I was emailing back and forth with a mentee of mine recently. “Lucy”, at twenty, sees herself as bright and talented, but also as insecure and filled with self-doubt. She doesn’t think of herself as particularly attractive or popular; she remembers her adolescent awkwardness vividly. On the other hand, she wrote, her friends of both sexes see her as aloof and mysterious. Her peers (of both sexes) have what she sees as an exasperating tendency to get crushes on her, either coming on to her and forcing her to reject them — or pulling away from her for the sake of self-protection. Lucy frequently feels isolated, and she longs to have more more friends. Her frustration with her inability to form and sustain good relationships with her peers have led her to grow closer to people much older than herself, and she’s struggled with the feeling, not uncommon in women in her situation, to see substantially older men and women as more suitable romantic partners. “Older people aren’t as scared of me”, Lucy says; “they don’t misread me as often.”
I’m not going to revisit the older man/younger woman in this post. Rather, I’m interested in looking at the disconnect so many of us have between the way we are perceived by others and the way we perceive ourselves. This is a problem hardly unique to women, or college students; it’s a nigh-on universal problem for human beings. Recall the famous Robert Burns line: Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursel’s as others see us! For the great Scottish poet, and for a great many others, the ability to see in ourselves what others see is a gift, perhaps divinely given, and certainly not given to most. Many of us spend a great deal of time developing strategies and techniques for getting others to mirror us, showing us ourselves as we truly are. We want, of course, our friends and family to be both honest and filled with praise, even though we suspect that if we get too much (or perhaps even just a little) of the latter, then the former has probably gone missing.
I’ve been as guilty as any –perhaps more guilty than most — of seeking validation and praise from others. I went into teaching for a host of reasons (starting with familiarity, as both my parents were college professors); not least among the reasons why I came to spend so much of life in the classroom was my desire for approval and attention. That need has abated considerably in the nearly twenty years I’ve been teaching, but it’s hardly absent altogether. And of course, a great deal of my sexual behavior when I was younger was about getting other people to reflect back to me an image of myself as desirable. Tormented by a sense of myself as fat, clumsy, tongue-tied and unattractive, I spent a great many years proving (to myself, no one else) that I was anything but. What I wanted more than sex itself was the assurance that I was desirable; at times, the actual coupling seemed more like a required procedural formality on the road to the real destination than the true end itself. I wrote about this last year:
Years later, I heard the comedian Jeff Foxworthy capture perfectly how I felt. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something like:
“You know the best part of being with a woman for the first time? When you’re making out on the bed, and she lifts her hips so you can slide off her underwear; then you know you’re going to have sex. And that’s better than anything that follows.â€
The honest-to-God truth was that at nineteen or twenty, still struggling to overcome a tremendous sense that I was fat and unattractive, the best thing about sex was not the physical pleasure or the emotional intimacy but the sheer wonder in discovering that I could be wanted. And of course, the more people I could “get†to “want meâ€, the better I felt.
What I’d add to that now is that the longing to be validated as desirable was, in many ways, the exact reverse of what a number of my female friends struggled with. Growing up, they received a barrage of information — from catcalls on the street and crude come-ons from older men to nasty whispers from other girls in the hallways — telling them that they were sexually desirable, outwardly attractive. Many of them longed to know that they were wanted for something other than sex, just as I wanted very badly to know that I could be wanted sexually. (See my post on the missing narrative of desire in men’s lives.) Not surprisingly, our behavior sometimes dovetailed — my promiscuity driven by a longing to prove that I was handsome; theirs driven by the hope that perhaps their sexual partners would be able, after the lovemaking was done, to see something else in them beyond their outward loveliness. That doesn’t mean that we weren’t sexual people in our own right; we certainly were, and I think most of us got a healthy dollop of carnal delight out of what we were doing along the way. But sex was frequently about looking for something very specific: a chance to see something in a lover’s eyes we couldn’t see in our own when we looked in the mirror.
What does this have to do with Lucy, who isn’t particularly interestd in being promiscuous, or in winning plaudits from all quarters? She’d just like to be able to match her sense of herself to what others see in her. And there are some very good — and emotionally healthy — ways to accomplish this. Small, intimate Twelve Step groups taught me the value of loving confrontation and equally loving “mirroring”. Small groups, built of like-minded folks struggling with the same issue (spiritual uncertainty, overcoming an addiction, and so forth) can provide a forum to do something that doesn’t happen nearly as well in one-to-one relationships: a chance to gently “call one another out” on one’s blind spots. When we think we’re sending the signal “I’m shy”, others frequently read it as “I’m self-involved and not interested in anyone else.” We need safe, semi-structured group environments in which to ask the hard questions about how we appear to others, and in which to give others the candid feedback they both crave and fear. The group dynamic is vital, because it ratchets down the tremendous intensity created when any two people start speaking to each other with the radical honesty that was previously unthinkable. When you’ve got other folks joining in the discussion, and everyone is taking turns mirroring and “being mirrored”, it provides a chance to breathe.
I’ve seen these groups set up informally among college friends in dorms; I’ve also seen a lot of outstanding group therapy run by counselors on campuses and elsewhere. Yes, it’s scary to take the risk to seek out such a group –even for we extroverts, whose need to connect with others doesn’t mean we aren’t also prone to considerable anxiety about too much closeness and too much truth! Colleges, however, generally have the kinds of resources that the outside world lacks — the counselors and discussion groups, yes, but also hordes of emotionally starved young people looking for a healthier way to discover who it is that they really are. Churches and other religious organizations (even humanist groups, or so I hear) have similar small group opportunities in which trust and mirroring can bloom. The Lucies are not as rare as they imagine, and the gift of which Burns wrote can be had by nearly all — if there is a willingness to ask for help.
Great post; I am also a twenty-year-old, out-of-place college student who has ALWAYS gravitated toward older friends and romantic partners. Being understood and respected for maturity, frankness, and ambitious goals is much easier with an older crowd, as fellow college students always seem threatened/intimidated/put-off by these qualities. In my experience, most college women (and men) spend much time involved in “games”: the games of courtship and coyness, “hooking up,” hating professors for giving them bad grades when they put in very little effort, etc. It’s exhausting to watch when you feel like you are past that (or never did it). When you resist engaging in the pettiness of aolescence, many perceive it as outright arrogance and being self-involved, as you mention.
And thus, it is always the adults – usually those over 30 – who are best able to understand, communicate with, and appreciate the qualities of a mature college student (especially when the very label “college student” itself implies a level of assumed immaturity and excessive behaviors). I more than understand Lucy’s situation. I always feel like I am putting in effort to form peer friendships; and it’s easy enough, but they tend to be less fulfilling than with older adults because they do not offer that sense of understanding and appreciation – and there is a certain amount of “putting up” with the obsessive romances and dramatic feuds required.
I think that both we men and women in such circumstances often need similar things to help ground us in a variety of ways as I think you allude to above. Where some amongst us may have a strong grounding (often within their own families if not elsewhere), many, many others of us feel alone. We are stuck in differing worlds which may be overly self-critical (perhaps more common amongst women), while the issues of us men may differ in important ways.
In either case we need to develop support networks, however we can amongst our peers to deal with our issues in a safe, but significant way. We need the bonds as men with men and women with women (regardless of our sexual orientation) learning from others who share important things with us.
We may need “reality checkers”, someone to hold our hand or many other things – free of the putdowns/competition we may feel and get from most of our peers.
Amongst girls (not yet women) there can be vicious competition and putdowns. Amongst men we can face different pressures which often tell us that we “aren’t good enough”.
I’d guess also that where our identities are strongly shaped by other important factors such as: racial identity, sexual orientation, being differently abled, etc, we may need ties with others sharing what is important in our lives.
For me, now 58, I started a men’s support group which has lasted and grown over nearly two years – the best men’s support group I’ve ever been a part of – with a Lot of Craigslist Ads – and almost giving up before we ever got started.
There can always be excuses such as: “I’m too busy”, homophobia (particularly amongst men), no role models for us in doing what we need to do, etc. Small gains – though can lead us to happier, healthier lives. It isn’t always easy, but I’ve found it very helpful!
Thanks!