Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
“You and this perfect person, who you’ve never met before, to come out of nowhere, fit into your life perfectly, complete you, and make you whole for the first time in your life, like your mother did for me.”
And even though what he said sounds sweet and whatever, the way it manifested to my seven-year-old self is, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole.”
And that’s not just something that my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society for the last 40 years has made every single child feel. Every Disney prince has a princess, every princess has a prince, and every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But guess what, by the end of the series? They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, the fucking idiot!
It’s all to do with love. Everyone needs someone. And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when you become an adult for the first time in your late teens and early 20’s, we’re so terrified.
We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw, and force them into our jigsaws anyway. I’m going to force this fucking person into our lives because it’s much better to have something than nothing.
Then five years later, you’re stood looking at this jigsaw you don’t recognize, being like, “Ah! There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this!” And in that moment, you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. Do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Do I waste the rest of my life?
My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they give up the one that they’re currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance, and it is cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than they are with the person they are with. The worst thing you can do with your life is to spend it with the wrong human being.
I would like to point out that this is a fucking stand up special, and it’s said to have broken off hundreds of relationships. It’s also very funny in addition to being very insightful, it’s Daniel Sloss’s Jigsaw, it’s on Netflix.
“AH There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this” I’m crying 🤣🤣
The purest expression of Love in Tolkien’s works is following
Sam follows Frodo into Mordor. Arwen chooses to follow Aragorn’s fate instead of the one she was born to. Amroth will not leave Middle-earth when Nimrodel cannot follow. Sam, Merry, and Pippin will not let Frodo leave the Shire alone. Beren and Lúthien follow each other into the darkest places in the world, or rather Beren goes, alone, repeatedly, and Lúthien pursues him with the same fervor that he once used to pursue her.
Tom Bombadil follows the river to find Goldberry and once he finds her he’s always following the path home to her; the only paths in the Old Forest that are dependable and constant are the ones that lead to his home and to Goldberry’s pool. “I have my house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting,” for him to follow her home at last.
Gimli follows Legolas and Galadriel into the West, and bears a love so powerful that he is the one exception to the rule; he bore no ring and yet is welcomed for the sake of his love for them. Sam swears to return to where he thinks Frodo died after the duty is done, but in that moment, the hardest thing is not the weight of the Ring or the fear of Sauron, but the burden of leaving him. Éowyn and Faramir stand together on the walls of Minas Tirith as they wait for the end. The Three Hunters push themselves to near impossible feats of endurance pursuing their friends when they are in danger. The ents constantly followed the entwives to their gardens, even though they didn’t care for them much, and the story goes that one day they will follow them and find “a land where both our hearts may rest”, a place where they can both be happy.
They go only because they would not be parted from thee – because they love thee, Éowyn whispers.
You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end…. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word, Merry scolds.
having to come to terms with the fact that love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer
[Text ID: “As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”]
1. Find a monster and give it a name. Any name will do, people say that names have
power, to be careful what to pick, but really, for this, any name. To even hold a name is power enough. Call it by that name until it begins to
respond, only good things have names.
Wait and it will become good.
2. Find a monster and bring it into your
house. Feed it at your table, make it
eat with cutlery and crockery, sit up straight, elbows in. Feed it so it is not restless, so it does not
fall into monstrosity again. Wait and it
will become calm.
3. Find a monster and treat it gentle. Show it goodness, calmness, kindness. Never strike it, speak softly, make your way
closer to it every night until you can sit beside it. Women and tigers, old songs still sung by the
fire, such an act has never been impossible.
Wait and it will become soft.
4. Find a monster and sing it to sleep. Ask it how its day went, how the people
treated it. Tell it that everything will
be ok, that in the morning all its fears and sorrows will leave it and the
birds will sing. Tell it about the sun,
about springtime and budding leaves. Kiss
its forehead every night and wake it up every morning. Wait and it will become nothing more than a
scared child.
5. Find the person standing before you, a child
wearing a monster’s face, trapped in a body all grown up and alone, and give it
a hope, and give it a home. Let it leave
knowing there’s a place for it to come back to.
Let it return and curl up in front of the television with you and weep
into your shoulder. Make it popcorn and
put chocolate on the popcorn and let it lick its fingers and fall asleep. Cover it with a blanket. Wait, and it will become nothing more than
what it has always been. All you did was
peel back the darkness.
“Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.
The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.
People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”
These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s emotional needs.”
…
“Kindness… glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated—feel loved. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” says Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” That’s how kindness works too: there’s a great deal of evidence showing the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in a relationship.
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.
“If your partner expresses a need,” explained Julie Gottman, “and you are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”
