The Emotional Calculus

It's just plain undignified, really: tailoring your actions to produce a desired result in another human being. Oh sure, it seems cool, it seems calculating. You're playing the game, not being played. What makes her happy, what makes her tick? You can learn to read the many moods, favorite foods, and (political correctness be damned) keep a calendar handy too. Soon the process syncs up with your senses and produces a strange synaesthesia. You can feel the giddy warmth of a smile and smell the acrid sickness of despair and frustration. You learn, and you learn well.

Do you have what it takes, though, to follow through to the end?

I don't. It's just so goddamn undignified. I suppose it could be done, though. At least in theory. It would be difficult, and your position would be perpetually precarious. You'd have to draw the line somewhere, and of course the only real difference would be that instead of drawing the line at this arbitrary point where things become undignified, it would instead be drawn where she might get suspicious.

This is the first perversity (so named because I'm sure there are many others:) your dignity is fuzzy math. Her suspicions are part of the well-established field of Emotional Calculus.

Is it like this for everyone? Does desire, even a desire denied and frustrated, compel the male mind to do math? Do behaviors and decisions and actions and reactions become delayed and one step removed? Is there always this constant buzzing in the back of the brain adding up sums and carrying the ones and then sending this option - the mathematically sound course of action - up to the frontal cortex?

Or is it just me?

Often I am a mind at war with myself. In this war, desire competes with thought. The second perversity: thought allies itself with the steadfast refusals of the nameless true self, and the animalistic desire allies itself with the concrete mathematics of relational realpolitik. Feelings, I suppose (at least feelings of my own) are just so much collateral damage.

The war does not end. There are ceasefires, holidays, temporary alliances against ghastly inhuman foes. But the war does not end, no: not until the beast is silenced, soothed, and sated. It is my conceit, then, to fancy that I've thrown in my lot with the forever-put-upon underdog. He fights for the fragility, the intangible dignity, whose reward is naught but a dull ache and sorrow.