
The Crane Wife - ivanech
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/16/the-crane-wife/
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tyh
This essay hit me particularly hard because I've been on the opposite side of
this where I was the one not realizing my significant other's needs. It makes
you question a lot of yourself. To think you can cause another person so much
pain through your own action and/or inaction is hard to come to terms with. I
don't think I meant to hurt someone else, but that was the result. It is easy
to be oblivious or flat out ignore other people's emotional needs.

For me, I realized that what I should have been doing was just communicating
my thoughts and feelings better. Meanwhile being able to accept my own
limitations. Can you become a romantic overnight? Can you be completely open
and honest about all your fears? Of course not, these things take time to
learn how to do successfully and naturally. You might realize you cannot
fulfill everything for your partner and maybe it won't work.

Realistically there are a lot of relationships that will fail. We tend to
think their ending is some sort of cataclysm. The author put's this so well:

"There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can
survive denying their own needs."

At some point you need to be honest with yourself about what you need in life
at an emotional level. It is very hard to go through life pretending otherwise
or constantly sacrificing for nothing in return. For me that is the lesson of
the Crane Wife tale.

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tptacek
This person was engaged to the caricature of Neil DeGrasse Tyson than Jordan
Peele plays in Key & Peele.

~~~
signed0
[http://www.cc.com/video-clips/4cytce/key-and-peele-neil-
degr...](http://www.cc.com/video-clips/4cytce/key-and-peele-neil-degrasse-
tyson-explains-pt--1)

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sonofaplum
A really fantastic essay. Thanks for sharing.

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ivanhoe
This is some really good writing style. I couldn't really relate to the
character and the story, but I still really enjoyed reading every single word
of it.

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freddy418_sc
In conclusion, why not do nothing instead of doing something for the sake of
it when you don't have long term goals

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riskneutral
Nice essay, but the conclusion is a non-sequitur. If anything, the story seems
to suggest that it is in fact "remarkable for a person to understand what
another person needed."

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jschwartzi
I actually think the point of the essay is that you should allow yourself to
have needs and to be who you are. There are a lot of people in the world who
want you to be who they think you are. My therapist once told me that
"feedback is like trying on clothes. When someone hands you a shirt, the
polite thing to do is to try it on and see how it fits you. But not every
shirt is your style, and not every piece of feedback is true."

~~~
kjeetgill
That's an incredible quote and general piece of advice. It precisely
articulated and idea I always found it hard to articulate. Two people could
each reject an idea or advice and one would frustrate me more than another.
It's because I wanted them to atleast try it on before insisting it wouldn't
fit!

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vonseel
I am reading this and enjoying everything up to this point, so far:

“ When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not
received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and
given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is
needy.”

I’m not sure why people insist on thinking things like this. My male brain
tells me I am being needy if I am wanting or desiring things, and I would
assume others also see me as being needy when I am doing so. Certainly not
confusing passion with need just because I am a male. Of course, people love
to promote their feminism in 2019, or at least portray an appearance of doing
so.

~~~
FussyZeus
I think it works better if you take the genders out of it:

> “When people desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have
> not received something they need they are “deprived,” and given permission
> for all sorts of behavior. But when a another person needs they are needy.”

I've seen this story many times with both men and women featuring in both
roles, and I think the lesson can apply, therefore, to anyone who reads it. As
a general rule, society at large favors the provider; whichever of the two is
bringing home the bacon. I've found this to be true across classes, and thanks
to an increasing number of women getting the role, across the genders too.

I think as a species humans tend to ally with the ones we perceive to be
stronger on an instinctual level, which when you consider our origins as a
social animal, is really not surprising. I think the 1950's housewife trope
was less to do with actual sexism of the populace, and far more to do with the
sexism present in the job market. Men held the jobs; therefore, women had to
clean the house. What the hell else were they going to do?

Yet, now you regularly see women just as sociopathic and socially detached
from their husbands as many husbands were back then; they see their marriages
as a convenience, their husbands as a source of child care and free labor,
just as men did. And they cheat on their husbands with men they meet in their
work lives, just as the men did before. And if the woman is bringing home
enough bacon more than her husband, the end result is also the same; she rules
him, because he has no options. Because being a homemaker is no career path
and the longer a person is in that line of work, the less employable they
become.

And this is not to say women are worse or better, in fact, it's to say they're
largely the same. It's to say that both women and men, when given more or less
entire dominion over another person, will treat that person, by and large,
equally shitty.

Edit; I think it's also worth noting that the high success types, the ones who
make enough money to sustain an expensive lifestyle on their own with a
dependent, is a self-selected group of generally speaking, socially distant
and cool/calculating type of people. That's an important distinction to make,
and I should've made it on the first go.

~~~
vonseel
A lot of interesting thoughts there! Although I’m not sure _all_ successful
people are socially-distant or cold persons.

~~~
yetihehe
All generalizations are wrong, including this one.

