Tarot

Saturday night, Ed and I stayed up late, and did an interesting activity together. I think Ed was hesitant to suggest this because of my stated pro-empiricism and anti-woo, but interpetive divination is actually one of the really fun woo types of activities, and I'm almost always willing to engage in it.

What he wanted to do was take the deck of tarot cards, shuffle them together (each of us shuffling half and then cutting the deck together), and then lay them out in a pyramid with each level representing one layer of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. So we had five cards speaking to physiological needs, four for safety, three for love & belonging, 2 for self-esteem (or "self-efficacy," as he cannily called it for my sake), and 1 for self-actualization. For the purposes of the reading, it was considered that the two cards immediately below any given card would influence or impinge upon it.

Typically in reading tarot cards, you are supposed to know what the cards are supposed to mean. But Ed's preferred strategy was to simply look at the cards and interpret them based on the pictures on them. (The cards in his deck are fairly evocative, so this was possible.)

I don't think Ed expected me to take this seriously at all. But I really enjoy interpreting symbols, so I spent time looking at and thinking about each card, how it related to the level it was on, and how it might impinge upon the cards above it. I think Ed had anticipated a collaborative process of reading the cards, but I basically just gave him my full spiel. It was kind of a depressing reading, even though I don't think I was in a bad mood. I also said uncharacteristically woo-like things like, "I think this card is here to remind me that..."

Then Ed talked about the patterns he had seen, and we did kind of a mutual reading more about our whole relationship. This is the kind of thing you could do all night, building more and more baroque theories about how everything relates and what it all means, but we did call it quits after a while.

Fun!

Deal-Breakers, Non-Negotiables, etc.

Recently, Ed and I have been talking about things that are critical to have in a partner. (A couple of his are "radical honesty" and "sympathetic interpretation.") Neither of us keeps an explicit list, but for me, the things that come to mind are more like deal breakers - the things I can't tolerate in a partner.

Just as a mental exercise, I'll list a few of each kind. These lists are definitely not meant to be exhaustive.

Deal-Breakers

• Substance abuse. I can handle moderate drinking, but nothing approaching alcoholism. I could handle occasional pot-smoking, but I'd rather not. Anything beyond that is right out.


• Possessiveness. It's hard to know what to write about this, exactly, and obviously "possessiveness" is a matter of degree. I'm not very possessive myself, and the path that leads from "Where were you? I thought you got off work at 5:30, but I called you at 6:15 and you weren't home" to cutting you off from your friends to beating you up is a scary thing, and even lesser forms of possessiveness or controllingness are not too cool with me.


• Excessive woo. By "woo" I mean new-agey or pseudoscientific things like crystals, tarot, chakras, etc. I can only handle so much of this before my head starts to want to explode. (See also "reality-based thinking" below.)


• Intentional hurtfulness. Some people, in a fight, will say the most hurtful things they can think of. I would have a conversation with someone about this before breaking up over it. But only one.

Non-Negotiables

• Feminism-compatibility. He doesn't have to call himself a feminist (though it would be nice), but I need his basic ideas and attitudes to be compatible with feminism.


• Reality-based thinking. I need for most of my partner's ideas to be based on empirical attempts to understand how the world works. I don't need my partner to be as empirical as, say, Sally, but a basic respect for and practice of empiricism is something I can't live without.


• Social liberalism. On the economic front, I can handle a fairly broad range of ideas - anything from "almost libertarian" to "Swedish-style socialist." But if you've got a problem with homosexuality or the legality of abortion, it's not going to work out.

Those are the ones that come to mind right now, anyway.