layers. The climax of the day’s dance with words and looks. The culmination of things felt and not yet named. The promise of…well, just promise.
I saw him recently, our first interaction in many years. He’s married and a father. He looks happy. Still does. They all do.
It doesn’t bring me comfort or insight to think about how things are meant to be. I focus on the thought that something nice existed for one proming moment. That someone saw the possibility of attraction in my wit, my ideas and my personality rather than in what I could do for them or how I could make them look. It’s nice.
Are you wondering what happened back then? I told him, “No. I have to get back to my boyfriend.” And I went back to a man who hit me, abused me and told me it was all my fault. I didn’t succumb to temptation. I did The Right Thing. I always do because I never want to look back in regret. The thing is, I don’t know if doing the right thing and avoiding regret have anything to do with each other.
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The Jealousy Object
January was an interesting experience, as regards matters of the heart. Interesting, I say, as a way of deflecting the bad-taste-in-mouth feelings that came up. In December I found myself catching the feels for someone I’d known casually for awhile and not given that much thought to. That is not so long ago but given that I was coming out of a dry spell, anything in the range of attraction-affection felt big and intense. I’ve spent most of these weeks trying to discern what is, what I’m feeling and where this goes. It’s important for me to correctly understand what I’m feeling and act accordingly rather than vomit it out in a tantrum and hope for the world to make sense of it.
The good parts of these weeks were feeling desired and attractive. That was really, really good. That’s possibly why it took me some time to realise they weren’t real feelings and that I had inadvertently fallen into somebody else’s game, a game that I had no part in.
There’s no easy way to say this. I’ve written four drafts and all of them are rubbish so I’ll just say it. There’s a guy and there’s a girl. The guy calls her a good friend. The girl calls him a variety of things, depending on who is being spoken to and whether or not he is in the room (ranging from ‘jaanoo’ to well, stories about how he farts in her face when he wakes up next to her in the morning). The guy talks about how exclusivity is a patriarchal concept, how he is the constant in the lives of his friends-with-benefits (who purportedly have partners that are not constant for them). The girl says she knows he sleeps with other people but at least he tells her about it which is better than her last guy. The guy strings her along with “Later”, “Not now” while he’s on dates with others. The girl marks her territory by showing up at the restaurants where he’s on dates.
And why this is a game is because of what happens after. Girl and guy ride off together, often with the hapless date in tow. Sometimes in place of a date, it’s a damsel-in-distress to assuage the guy’s saviour complex. Only said damsels are just needy enough to be allowed mild PDA but never given the status of an actual object of affection. Once the date/damsel-in-distress/Jealousy Object has been discarded or dropped off, guy and girl ride off into the moonshine they’ve built together. Happily ever after.
I realise why I was so ‘confused’ as I described it all these weeks. I do not like being an object of any kind. I am not a fucking dildo for someone else’s messed up headgames. I’m not a sex toy to make somebody else’s fucked up relationship interesting. I do not like being used. I do not fight territory battles over people because people are not property. I’d like to say I don’t play games in relationships but that would be naive so I’ll just say this is not the game I play. Not the jealousy game, no.
I’ve been Sex Object a lot of times. I’ve buckled under the burdens of Affection Object (wherein man showers all his gawdawful poetry/singing and assumes his role is done with the hard work of building a relationship, managing the in-law people and the emotional labour of the relationship falls to me). And now I’m realising I’ve also occasionally been the Jealousy Object. This is the prop that (usually) men use to make the woman they’re with, feel bad about herself so (presumably) she won’t think to leave them.
This is the behaviour exhibited by numerous ex-boyfriends who’ve never been that nice to me but make sure to tell their current partners about how slim I am (body-shaming is the first play in the book of a Jealousy Game player). I’ve also been the ‘She’s more successful than you’ prop’ and the ‘So much cooler than you’ thing on account of my recent stage career.
I have never liked it. It’s a horrible thing to do a person and no, it doesn’t not feel like a compliment to me. Firstly, it is not a compliment to me to be used to make another woman feel bad. Secondly, there is nothing complimentary about using me as an object to incite some feeling in a relationship with someone else. That’s no better than a picture in Playboy that a man might use mentally to get off, were he not feeling that attracted to his partner.
Not that the girl’s behaviour is anything I want to feel empathy over. The feminist in me shies away from outright shaming but honestly, settling for someone who behaves badly is just a bad idea. What’s more, this willingness to play along and assert territoriality in desperate ways weakens things for all women. And finally and most important to me, it is directly disrespectful to me. I don’t care how badly you’ve been treated before or how weak you are or how much you care about him — none of these will ever be good enough reason for you to use me.
Ugh, I am utterly disgusted by both people’s behaviour, no matter how objectively I try to look at it. As some kind of poor consolation prize, I guess I’m lucky I got out with not too much harm done and at least with a post to boot.
Argh will it ever stop, this discovering of how fucky-ass fuccbois (and their complicit females) can be?
P.S. – Here’s another worthy piece of content that came to be because of the above experience.
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I’m Always Coming of Age
I’m like Sleeping Beauty in that I’ve been dead for most purposes, except for two years, not a hundred. An entirely consuming set of relationships and work projects burnt through me and left me in nothingness. And now I feel ready to awaken or be reborn. I say reborn, because everything feels fresh and new, like I can become a different person, find a different model of relationships, build a different career. This isn’t the first of its kind in my life. I have had many careers after all, and I’ve been many different people with all the relationships that have passed through my life.
Early this year, I waded into the possibility of a romantic liaison. It was great. Exciting, dramatic, fun, unexpected and always, a little terrifying. He didn’t want what I wanted. I felt myself standing on the precipice of endless, burning painful emotion and it felt so familiar, I almost didn’t recognise it for the bad pattern I’ve lived through my whole life. Somewhere dimly I knew I was ingesting something that had proved to be bad for me in earlier times and I choked, sputtering, asking for time and space to think it through. I didn’t get it and that reminded me of another time in my life. In the middle of the most corrosive, damning relationship of my life, I still fought for clarity in my mind and I suggested a specific framework of space to him, that would take out all the pressures that kept us in that status quo. He flat out refused and in frantic aggression shut it down with what sounded like a threat – that we’d break up if I did that. It ended with every form of torture, abuse and humiliation that he could exact on me. I still think if we had done as I’d suggested, he and I might at least have stayed friends, respectful of each other instead of these poisoned factions.
This time, I know better. I know I am right, even if I’m not able to articulate it in the cold-logic/intellectual arguments that characterise my romances. If I must act in undignified, messy, ‘overemotional’ ways, I will. And that’s what I did. I got sarcastic, I wept and I crashed. It allowed me to put that distance and space. And then I ran away to Pune.
Perhaps this was the person to take the chance on, that I did on the wrong people in the past. But this doesn’t feel like the right time now. I realised my love life has been driven by FOMO (fear of missing out). They have been flinch reactions to the fear that I can see an emotional range that the other cannot and that I must carry us till they’re able to.
A friend said something about a specific situation (with someone else) that made sense to me:
“I think you’re crediting him with a lot more emotional depth and intelligence than he’s shown in all these years.”
And I realised the truism in ‘Not my circus’. This always felt like a cold thing but it is really not. There are the indulgences that one can extend, the minor adjustments one is willing to make. But one really cannot and should not attempt to fill in the thinking (intellectual or emotion) that the other person is supposed to do. That’s only a relationship with myself if I do that.
I’ve gotten into the habit of struggling, really suffering through this situation. I had to remind myself that I find it relatively easy to free myself of habits, especially those that don’t serve me. It helped to be in Pune, a place that always clears my head. I moped a bit, slept a little too much at the wrong times, binge-watched Netflix, spoke a little much or too little to the wrong people and overslept the morning I was to return. And then I picked myself up and got onto that bus back. On the way, I looked at myself in that wonderful thing called the selfie camera and I realised I’d be okay.
The weekend was better. I started with a performance. I know the way to shake a habit is not to avoid it but to look it square in the eye. So I brought my story of Custody to stage. A friend accompanied me and then cooked me lunch. Another friend picked us up and we spent an evening together.
Somewhere along the way, we got to optimising my social media feed. Emotions and what’s happening in my heart will always lace the things I do and it’s best I let them instead of drawing artificial walls there. In the examining of the images that make up the last 6 years of my life, I found myself able to say this doesn’t matter any more, this must be removed, that can be put away without clinging. And 24 hours later, I have a cleaner feed and a lighter heart.
I am constantly coming of age, it’s true. And here, it begins again.
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In The Name Of Love (For Many)
Polyamory: Millennial Free Love Or Old Cheating With A New Name?
I’ve written about polyamory before though on The Idea-smithy rather than here. Let me start by explaining why I did that. I know running two blogs is no mean feat but the trickiest thing is not the ideation (hah, look at my name!) or content production. It’s deciding what goes where and when. The Idea-smithy was my first blog and is the source of my pen name, now a stage name, a preferred identity and the base of my social and professional world. XX Factor started as an offshoot of The Idea-smithy, a standout character from a cast that also featured some pretty dark poetry, moody home truths, wistful and wishful thinking and just fantasy. My posts about womanhood and about men seemed important – to me and my readers and so I decided they merited a blog of their own. In the 15 years since then, my understanding of my own gender, sex, sexuality and identity have evolved. These come from personal experiences whose accounts rightfully belong in The Idea-smithy since it was and still is a personal journal. But the specific love-sex-dating-relationships-gender incidents as well as how they affect my identity sit with XX Factor. Sometimes it’s hard to draw those distinctions. But all of this works as long as I compartmentalise. It’s very important to me.
So how do I decide where to put a subject like polyamory? Fundamentally it seems to be about love and sex, so yes XXFactor. On the other hand, it is about language, about society’s norms, about our personal politics and how we navigate the world and that makes The Idea-smithy claim it. I guess at the deepest level, I don’t know how I feel about it. So I can’t decide which neat and tidy room in my life to place it in – my emotions or my ideologies.
I’ve known polyamorous people. I’ve been out with some. I have felt a deep connection, even great affection for a polyamorous person. But I’ve also known a lot of men who use polyamory as license to cheat and humiliate their partners. I’ve known more than I think, my fair share of ways in which men exploit every privilege afforded them by the world to wreck destruction. “You can love multiple people” feels like handing over a loaded gun to a seven year old with non-existent impulse control and a propensity to damage things.
I have known at least three women whose partners have philandered (and I don’t care if that word sounds old-fashioned because it’s still relevant) and caused them long-term damage through public humiliation, gaslighting and financial exploitation, all in the name of loving many. I was the subject (the target) of the attentions of these ‘polyamorous’ men. That they ranged from ‘dangerous conversations’ to ‘sexual harassment’ is semantics. Because the nature of trust and respect is hard to define and words are but warm air until someone decides to assign meaning to sounds. We all do and we place so much faith in them that it’s easy – too easy – to get lost and to get hurt. I’ve seen it all happen.
All my experiences of love and sex that contribute to this blog stem from experiences that challenge me and make me question who I am, at the core. Whether it was wondering how I felt towards people who loved others of the same sex or whether it’s taking a stand on abortion, it always comes down to this. I accept the human condition with all the ways in which other people express it differently from me. Acceptance means bearing witness with respect, not being indifferent or judgemental. It was relatively easy to conclude this for a gay/lesbian person. A little harder (intellectually) to come to this mental place for a trans person. Not even a question when it came to kinks and distinguishing sexual inclinations from tangled emotions. But I still don’t know where I stand on polyamory.
If it’s only about feeling love for a lot of people, what’s new about that? Isn’t that every single human being on the planet and what’s the need for a special label for this? If it’s about non-monogamous sex, Tinder made that the reality of our generation and again, why a label? And then, how are there also marriages and couples within polyamory since those terms define exclusively monogamous relationships (by law too)? My thoughts are as cliched as those of monogamous people, the overwhelming one being, “It’s hard enough to maintain one romantic relationship, how on earth do people manage multiple ones simultaneously?”. And yet, I detest labels so I chafe at being clubbed in with the monogamous. This doesn’t mean I willingly pledge my troth with the opposite side because polyamory is a label too. It’s easiest for me to be okay with everyone doing their own thing, mainly because I see these as if from the outside.
The hardest thing is being part of the picture and living it with grace. ‘Polyamory’ like so much else reminds me of the horrible past relationship that was systematically strewn with every manner of lying, humiliation and abuse. That he began our relationship with the sentence “I don’t want any of this open relationship shit. Brutal honesty, that’s all.” and meticulously went on to lie and cheat in every textbook way while making me end my friendships with exes and keeping me off the stage – these still loom large and dark in my perceptions, no matter how hard I try and keep perspective.
Earlier this year I met someone who introduced me to ‘the poly community’. Of course, I remembered thinking, something like this needs a community. For one, it’s a hard idea for the world to accept and there’s strength in numbers. Secondly, by its very definition, polyamory means loving several people, including the people that the ones you love, love. In theory that sounded nice. I always thought I was a 70s hippie flower child born in the wrong time, after all. The idea of a contemporary commune of people expressing love and respect openly, minus social restrictions and free of the pseudo-spiritual drug culture of the time, sounded wonderful. In reality however, it was a dark room (why? there were plenty of lights and in Mumbai, the electricity never goes) with a heavy fog of weed smoke. The conversations ranged from inane to mundane, the kind you’d find in any watering joint in this city on a weekend, among people desperately trying to fill loneliness with intoxication and noise. And finally, it didn’t last longer than a few weeks as Person A’s ‘primary’ Person B moved to another city and Person C (earlier a secondary) decided they preferred Person D, who in turn was great friends with B, and also got along really well with me while their primary ‘knew’ (don’t ask me if that’s in the biblical sense) my ex’s somethingsomething. I couldn’t keep track of primaries, secondaries, tertiaries and whatever comes after that. That last bit did it.
While I’ve been slightly amused by a friend freaking out about Sex Degrees of Separation, this is getting just too connected for comfort. I never want to remember that the monster I was engaged to, inhabits the same universe as me. Of course, he does, but compartmentalisation allows me to keep my sanity and peace of mind and focus on things that matter to me. I don’t want to have any conversations about love or sex or intimacy or anything with anybody even remotely connected to him. Full termination, amputation, whatever you may call it. Even while I don’t like them, boundaries work for me.
Which brings me back to – Polyamorous People. I’ll never judge an idea. It is after all, something magical, something intangible that has the power to shape identities, change lives, transform generations. People though, are much smaller, pettier and more limited than ideas. And this is after all, not about how I feel about polyamory but how I feel about polyamorous people.
That, I think will depend on the person themselves. There are people that I am willing to overlook some of my rules, for. There are others whose seemingly minor infractions are causes to block, unmatch, report, ghost or terminate. There’s no one formulaic reaction to polyamorous people (or their communities) because there’s no one formulaic polyamorous person. This is not judgemental, it’s accepting and respectful while staying true to my nature.
I don’t know what I’d do if I fell in love with a polyamorous person and didn’t want to become one though.
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If you liked this post, you’ll want to follow the Facebook Page and the Youtube channel. I’m Ramya Pandyan (a.k.a. Ideasmith) and I’m on Twitter and Instagram.
A Bleeding Goddess
Has it occurred to anybody that we are debating a woman’s right to worship in the same month that this religion worships womanhood? Navratri, Durga Puja or Pujo, whatever name you know this festival by, honours Shakti, the divine female force that manifests in abundance (Lakshmi), wisdom (Saraswati), loving relationship (Parvati) – just a few of the avatars that Hinduism revers. Durga specifically, represents the female force against evil. And what is more evil than discrimination, than treating human beings as less than human? It is especially ironical that the very thing that is considered prime about the female energy — the ability to bear life — is also used as a reason to discriminate against everyday women.
Let’s examine menstruation taboos. What makes a woman unclean during her period days? I’ve heard people tell me that this was used as a way to give the woman rest from her hard labour and to keep her husband from imposing sex on her. Even if this were true and the only way to give a woman rest at one point of time, is this the world we want to live in? What does it say about us as a society if the only way we can allow a woman rest and reprieve from forced sexual demands is by making her taboo? Are men and society at large that indifferent to a woman’s personhood — her health, her wellbeing and her consent? And if that is the case, what kind of hypocrisy is it to worship this same aspect of the women that they discriminate against?
Menstrual blood is not unclean and is not an excuse to treat menstruating humans as untouchable. A period is not an illness, not a reason to quarantine menstruating people. Women are human beings, not objects to be put out of harm’s way or intoxicants to be locked away.
This is my poem about the dichotomy of being an object of worship/discrimination in my culture. The background score was composed by the talented Karthik Rao and the animation and video production were by KalArt/Bramha Media. Thank you Kunal Jhawar and Nalini Ujjain for bringing my message to the world.
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If you liked this post, you’ll want to follow the Facebook Page and the Youtube channel. I’m Ramya Pandyan (a.k.a. Ideasmith) and I’m on Twitter and Instagram.
