Inside out
I took a social intelligence test on the internet. I should say that doing so was unrelated to my friends’ concern for having come out on Substack as a big dumb idiot. Some thought it was a bit rich to hear about the girlfriend I hadn’t met from an email to a vaguely large audience. Plus, they said, what if it doesn’t work out?
The social intelligence test consists of three dozen pictures of faces, and the aim is to identify the emotion pictured in each: surprise, sadness, suspicion, anger; flirtation, alertness, joy, amusement. The hard part is that everything but the eyes is cropped out.
There are different versions of the test but they were designed to highlight the Theory of Mind, which is “the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them.” It’s a helpful skill in a world where people’s thoughts and feelings are painfully concealed and mysterious. Anyone who’s been in the throes of romance knows the internal echo of that specific question: what are you thinking about, and it’s probably in order to maintain some projection of sanity that we learn to pick up on the answer in a way that doesn’t always require asking.
Have you heard how Quakers get married? I hadn’t. E told me. It’s beautiful. The couple sit facing each other, surrounded by a small group of friends and family, but there’s not really a ceremony, and also no officiant, which is because Quakers believe God alone can unite a couple in marriage. So what happens is they sit silently in a state of prayer while gazing into each other’s eyes. There’s no prescribed duration for the period of silence, but apparently it can go on for quite some time. They sit there open and silent and waiting for a third thing to arise, waiting to be “led,” at which point they know, together, that it’s time to stand up and exchange vows.
The eyes are the window to the soul but as it turns out we’re differently adept at inferring the unseen from the seen. People with autism and schizophrenia tend to have a hard time reading emotion in others, and also, interestingly, so do coke heads, which makes sense if you’ve ever been at a party where someone bloviates about libertarianism while blind to all the physical cues you’re using to communicate your desperation for them to please stop talking. Social disconnection can create anything from mild annoyance to existential horror, but on the other hand there’s hardly a better feeling than when it lines up, when you understand and feel understood.
E’s flight landed on a Thursday afternoon. I was waiting in a worn chair at SFO, just outside security, and I knew she had landed because I was refreshing the flight info on my phone every ten seconds. I’d arrived at the airport way too early, walked around and took pictures and honestly could’ve used a beer but got mints instead. Then I parked my fresh breath outside a large glass door, crossed and uncrossed my legs while highly aware of the coif in my hair, and that’s how it was when I checked my phone again and it said Landed. For some reason I took a screenshot. Then E texted to say they were pulling up to the gate. Are you freaking out yet? she asked.
We’d talked about how strange it might be to see each other in 3D, made jokes about what if we didn’t like the shape of each other’s ears or the smell of each other’s necks, but somehow talking about what could go wrong only made it seem more far-fetched. I think we already knew what was going to happen.
What happened is I saw her through the glass door and she saw me too and we smiled like thirteen year olds. She was walking towards me and I stood up and we didn’t look away. She kept coming and the door slid open and when we embraced her heartbeat was so intense, so fast and hard that it occurred to me I should absorb some of it, which I actually tried to do, like I could become a big spongy redwood tree. We didn’t say anything for a while I think. We were hugging and we kept changing the way we were hugging but it was more like grasping at each other, our hands finally topographical, and I’m not sure how much time passed but when we went to the parking garage it was by levitation. We got in the car and my phone was buzzing in my pocket because my friends wanted updates—we have a tradition where whoever’s on a date has to slip away and text the group chat one of three emojis: eggplant, diamond ring, knife—but I let it keep buzzing and we drove away laughing at ourselves for talking about the weather.
The weather was pleasant. Dinner was at Delfina. When we sat down someone brought two complimentary drinks, which was nice and felt fortuitous, but then a little while later the same woman, who I learned was the manager, came over wanting us to try the butter beans, and then the radicchio, and eventually I just looked up and said wow what did we do to deserve all this. She explained that they remembered me from the birthday party I’d had there last year, which admittedly got a bit out of hand, but in the best way that came to include most of the waitstaff, and, anyway, she said, thanks for dining with us again and we hope you enjoy. She walked away and I looked at E as if I had a full plume of peacock feathers.
“I swear I didn’t set it up like this.”
She laughed and did this very specific head movement that I hadn’t noticed during the hundred hours we’d spent on FaceTime. But in an instant I could tell it was a thing she did and it was torturously cute and I smiled really big. E asked what and I said I just learned one of your mannerisms. Tell me, she said, and I made my eyes annoying and said I don’t want to. But, dear reader, know that I could describe it in full resolution.
It was a couple years ago that I took the social intelligence test. I’d read about it in Barbara Tversky’s remarkable book, The Mind in Motion. She writes about motor resonance—it’s an uncanny thing: when you watch someone move, your brain lights up as if you’re making the same movement. “The mimicking is internal,” Tversky writes, “but it can leak out into actual behavior. We imitate each other's body movements and facial expressions… [which] means that the bodies of others get internalized in our minds and our bodies get internalized in theirs.” This didn’t really make sense until I took the test. What happened was surprising. It was a small thing, but when I looked at the first set of eyes what I did was try to mimic the picture. Even before reading the multiple choice options my eyes attempted to take the shape of the ones I was looking at. It was as if the screen no longer held the right answer, but my body did.
This is where I’m gonna sound like a yoga teacher for a paragraph if you’ll bear with me. The practice rests on an axiom that the mind and body only move in relationship to each other. It’s why we get hangry—angry when we’re hungry. The physical state pulls on the mental state. The opposite is also true, which is why it can be hard to sit still when waiting for a plane to land. The mental state pulls on the physical state. This is amplified in the yoga room because the yoga room is a loudspeaker of motor resonance: when a bunch of people synchronize their physical gestures it creates a shared attention that’s literally mind-altering. Focus is palpable, and contagious, and an entire room can fold into a single point. From the teacher’s perch it’s also clear to see that there’s never only one person who itches their face or reaches for a water bottle; the people around them absorb what’s broadcast, which ripples out again, until an outbreak of itchiness and thirst has overtaken the room. This all appears to be unconscious, which is of course the opposite of the goal of yoga, but what’s really interesting is these actions have little to do with being itchy or thirsty.
On Monday E wanted to take my class. I was a bit anxious she’d no longer like me after the whole song and dance but figured might as well rip the bandaid off. It also happened to be the first class after I’d sent the email about us. On the way to the studio I told her people were probably going to bring it up. I must’ve done something with my face because she teased me for being nervous and said we don’t have to hold hands on the way in. When I’d asked her for consent to send it in the first place she said life is theater baby, but with expressive humor because she is, in fact, a theater kid. So on Monday night we walked up to the studio, one and a half steps apart, and the moment I opened the door a student said hey man can’t wait to hear how it turns out with your girlfriend. I didn’t look at E, but I knew if I did she’d be doing that thing with her head again.
Class was full and I was too conscious of myself and it was hard to say exhale chaturanga at just the right time. And then hearing my voice echo off the walls it sounded either like I was a drill sergeant or a spa attendant but definitely nothing in between. The whole time I wondered what E was thinking. I tried not to look but that was wrong and in triangle pose I did look and I couldn’t tell. We kept going. Everyone was focused and trying and it was warm inside and dusky outside and then at the beginning of backbends she stopped. I saw from the corner of my eye that she was kneeling, and looking at me. I was on the stage and everyone else was doing backbends and I looked at her too and it was as if a tunnel opened up between us. I felt see-through and this lasted for what seemed like an eternity, and then she nodded at me, and I nodded at her.
The rest is hard to recount without this turning into a fully exposing read, but suffice it to say we canceled plans on the last night so we could lie on our sides with our eyeballs three inches apart. A thousand times I wished I could say something that no one in the history of the world had ever said before. Then on Friday she went back to New York.
As it turns out it’s definitely intense to live-blog the beginning of a romance. I asked my brother and he said give the people what they want. But what if it doesn’t work out, I said, and he said you’ll just have to write about that. A few weeks went by and don’t worry E and I are not engaged, but I am sending this email from Brooklyn.
It’s hot here and she’s at work and this morning on my way to the coffee shop a woman’s dog lurched chaotically around the corner, chasing after a pigeon. The dog pulled on the woman and the woman almost ran into me and she was horrified about this, gave a hearty apology and then yelled at her dog, who was still pulling her down the sidewalk. I said no worries and watched her lumber away, but for a second I actually had the wherewithal to notice that my hands were in fists and my shoulders were up my neck. There were other people out and about; it was threatening to rain and an older man was approaching now and it occurred to me that if he were to look at me, something inside of him would then be clenched up too. This was all a bit psychedelic but I felt suddenly responsible for not transmitting the agitation through space. I tried to relax myself and then I smiled at the man. He looked at me like I was insane. I took one of those breaths you have to tell yourself to take and then walked down the sidewalk, inside out.