Most machines of any degree of complexity, that we opt to live around.
Are offered to us with an instruction manual.
A guide to how the unfamiliar machine works.
What we can except from it!
How to get the best out of it!
And how to interpret its signals.
The assumption being,
that it would be so much easier and less enraging
to deal with this machine,
when we have taken some time systematically and patiently
to learn, how it operates.
And yet one area, when we tend not to have manuals to read
is when it comes to other people and their functioning.
This causes us immense troubles.
We going to relationship without any real sense
of where the others peculiarities will lie
and vice versa.
We are wittingly proceed
as if operating another person might be an intuitive skill
will just pick up along the way.
It can take a painful decade or more
to work out the very basics.
Mostly, human machines work in extremely odd ways.
And yet tend not to explain, the origins of their madness.
For example: They don't calmly lay out
that certain incidents in childhood
have given them a disposition to shout at airport,
to be suspicious of authority
or to be shifty in owning up to debts.
We must work backwards, from outward behavior,
to possible causes,
without any help, from the machines themselves.
Sometimes, the signals are just completely confusing.
"Fuck off, I really don't want to see you."
Turns out to mean:
I am so worried you don't want me
and I am getting in early with my revenge.
Please tidy away your clothes
and put away the dishes.
Might mean:
I am trying to control you procedurally
because I fell so out of touch with you emotionally.
We would safe so much time
if we knew how to give one another manuals, early on.
If we could explain:
when I am hurt I go cold
or I am especially prone to be subservient,
but then, resentful
or I get brutal when I am at most vulnerable.
or I feel a need to talk about other possible lovers,
because I feel so unattractive to you deep down.
Instead, the weaknesses of machines
are usually discovered in a heat of conflicts.
In context where they would have wounded the other person.
And therefore
will be denied to the good will that might have ensured that could be forgiven.
Many of the difficult patterns of behavior of human machines
have very sympathetic points of origin.
But, once they have caused the partner humiliation
they are unlikely ever to be looked upon charitably.
We don't need people to be perfect,
We only need them to be able to see their faults,
to teach us about them, when we are unthreatened
and to apologize for the difficulties they causes in good time.
In other words, the greatest, most loving and luxurious gift
any partner could ever give another
is an instruction manual.
To their own rather tortured, odd
but ultimately, always really rather lovable soul.