Love and Fiction, part 2: Staying In Character
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
In my previous post on love and fiction, I talked about the role fiction and fantasy play in my relationships. Here's one anecdote I want to share about what that can look like.
Last week my long-distance girlfriend visited me in person for the first time. Like all such visits there was a very fraught last day, when we were still together but had to pack up and acknowledge that the time was coming to a close.
I often don't deal well with this part of a visit. I can get so agitated anticipating the goodbye that I ruin the time that we have. I kept busy and wrote my girlfriend a ground transport itinerary while she wrote thank-you notes to a few of the people she'd met here, but she could tell I was emotional and struggling. She still needed to pack her suitcase, and I couldn't help much with that, but it felt wrong to sit around and watch her do it. It felt like I was wasting time that we could spend doing something meaningful together, and I couldn't stand that feeling.
So - she suggested we roleplay.
We have a pair of characters we've been doing a lot with over the past few months. We'd assumed their identities more than once in the visit already, just for fun, and we'd been working together on the timeline of what happens to the two of them as their relationship evolves. What if we were our characters, and her character was going out on some mission, and my character was just hanging out with him while he packed?
I asked a few questions to get clear on the scenario and on where in the timeline we were, and then I agreed.
As soon as I focused and got into character, I was instantly calmer. My character is devoted to a fault, but she sees her relationship with my girlfriend's character as being permanent. These missions that one or both of them go out on are temporary. She has her own emotional struggles but she's not worried, the way I was worrying in real life, about when she'll see him again.
It's not that I was hiding my worries so I could act more like my character. It's that, once I focused and got into character, I was genuinely reacting in something closer to the way that she does. The worries that don't correspond to how she sees things got put on a back burner.
All of a sudden it was easy to hang out, to make small talk in character, to scurry off and do small tasks when my girlfriend asked, but otherwise to just sit there reading my book, enjoy the fact that she was in my vague vicinity, and think sweet, poignant thoughts about the future.
The mere fact that both of us were staying in character made the packing feel like a meaningful activity - something that involved us attending to and responding to each other in a way that's personal to us.
Fiction can help me to express myself. Sometimes it's like holding up a sock puppet so that the puppet will say the hard things that I can't yet say straight out. When the feelings only halfway feel like mine, they're not quite as hot to handle. I can examine them with a little more nuance and grace.
Sometimes that means I use fiction to write down something really upsetting, something I haven't even all-the-way consciously acknowledged. But sometimes it's the reverse. Sometimes the distance is the point, and the fiction is calming.
With the added grace of being part of a good story, many of the hard things in life become easier to bear.