We are all relationships

Ernestina and I watched this show in Netflix about a lesbian couple that runs a bar together in Argentina.

The two of them were clearly very in love, but it was a real odd couple situation.

The one who had originally inherited the bar, was soulful, poetic, had a motorcycle.

She loved the bar because she liked to stay up late and talk to her friends, to hang out with them and their dogs.

“Its more than a bar, it’s a family,” she said, getting all Fast and Furious.

“I love them,” she said, staring into the distance beyond the camera.

—

The other lesbian was not as poetic. She had a blazer on in all of her interviews.

“Those guys, the ones she hangs out with — they never pay,” she told the cameraman, exasperated.

“And dogs aren’t hygienic. I love this bar, I really think it could be something. This could be a real establishment, but… It needs to be organized like a business, it needs to be organized.”

Shots of her typing furiously, keeping the books, scrubbing down the walls of the bar, were interspersed with shots of the other lesbian staring deeply into customers’ eyes, thanking them for being alive in the same place as her, part of the community.

Hearing the two of these bar owning queers talk, I felt a weird glimmer of recognition.

The way they interacted didn’t remind me of a dynamic, or a couple I knew.

Instead — their dynamic reminded me of a single person.

I looked at Ernestina, who was scowling at the TV.

This confirmed my suspicions.

“This is what it’s like to be inside of your brain all of the time, isn’t it?” I asked.

Ernestina nodded somberly.

“I tell her that there can’t be dogs in the bar, she can’t have dogs in the bar, but she never listens. Then there are always dogs in the bar,” said one of the Argentine lesbians on TV, the Virgo one.

In the background, the motorcycle one sighed.

“It’s terrible,” Ernestina said.

“It seems terrible,” I said. “Like... a lot of internal conflict.

Ernestina nodded again.

“Dogs are hygienic, but they also aren’t,” she said. “That’s why I struggle.”

—

So often we talk about being divided, in conflict with the self, but we rarely talk about one of the weirdest and most obvious parts of conflict — that it happens in relationship.

Certain people bring out certain sides of ourselves: in some groups we’re the Roman, in others the Kendall.

It all depends upon who else is around.

But when we acknowledge that most of our personality is about context, is in comparison — then about when it’s just us?

How do these parts, that seem particularly distinct depending the context, relate to each other when we’re all alone?

When they have to duke it out internally?

Internally, we start to look a little bit like.

Well.

The place where conflict always happens.

A relationship.

—

For all their troubles, this couple clearly loved each other, which I think says a lot about Ernestina’s emotional health.

Not everyone is a bar owning lesbian couple in Argentina.

Just like relationships, some people have more fraught internal relationships than others.

What’s your internal relationship like?