Some For You, Some For Me, All For Us

October 1, 2012 By Lise Quintana in personal, Uncategorized Tags: anxiety, bonding, drama, family, musings, pizza, sharing, taste 2 Comments

My husband and I have been together for about 12 years. When we first got together, we told each other all of our deepest, darkest secrets – all of the likes and dislikes and fears and desires that another person might hear and say “Ew. That’s weird.” Telling him these things made me feel I was testing him. If he could hear the worst about me and still want to be with me, then he really loved me. Hearing those things about him made me feel he was blessing me with things he couldn’t share with other people.

Somewhere along the line, it got harder to share things. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we keep secrets from each other, but we certainly went from “I love you and I want to share every single new experience with you” to “I don’t want to bother you with this, I know it’s not your thing.”

On the one hand, that’s a good thing. I think that every relationship goes through that initial phase where you’re pretending to like things the other person likes just to have an excuse to have more experiences together. Once you live with someone and get to experience them in uninterrupted stretches, there are things you can skip.

On the other hand, when you’ve been with someone for a long time, it’s easy to make assumptions that cut off what could be shared experiences. Assuming that your partner doesn’t like a pizza because one time you asked if they wanted some and they said “no,” or thinking that your partner’s dislike of a particular band equals hating an entire genre of music means that there are whole areas of potential shared experience that you won’t have.

My worry is that once you start cutting out shared experience, you start diminishing your relationship. You find other people to go out for pizza with, you start going to see your favorite band alone, and then you start building new communities that don’t involve your partner. The bigger worry is that the reason one person isn’t sharing is because they’re afraid. Afraid that you won’t like their new thing. Afraid that not liking that thing may make you not like them.

It’s an effort sometimes to remember that risks are still part of bonding, even after we’ve been together for so long. I’m always encountering new music and theater and movies, etc. that I think are interesting. It’s good to think back to those early days, and remember how amazing it felt to spill all my secrets and remember that it was sharing that made us into an us in the first place.

My Taste, Your Taste

July 24, 2012 By Lise Quintana in leisure, personal Tags: addiction, alcohol, anxiety, brain function, flavor, food, smell, taste Leave a comment

Last night, the Pirate and I opened a bottle of red wine after dinner. We were still drinking the wine when we retired to the bedroom to get ready for bed. The Pirate brushed his teeth before he’d finished his wine, and when he came back into the room and took a sip, he made a weird face.

“That’s interesting. After brushing my teeth, this wine tastes like…chocolate…and cheese….” He was doing that thing people do when they’re trying to describe a taste or sensation they’re experiencing: looking around in the air above his head as though the answer were on one of the hundreds of postcards attached to the ceiling.

Postcards on my bedroom ceiling

I started collecting these in college, and still pick up a few whenever I go someplace cool. If you sent me one, I’d put it up and think of you when I looked at it.

He wanted me to taste it after brushing my teeth, but I declined. I feel certain that if I had done the experiment, I wouldn’t have tasted chocolate OR cheese, and it led me to wonder – when I eat chocolate, do I taste the same thing my husband tastes? Or that you taste? I know that when I drive past a skunk that was hit by a car, the skunk smell is exactly the same to me as the smell of roasting coffee, and yet I know people who say that the smell of roasting coffee is pleasing to them, but the smell of skunk is disgusting – how can they make a distinction between them? To me, they’re identical.

People can distinguish five different tastes: sweet, bitter, salty, sour and umami. In addition, they can distinguish seven different types of smell: musky (the smell of perfume), putrid (rotten eggs), pungeant (vinegar), camphoraceous (moth balls), ethereal (dry cleaning fluid), floral (roses) and mint. Here’s what I’m not sure about: a given food contains a set of chemicals that make up its flavor profile. Every eater of a given food is working with the same set of chemical inputs. Why, then, the differences in perception? Is it a difference in body chemistry? Is it a difference in brain wiring? Both?

How much does our sense of taste play into our food and drink addictions? A Google search of the words “fast food addiction” shows 16.6 million results, including studies that show the addictive properties of fast food. Those addictive properties are tangentially related to taste in that the pleasing taste activates the brain’s pleasure centers – one article outlines the addictive ingredients in fast food including monosodium glutamate (a prime component of the “umami” taste) and casein, a naturally-occurring protein that, in fast food, is pumped up to past the danger point.

I’m not addicted to fast food. I can’t afford to be, since I’ve been battling a weight problem all my life. My husband, on the other hand, is naturally thin and has no real fondness for the things I have the most trouble with – baked sweets, chocolate, cheese. It feels unfair to me that because of an accident of chemistry my husband can maintain a healthy weight despite eating an enormous amount (I know, part of it is that he’s a man and therefore has more muscle mass and a higher metabolism, in addition to the fact that the man is two meters tall and therefore has a lot of guy to feed) while I have to consider every bite that goes into my mouth.

On the other hand, I also like to think that it means that I have outlets for enjoyment that are closed to my husband, who doesn’t equate the taste of white jasmine tea with love, or the flavor of Ezekiel bread with independence. In that way, I’m the lucky one.

What Gets In When the Skin Is Thin

March 16, 2012 By Lise Quintana in of interest, personal Tags: high sensitivity, kryptonite, noise, noise-cancelling headphones, taste, touch Leave a comment

My mother tells a story (the same one over and over for the last million years) about how, when I was little, I would play happily by myself for hours on end. Other people would remark on how happy I appeared to be and wanted to join me. Of course, someone else coming into my own private game – someone who didn’t know the rules (of which the primary rule is “I always win”), someone who wanted to do things like share (which means that everything isn’t mine all the time) and take turns (meaning that there’s some time when I don’t get to play) – inevitably spoiled it.

Decades after that, I had a little kid of my own. My second little kid. Entirely unlike the first one, the second one wasn’t a good sleeper. She startled at every noise. She hated all but the blandest foods. She screamed when I dressed her and was only content when naked and warm.

I didn’t think about how much alike she and I were until I heard about highly sensitive people. It got me to thinking about how sensitivity has shaped my life. Like my daughter, I’ve never been a good sleeper. For me, it’s because every little noise wakes me.

Sounds are my kryptonite. Some are worse than others. Sounds made by mouths are horrifying. Other people chewing, smacking their lips, the sounds animals make when they lick themselves – they are enough to cause an unpleasant physical sensation in me. Whistling is unbearable. Similarly, the sounds of certain kinds of keyboards are painful to me. It’s one of the reasons I hated working in an office all those years (sadly, a reason I never felt I could share with my boss). To this day, my husband and I share an office in our home, and when he’s working, I can’t work unless I’m wearing headphones. But at home, I can wear headphones without fear of being fired.

Noise-cancelling headphones and high-tech earplugs have been my salvation. The ability to keep those sounds that most hurt me at bay has been critical to keeping the little sanity I’ve managed to salvage. For my poor daughter, the one who can’t handle physical touch, the challenges are a little tougher. But the second they come up with touch-cancelling clothes, she’ll get the same benefits I have.