TIME OUT:Perturbed by kernels of truth in our inboxes, writes MARIE MURRAY
CHAIN-MAIL e-mail communications can be intrusive. These jocose “pass it on to all your friends” submissions which arrive into one’s inbox are often irritating and unwelcome.
Pseudo-profound, hyper-ironic, alarm-generating or maudlin, these entertainment narratives typify the mushy, slushy, mawkish sentimentality of generic internet-generated wisdom.
They regularly depict formulaic battles between the sexes. Often they provide highly ageist stereotypes. Sometimes they typecast parent-teenager exchanges with anecdote, witticism and wisecrack. At other times, they contain common political epigrams or more specific political satire. They are often predictable and sophistic and there are far too many of them clogging up inboxes.
Yet we read them because they can be psychologically interesting as perspectives on the relationship between the sexes, on the stereotypes that surround them and the deep- seated assumptions that men and women still make about each other, if only in apparent jest.
One recent “inbox” entry is an exemplar of this genre. Entitled What do Women Want it provides a list of all the roles and accomplishments men need to have to make women happy.
It says, for example, that to make a woman happy a man must be “a friend, lover, companion, electrician, plumber, bug exterminator, chauffeur, carpenter, mechanic, decorator, gardener, father-figure and psychologist”.
It says the attributes that women want in a man include, “being a healer, a good listener, being passionate and compassionate, kind, sympathetic, ambitious, athletic, attentive, warm, gentle, strong, tender, tolerant and prudent and fun”. He must be “gallant, capable, courageous and creative”. It finally clichés that he must never forget birthdays and anniversaries and that he must love shopping.
We might ask why we read such e-mails and what entertainment function, if any, these chain-mails have? We might ask for whom they are amusing, to whom they are insulting, if they are drivel or if they carry any meaning at all? Do they warrant attention or are they just another form of cognitive candy in the communication e-mail overload that constitutes the electronic day?
It would be easy to answer that they are irritating, irrelevant, trivial and untrue, but sometimes they are more than that and they surprise us. They perturb us because of the kernels of truth they contain. They perturb us because somewhere in the morass of nonsense there is a glimmer of reality. They perturb us because they sometimes reveal us to ourselves.
For example, the chain-mail describing what women want from men highlights an issue that often brings couples to marital therapy: that is the unrealistic expectations that each may harbour about what a husband or wife should be and about what each should provide for the other. It demonstrates how demanding we have become in relationships as part of a wider perfection quest: in appearance, in accomplishment, in performance, communication and intimacy. Fantasies of perfection that cannot be fulfilled bring disillusionment. Intolerance of adequacy makes what is satisfactory insufficient.
The nature of tragic relationships is not how they begin but what they become because people can forget what they first loved and cherished in another person and then try to change the person they originally chose into someone else. It is important that relationships allow people to be themselves rather than ask that they be what they are not.
The notion of unconditional love means that when we love people, we nurture them, we accept them, and we value them as they are. They are everything because they are themselves rather than being loved because they are everything.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray's weekly radio slot Mindtimeis on Drivetime on Wednesdays on RTÉ Radio One