emotions Archives - The Cracked Door

What I Learned Developing a Long-Distance Relationship with a Woman from the Other Side of the World

I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned from dating a woman living on the other side of the world. My ex-girlfriend is a Thai woman who was living in Cambodia, and we met when I took a trip there.

One major mistake we made is that we did not give enough time being together in the same place. For context, we went on a few dates while I was in Cambodia. Then after chatting for a month and a half by text, we met together for two weeks in Vietnam, before I went back to New York where I lived at the time, and she went back to her home in Cambodia. Then three months later, she came to New York for what turned out to be a month and a half trip visiting New York and also Washington state.

After this, we decided to travel the world together, which in effect involved living together on the road. That was too soon for such a step. To be clear, I don’t think touring Vietnam, New York, and Washington state were bad trips. They were very impactful experiences that deepened our relationship. Our problem was that we did not know enough about each other to decide to live together while traveling the world.

That was too big of a jump for where we were at, and it turned out to be the wrong call. Once we traveled together, we realized all sorts of incompatibilities and tensions that eventually destroyed our relationship.

Traveling with a significant other in itself can be difficult. One of my friends quibbed that traveling together is a relationship “on hard mode” as you constantly have to make complex decisions together while also being potentially tired and removed from a stable rhythm or sense of place. But I don’t think that primarily explains why we had the tension. We did not do enough work evaluating whether we were compatible in the first place.

Compatibility is difficult to evaluate when a relationship is long-distance. That’s one of the long-distance relationship’s biggest difficulties. Living in the same city (even if they live on the other side of town) allows you to see the person in your daily routine. You can feel out how you feel with them everyday, how your lifestyles’ overlap or conflict, and what to do about the latter.

Some in my generation insist that couples should move in together before getting married to evaluate whether they are compatible. I would go that far per se, but living in the same town is important. Seeing them as you go about your day and week and doing the many little things together that make up regular life helps you understand whether you fit.

Our long-distance relationship was stuck on the honeymoon phase, where we were head over heels with each other, perhaps naively so. Psychologists who have studied this phase of relationships report that people usually notice our partner’s flaws but do not consider them a big deal. Instead, we tend to minimize potential problems in favor of the positive aspects. It’s in later stages of the relationships that we truly process these flaws and any other tensions in the relationship and actively work through them. It’s necessary to do this to evaluate whether you two really are a good fit.

When a relationship is long-distance, you often communicate on your own terms. Whether it is texting or calling, you interact with the person according to your schedules. You may speak with your partner frequently – for example, at this time, I generally spoke with her twice a day – but there’s something about only texting, chatting, and video-calling that does not help move the relationship out of the honeymoon phase.

I believe the reason is that these virtual, long-distance communications are not a major disruptions to our day-to-day lives. It’s by incorporating the other person into our day-to-day lives that tends to move the relationship out of the infatuation stage and start to show the frictions inherent in the relationship. It both allows us to experience them enough to get under our skin, but it also requires more of a shift into our lives that causes friction.

I remember a priest in my home church growing up once reflecting in a sermon about his experience counseling new couples planning to get married. One of the first questions he asks the couples is, “During your fights, how do you two fight? What do you tend to do?” Some newly dating couples will respond that they have never had a fight before, and he’ll tell them to wait until they get through a major fight and then come back to get married. For him, having had a fight is a sign that they are close and not having had a major fight demonstrates that they are not intimate enough for marriage. Genuine intimacy requires getting under each other’s skin, which necessarily produces friction and tension.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we never fought while our relationship was long-distance. It was not intimate enough to do so. Unsurprisingly, during our trips together traveling (both in Vietnam, New York, and Washington), we did fight. The longer we were together, the more significant our fights became, precisely because we were sharing more of our regular lives together, leading to greater opportunity for connection and friction. The long-distance phases, though, felt similar to freezing fruit to prevent it from ripening: typical reactions were suppressed, preventing the relationship from moving to the next stage.

What is the alternative for someone in a long-distance relationship? I don’t know. Ideally one should close the gap and move to the same place, but in many circumstances, that is not realistic. This is still what I have noticed at least, even if it can be a hard truth for two people considering dating who do not live in the same place.

How Best to Respond to Anger? (Part Two in Philosophy of Anger Series)

This is the second part in my series about the philosophy of anger. In this part, I will focus on how to respond to anger.

When you are angry, you should first figure out why you are angry (that may seem kind of obvious). As you sort through that, you should evaluate how you feel about the fact that you are angry (in particular, what this tells you about what your needs are in life) and how you plan to respond.

In determining why you are angry, the following questions can help:

1) What injustice do you perceive, and/or what needs do you feel like are not being met?

This can often seem like an incredibly easy question to answer, since most manifestations of anger (especially rage anger) make us vividly aware of what we are angry about and what we are lacking.

But, it can err easily, so we should take this with a form of skepticism. In the heat of the moment, something may clearly seem like the source of our anger, but if we reflect a little more deeply, we may realize more complex issues underlie our feeling, that we rushed to a conclusion about what was happening, and/or that there was something wrong with our initial expectations in the first place. Anger can mislead us away from what truly matters.

Some forms of anger (especially the passive anger discussed in Part One) often blind us from what is making us angry and why. Such anger may orients us at ourselves only to have to realize that we were not the source of the problem. Rage anger has the opposite problem: it orients us towards external problems, which means that in some situations we need to pause and realize how our own actions may be contributing to the problem.

2) Is the injustice you perceive real and legitimate?

Like I already discussed in Part 1, a person can be angry at something that is not actually happening. Our emotions react to what we perceive to be happening, not what is actually happening, so we should pause to reflect on the accuracy of the interpretation of events that is causing us to feel angry.

Take, for example, a husband who thinks his wife is cheating on when she’s not. Maybe, he interprets whatever she is doing that day as her visiting another sexual partner when she’s just going about a normal day. Anger can lock this husband into his interpretation, putting him in a type of “go” mode by orienting him to do something about it.

It’s good to take a moment to determine if our anger is clouding our judgement about what is actually happening. Do you even have enough relevant information to know what is going on in the first place? In particular, what information do we have to understand what someone else is doing, and are we jumping to conclusions about their intentions?

Furthermore, maybe we need to reflect on our underlying expectations. We most often feel angry when some implicit expectation for how something will go does not occur. Sometimes our expectations are reasonable, but sometimes they are not. It can also be useful to reflect on our underlying expectations.

3) Who is responsible for the injustice, and how responsible actually is the person who I think is responsible?

Anger often orients us to blame a certain person or group. For externally-oriented rage anger, this tends to be someone else, and for the internally-oriented passive anger, that person tends to be oneself. Either way, reflecting on whether we are jumping too quickly to blame someone is useful.

4) What should we do to address the injustice?

This is the final and arguably most important question. Anger often orients us to act to fix the injustice in some way. This is reasonable: injustices are bad, and we should live in a world without that injustice or at least have the harm of what happened repaired as much as possible. If we cannot rectify the injustice, we at least need to develop a way to live with it resiliently. At the same time, anger can push us to act quickly to do something now, and whatever action feels right in the moment may not be the best way to resolve the injustice long-term.

The question of how to best address an injustice is a tactical question and an incredibly complex tactical question at that. Anger can cause us to narrow our thinking towards whatever specific response we are thinking about in that moment, but we often should pause and think about other types of solutions that may turn out to work better in the long run. For complex societal injustices, there will likely be legitimate debate about the best way to rectify the wrong.

For example, during the Civil Rights movements, different black leaders and organizations (such as Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X) proposed very different tactics for how black people should best respond to the racial injustices they encountered. Each strategy had their advantages and disadvantages, and thus probably different situations when they were appropriate. It may be better that the debate of how to respond remains open because different black individuals and communities will face different specific circumstances over time that will require them to adapt and figure out how to respond differently.

In this kind of big debate about how to respond to a major, multifaceted injustice in the world, I think the feeling of anger plays an important part in orienting us to act in the first place and helping us think through whether specific strategic responses feel like they would provide a lasting feeling of peace and justice, but we obviously also need to employ our many other mental faculties to think through what the best ways to address them.

All these questions may be answered at once or in a different order than the logical, linear order presented here. An emotion like anger may even direct us to process these matters in a nonlinear way. That’s fine, but I think these are all four important questions to think through before carrying out one’s desired response to anger. Even in an emergency situation, one can take a second or two to work through all of them. Anger tends to direct us to act quickly even potentially impulsively, so these questions form “doubt reflexes” that help reground us and think through our actions.

Now, none of this is meant to imply that anger, or any emotion for that matter is bad. I do not believe that emotions are bad or that “reason” is a better guide for making decisions than emotions. Insofar as these are separable, I think both are incredibly useful psychological tools humans have, and they work best working alongside each other.

On a practical level when making a decision, it’s helpful to think through a few different lenses or angles, including working through how one feels and what decision feels satisfying emotionally and what decisions seem best from the perspective of a rational calculation. This is both because undergoing multiple decisions making strategies slows us down and slowing down helps people make better decisions, and because these two ways of thinking seem to complement each other well, often picking up on the biases and blind spots from the other way of thinking.

A Philosophy Anger Part One: What is Anger?

How would you define anger to an alien from outer space who has never experienced the feeling. Anger is the type of thing that pretty much everyone seems to understand but is incredibly hard to define or describe, but I find thinking through what anger is to be incredibly useful in thinking about how to respond to the world around us, most specifically how to respond to injustices in the world. I think anger has far broader manifestations that the everyday understandings of the feeling don’t explore.

In this series, I will define anger, describe some of its different forms, and discuss how to best respond to anger.

Part One: So what Is Anger?

To me, anger is any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If I had to put words the most common everyday definition of anger, I would describe it as “an intense conflictive feeling against a perceived injustice that directs us to act to counteract that slight.” I think it takes many different forms far beyond this everyday definition though.

What I like about this definition is that it situates anger as a response to a slight as a way to orient us to act towards addressing that slight, but I think it limits too much the types of emotional responses people have when they experience such injustices. Humans have a variety of intertangled emotional responses to injustices that direct us towards different strategies of action, and I think in understanding this, we can think through how to approach the injustices in our world.

Defining a Few Key Words in My Definition

So, let’s first talk about what a “perceived injustice” means. First, we have “injustice.” What is just or unjust is an incredibly complex philosophical questions debated for thousands of years, so I will not venture into that discussion here. But suffice to say that every individual has a sense of what justice is that grounds our expectations for how people will interact with them on a daily level. This, often, intuitive or implicit set of expectations often seem to ground our emotional responses to the world. If I say, “Hello,” to someone, and they rob me, then this disrupts my sense of expectations of what that interaction would entail in a way that I would perceive as “unjust,” meaning I will probably feel angry. Whether robbing me in that moment was justified according to some abstract sense of justice or morality is less important for my emotional response because these implied expectations, not a rationale assessment of true justice, seem to form the basis for our emotional responses.

Next, “perceived” is important here. We get angry when we perceive an injustice. To be angry, we only need to perceive that something is unjust. That perception may or may not be true, but we could still feel angry about it. For example, if a partner believes their other is cheating on them even though their partner is not actually doing so, the emotions the first person feels is still anger, despite the fact that no injustice is not actually happening. One can be misinformed and yet still have an angry response.

Finally note that the injustice does not have to happen to the person in question. If I experience someone else receiving an injustice, then I may still become angry, even though I am not the person who experienced the injustice directly. One can even feel anger at an injustice that occurs in a fictional story where the injustice never occurred in the literal sense. The “perceived injustice” that causes one to be angry could just as easily happen to oneself as to another or a group of people.

A Broader Definition of Anger

The most important single difference between my definition and the normal definition is that the normal definition views “anger” as a specific emotion; whereas, I see anger as any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If the perceived injustice makes someone sad, then that sadness would constitute “anger” for them. Any time we perceive an injustice whatever emotions we encounter is anger, so when one experiences an emotion, the question becomes:

1) What kinds of emotional responses do we have to that injustice?
2) How do these emotions direct us to act?
3) What does all this say about us in general?

As a parallel, consider “anxiety.” Clinical psychologists will often broaden their definition of anxiety to include not just the regular definition of nervous anticipation of the future but to also include excitement, nervousness, enthusiasm, dread, and many other emotions related to the anticipation of a potential future event. They do this because on a practical level, people experience combinations of these emotions at the same time when they anticipate a potential future event, so it is useful in a clinical setting to combine them into one category.

Likewise, I consider it useful to combine the totality of our responses to a perceived injustice under the umbrella of “anger.” To me, when a person experiences an injustice, they experience a plethora of emotions, which include rage anger, frustration, fear or insecurity, sadness, disgust or repulsion, indignation, etc. Because of this, anger can look very different.

What all these different specific emotional responses have in common is that they are an emotion in response to a perceived injustice, and as such, the emotion directs the individual to act in a way to resolve that injustice. But specific elicited emotions may direct that individual towards very different (even contradictory) ways to act to resolve that injustice, but determining how to act to resolve the injustice is a core, if not the core, question in creating a healthy way to process and express our anger (something I will discuss in detail in Section Two).

A Few Different Types of Angry Responses

To show the variety of forms anger may take, here are two, opposite examples of patterns of anger, each of which fundamentally orients the given person to respond to the perceived injustice in a very different manner:

1) Rage or Active Anger: The first is the everyday understanding of anger: the person gets “mad” and starts acting, often aggressively (such as shouting or physically attacking someone), to counteract the perceived injustice. People often view this as a “hot” response since often when we are in this state, our bodies feel hot, and we feel the urge to do something. This form of anger seems to urge us to act to determine 1) who is responsible for the perceived injustice, 2) address or resolve the injustice by actively confronting/challenging what they did, 3) bringing those responsible “to justice,” and/or 4) preventing that injustice from being able to happen again.

I think there is a time for such responses, for example a time to turn over the proverbial tables and confront the “powers that be” for their injustices. Though, this form of anger can also error and/or become unhealthy when 1) it clouds other forms of judgement causing us not to use our other mental faculties to evaluate what is going on and how we should respond, 2) it only makes us aware of how others are part of the “problem” and blind to our own culpability; 3) directs us to act in an excessive, inappropriate manner, especially an excessively violent manner; and/or 4) causes us to go after someone who is not at fault, especially to “punch down,” directing our fury against those who are more vulnerable than us.

2) Passive Anger: In this angry response, we tend to perceive the injustice as a disruption or departure from tranquility. In contrast to the first form, which directs us to seek a resolution by changing the external world, this form of anger directs us inwards to do or become what is needed to restore a sense of peace and tranquility. For example, say in a conversation the other person says something offensive. The first form of anger may direct you to pushback and argue, to directly counteract the person for their statement (and if that fails, leave in a hush); whereas, the second form of anger would direct the person to say nothing and silently shrug, maybe steering conversation away from that topic without “ruffling feathers” so that the conversation can continue in “peace.”

This is a form of anger, although it contradicts the typical definition of anger. Instead of being directed externally against whatever seems to be causing the injustice, this form of anger gets directed inwards, orienting the person to act to reorient themselves to maintain stability, tranquility, or at least stasis. There are times when these kinds of actions are useful, but they tend to error and/or become unhealthy when 1) the stasis being pursued contradicts a better, more lasting resolution to the injustice, 2) when it leads to the person directing guilt or hatred onto themselves, especially for problems beyond their control, and 3) when doing what is necessary to maintain such stasis involves sacrificing essential aspects of oneself.

Conclusion

These are not the only two ways anger can manifest, but they provide a sense of the variety of what anger can mean for different people in different circumstances. Each orients the person towards a type of action in response to the perceived injustice, even if these two examples happen to orient towards partially opposite response. The first may direct one to aggressive action against an external threat and the second towards a passive, inward response

Now, just because one experiences an emotion that directs one’s action does not mean that that person necessarily performs that action; for example, maybe they become enraged, wanting to do something violent, but decide not to. Emotions seem to direct us towards certain types of actions/responses, but of course, we may also use other mental faculties beyond that emotion to ultimately decide to have a different response.

Finally, since anger is the emotional process a perceived injustice, the way in which that individual perceives the injustice will significantly shift how anger manifests in that specific circumstance, and overtime, our various emotional responses may form dispositions or habits that we subconsciously use to process the next unjust situation. In the next part of this series, I will talk about the best ways to respond to anger and the habits of anger we form over the course of our lives.

(Read Part 2 in this series here.)

The Angry Firecracker (A Short Story)

There once was a firecracker named Pow Pow. He loved his life hanging out with the other firecracker friends in his bundle.

One day, they were bought by a family, and he was excited to meet them and discover what kind of fun they’d have together. The family took them out on the patio of their home. The mother took one of his firecracker friends. All the other firecrackers were excited to see how they might play with her.

The woman took a hot flame and lit it under her butt. This caused her friend to shoot away as fast as possible, screaming in pain, and die an explosive, painful death. The woman, her husband, and her kids just squealed with glee at the ordeal.

One by one Pow Pow watched as his friends were snatched, taken, and exploded in the same way. He turned hot with anger at how they could torture and kill his friends for fun like this.

Then, finally, he was picked. They carried him over to the edge of their patio where they had done away with all the others. He burned hot with rage.

Suddenly, they lit a match in his hindquarters, and he burned with anger. He broke free from their grip and flew away, shouting every obscenity he could at these murderous people. He could finally let his anger out, and it boiled within him.

Eventually that was all he could feel as he exploded with rage, becoming another fun firecracker explosion for the parents to enthrall their children.

What Are Emotions, and What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves?

Many are critical of emotions, seeing feelings as something that stifles them, as something they must overcome with reason and rationality, but that is foolish in the long run. We should be aware of our emotions because they teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and our needs.

Emotions are one of our internal mechanisms to orient us towards what we need. Thus, they are crucial. Even though sometimes emotions can be overwhelming or lead people to make decisions in the moment that turn out to be poor ones, we should not ignore or suppress our emotions.

Instead, we should seek to understand what they are telling us about what we need. Anxiety is a sign that we consider whatever we are anticipating as important. Worry and fear area signs that we are concerned about our wellbeing. Anger is a sign that we feel an injustice has threatened ourselves or others we care about.

At the end of the day, they are signals. Signals that can turn out to be correct or incorrect. Sometimes we are angry at something that we discover is not a real injustice, and sometimes, what we fear turns out not to be much of a concern. But often they are not wrong: our minds can be very good at assessing what is important.

Either way, it’s important to process the emotion, understand why you feel it, and then determine the best response to having the emotion. Through this, we can synchronize our emotions with our rational thinking. Using our reason to think about whether our emotion’s assessments are missing important information, and in turn, determining whether our rational self is ignoring something our emotions are picking up on.

A successful marriage between the two is a healthier way to respond to our emotions than suppression and a better way to use the tools in our psychological toolset to engage the world and live a good life.