23. When was the last time you gave someone a really good listening to?
Today’s post is a reflection on two recent media articles and how we value one another. One had the title: Do You ‘Matter’ to Others?. The other: For years, I saw sex as a competitive sport. Then I realised how empty I felt.
I’ll start with the more salacious of the two. The article is on the one hand a celebration of a shame-free approach to sex, one that has been available to anyone, at least in principle, since the advent of cheap and effective birth control. So far, so good. But in the article, as the title foreshadows, the author describes how it was not endless pleasure, and so, to repurpose the gambling slogan, when the fun stopped, she did. Her article is very quotable. For example:
“(Sex) became a means to an end – an orgasm, a stress relief, a cure for boredom or loneliness.”
“I can think of at least 10 more similar situations where I felt belittled, sidelined, slut-shamed or all of the above. But what haunts me the most is that I know I have done the same to some of my sexual partners in the past.”
“Looking back, there was no one big lightbulb moment that led me to quitting casual encounters. But sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table surrounded by my happily married parents and my sister, her fiancee and toddler, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. The juxtaposition between my life and theirs suddenly dawned on me: “I can’t remember the last time someone I liked held my hand or hugged me.” “
She concluded, in the sexualised language of today, that she would only have sex with herself until she had romantic feelings for someone else.
“I am starting to realise that sex is not a numbers game and that intimacy and sex can be entirely different things.”
At this point in the article, you may feel that I am about to be, or have already implicitly been, censorious. That is not the point of this post. But I do believe that if we think casual sexual encounters can meet all of our interpersonal needs, we’re likely to be sorely disappointed. Which brings me to the second article.
Sometimes someone says something that makes you think “That’s important, but I’m not sure why”. Many years ago, recalling the words of a teacher, the actor/director David Hemmings said: “Everything matters, but most things don’t matter very much”. Psychologists have decided that mattering matters. A lot.
What is mattering? The psychologists describe it in terms of three components: awareness, importance and reliance.
Mattering might be conflated with social support but the academics believe that mattering is a distinctively useful concept. For example, Gordon Flett, said: “There is no other construct that gets at people’s need to feel valued and seen by others as important”.
It is a short step from something mattering to it being of value but the way the researchers have treated it adds to previous posts. Mattering has three dimensions:
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On one level, the first is the simplest. I matter evolutionarily in the sense that I am evidence of a certain amount of success as a representative of my species and, if I have children, I am contributing, pressure on resources aside, to the survival of the species. Whether my existence, or that of any offspring I may have, contributes to an improvement in the survival chances of the species is another and more complex question, usually involving the other two dimensions of mattering.
Another way of dealing with whether my existence matters or not to me is in terms of a sense of meaning that I make. Again, the meanings I make are rarely wholly independent of other people, but they may be. At the grand scale, this may concern a life mission or a religious calling that extends way beyond a lifetime but things that matter can be much more immediate and perhaps apparently trivial. For example, a young child may have an attachment object such as a blanket or a soft toy that provides meaning, security and value. To the child, the object really matters. This aspect of mattering may seem both obvious and trivial but it is not. In times of existential crisis, all forms of mattering matter.
However, most of the things that matter are the behaviours and thoughts of other people and/or our interpretations of them. Generally, the mattering that matters most, both directly and indirectly, is your perception about how much you matter to your family and friends, the more so when you feel they matter to you. Mattering and self-esteem usually go hand-in-hand. Mattering has real benefits, especially in providing protection against depression. However, there are complications; you can matter not just too little but also too much; and, the quality of mattering is important as well as the amount.
Whether it concerns family, friends or life partners, betrayal tells us that we do not matter at all, or as much as we thought we did, or in comparison to someone else who matters. It is difficult to deal with significant breaches of trust. Intimate trust may be impossible to rebuild if broken. We feel like a part of ourself has been debased or attacked. Betrayal by intimates has been around as long as humankind. We would lose a huge slice of the world of the arts without it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. The two main structural antidotes, religion and marriage, are equally long-standing. Christian religions hold out the promise of a better life in the hereafter in exchange for good behaviour on earth; marriage asks for a mutual and exclusive commitment of two people to one another. These assurances tackle betrayal by outlawing it. Less widespread practices such as polyamory take the opposite path, deliberately devaluing the exclusivity of lifetime commitments, in part, perhaps, because the proponents see such long term commitment as unrealistic, and in part because they feel that such commitments just don’t matter too much. That is, exclusive mattering and the jealousies that often accompany it are counterproductive to a good life.
Small things matter in intimate relations. To refine the first aspect of the definition of mattering, it is not just about awareness, it is about paying attention. Ant the clue is in the word. When we pay attention to someone, we make a commitment of effort. So, the next time you have a night out (or a night in) with your nearest and dearest, consider how much time you spend with your mobile phone and how much time you spend with them. The American phrase quality time may be jarring to British ears but it contains a truth; how much of the time do you really attend to the other people in your life?
The final form of mattering concerns everyone else in your psychic world. You may feel close to them, you may have a certain, let me call it electronic, closeness but they are not family or friends in the traditional sense, and they do not care about you personally. There are some boundary problems here. If you are a pupil or student, some of your fellows and teachers may mean a great deal to you and you to them. Work relationships can be similar, but in some organisations, especially those that are massive and operate to a large extent remotely, the ways in which you matter to other people are qualitatively different, and more distant.
You may matter to your bank and your supermarket, but possibly in a different way to the people in your coffee shop or bakery. This third kind of mattering is that of the bank and the supermarket. You matter to them because you generate a profit for them; they matter to you because they make your life more convenient in some way. In short, they matter in a more abstract, less personal way. We heard recently from Nigel Farage that he was ‘debanked’ by NatWest for political reasons. He mattered in a way that he felt was wrong. And it highlights the key themes of the third way of mattering: reputation, status, fame, public image and power. This kind of mattering is important because it tells you how much power and control you have or do not have, and in particular contexts. And, of course, it brings us back to the extreme examples of needy, narcissistic leaders like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Their desire to matter at this third level is unusually high. In these cases, their desire to be noticed and to feel loved is accompanied by countless examples of deceitful behaviour to help them to fulfil their needs.
In our general dealings with the wider world, reputation is more important than family or friendship ties. But rules and enforcement measures are important too. In the previous post, I discussed the importance of the institutions that support trade. Here, the ways in which we organise ourselves have a more general importance.
Westminster has often been referred to as a gentlemen’s club. One of the implications behind the use of this term was that its members should behave like gentlemen (and ladies, as appropriate), and that the informal web of norms was sufficient to bolster Britain’s patchwork constitutional arrangements. It assumed that playing the game, nicely, would be sufficient. I do not believe that Boris Johnson is a gentleman. His wilful and cynical manipulation of the rules and his upending of parliamentary conventions has severely damaged trust in Britain’s institutions. As an aside, his behaviour is also far from Conservative. He organises his life to gain more respect from others than he is willing to give to them. This points to the greatest challenge in mattering. At its best, it is mutual and more or less equal. In both his private and public lives, Johnson has shown himself to be a master in the arts of charm and manipulation to serve his own narcissistic ends, to prove to himself and anyone who maybe watching that he matters.
In this regard, Johnson is an amateur compared to the brazen corruption of Donald Trump. While Johnson contents himself with bending rules and flouting norms to suit his purpose, Trump tries to break and change the rules at whim. His only measure of the value of other people is their loyalty to him. Unfortunately, the investment others make in him must be reinforced by them; if they do not do so, they risk the cognitive dissonance that members of end-of-the-world religious cults experience when the world doesn’t end on the due date. The only way to avoid the pain of investing so much in a fraud and to maintain their self-esteem is to insist ever more strongly that the facts are not facts, that the news is fake.
The researcher Prilleltensky emphasises the interpersonal and mutual aspects of mattering, defining it as “both having value to others, and giving value to others.” This is more difficult and open to abuse at the third, more impersonal and abstract level. Not mattering or ‘anti-mattering’ is powerfully destructive and strongly associated with depression. Mattering is a vital source of value but it can be easily corrupted by the manipulative and narcissistic.