Is somebody gonna match my freak (blather on endlessly about what it means to match someones freak)

on intimacy avoidance, having your freak matched, and psychic wholeness through love

I love the “match my freak” discourse lol. I love the idea that so many people perceive themselves as freaks who are searching for an energetic equal in their singular, peculiar, wacked-out tendencies. The original lyric, that delicious question from the song “Nasty” by Tinashe, “is somebody gonna match my freak?” and subsequent memeification of it brings up so much for me and I dont care if im thinking about it too much (I am).

The phrase implies an understanding between people without the sometimes daunting task of explanation. We want someone who just gets it without having to go through the exposed, vulnerable, possibly even risky task of explaining ourselves. We want to be understood (who could blame us?) and not only do we want to feel comfortable in our oddities, we want someone to match them.

Sourced from @etherships instagram page

People are freaks, undeniably (and redeemably) so, which is part of why everyone and no one is really that weird. If you ask me, there are millions of people who can match the freakiest parts of each of us. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think finding someone to match your freak is that hard (in a platonic or romantic context) unless you either:

1. see yourself as extremely set apart from others, which is kind of unreasonable and even absurd to believe or

2. you are afraid to let someone see you

I understand the second one a lot more. It’s a fear I believe should be overcome, gently and with care, but it’s one I understand even if I don’t experience it in the same way as other people. My desire for unadulterated connection with others runs deep, is instinctual and impulsive in ways I can’t always explain- possibly even something that could be pathologized - and has always always always outweighed my fear of intimacy for as long as I can remember.

In fact, when I first heard the term “intimacy avoidance,” I was like yes, I have that, I sometimes use intimacy to avoid other aspects of my life, not realizing that it referred to the opposite: people who avoid intimacy itself out of fear and anxiety surrounding closeness to another. I couldn’t have been further from this. I wanted closeness so bad, long before I could name it. I had crushes all the time growing up and all of them mattered to me just as much as the last. I was heartbroken often. I was loosely aware of how maybe I was feeling too intensely about a person or situation, and that I was alone in that intensity, but being aware of it didn’t stop me from feeling the way I did.

I think it was easy for me to imagine loving people. I allowed possibility to enter the mainframe. I was (and am) able to chart possible futures with people effortlessly after knowing them for a short time, and thats always been the case for me. It’s easy to imagine a future with people, to imagine what our love or friendship might look like, what jokes we would make. Of course, I rarely shared these thoughts with the people I had them about. I’m not a psycho. I knew how it could have come off. Importantly, just because I could imagine it didn’t always mean that I necessarily wanted the future with them or was planning for it or felt that I was predicting anything, per se. It was more of a glimmering but strong notion that our togetherness was possible. Possibility has always been enough for a heart like mine to latch onto.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that people did not desire closeness in the way that I did. Sometimes, they even shied away from it. So while I can’t totally relate, I think I understand intimacy avoidance because it was something I just kept having to deal with. So many of my family members, friends, and past romantic partners have communicated it to me over time in a thousand different ways.

In fact, most people I know are afraid of intimacy. I have a friend whose been married for over 9 years and the other day they told me on the phone,

“I don’t really trust anyone,”

and I said, “well yeah, but you trust your husband,”

and they said “Nope. Not even him fully.”

I was incredulous! My brain stumbled over the mechanics of it: a near decade long relationship, one I see as healthy in many ways, functioning without the very thing that many call the most important element. I trusted this persons husband. How could they not? I blurted,

“but I trust him! What do you mean you don’t? What’s the point of being together if you don’t trust him?”

“I love him, thats the point. It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid he’s going to hurt me though. Besides, you trust everyone and like everything.”

That’s the thing: being truly open to love necessarily, definitionally, involves the crucial element of being open to things you may not want. Like emotional and psychological pain, which the object of your desire should you open your heart to them has the ability to inflict on you. Which is scary, I get it but also, a big part of me really doesn’t and never has.

I’m not interested in whether it’s right or wrong for my friend to trust their husband absolutely or in making a value judgement on the validity of relationships that have or don’t have absolute trust. I’m interested in the hesitation to trust someone fully who one has shared a bed, house, and life with for years. I’m interested in my own incredulousness at the hesitation. I’m interested in what I see as a widespread cultural trend of intimacy avoidance coupled with a desperate desire for genuine closeness, for freaks to be matched.

And before you think I’m insinuating that I’ve never been afraid to trust someone or of letting someone in, let me say bluntly that I often feel unmitigated terror about this and other aspects of life outside of my control. But I’ve never felt terrified in a way that has thwarted my instinct to foster romantic connection. And while my friend was exaggerating, I know what they mean. I may not actually trust everyone and like everything, but I want to. I think there’s an important distinction to make between liking everything and wanting to like everything. And this part is true, I do want to like things and trust people. Sometimes I’m more ready to than I should be. This isn’t always a good thing, and I’m definitely not trying to claim some special type of emotional bravery. I only want to understand my own tendencies, why and how they differ from others, and how to work with them instead of against them. I want to understand why there seems to be an innate emotional recklessness in my approach to love that’s been there since before I knew what it meant.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, not just because I’ve experienced a great deal of pain because of it, but also because it’s interesting. I just loved being a girl in love. And you could go back to my childhood and point out experiences or reasons for why, sure, but some of it seems beyond that. I have 5 siblings who all grew up in the same place as me, eating the same foods and having many of the same experiences, and they don’t share this instinct.

Now I know how to be open less recklessly, but I’m still good at going all in because of all the practice I had in years prior, because I was (naively) unafraid of ripping my heart out of my own chest and offering it up, dripping and exposed. I could tell that some of my friends and family thought that it was an embarrassing way to live: throwing myself so deeply into relationships with people they saw as flings at best and potentially irrevocably damaging to me in the long run at worst. And they weren’t always wrong. But I didn’t always see what I was doing as moving too fast or giving too much too soon. Even now, in many contexts, I get the feeling that if I just say how I feel, it will help move things along to get to where they’re really going, to the real ending. And it usually does! Even if I end up hurt by the act of it (and I have been hurt badly because of this unfastened willingness to find out, so help me god, if somebody is going to match my freak), I’ve found that an open honesty typically does move things along to wherever they were going to go.

Sourced from @iamthatwitch instagram page

When friends or loved ones describe what I see as practicing a kind of restraint in their love lives, I experience mixtures of wonder and admiration, even envy. I’ve written about and discussed with some of those close to me how maybe my disposition toward love and devotion would be better suited to a spiritual or religious context, like, maybe I should be a nun, and this line of thinking is closely tied to my longstanding preoccupation with god (and my briefly, actually becoming a nun). I’ve never had to feel embarrassed about, alter, or tone down my love for the divine in the way I’ve had to do in certain relationships. The divine, definitionally, is so much larger than me, unfazed by my mini dramas, romantic stamina, and unending worship. I’ve never been too much for god.

This is part of why I’m interested in the proliferation of the phrase “match my freak.” I think people want someone to match their freak but refuse to acknowledge how you have to allow someone the space necessary to do it. More importantly, you have to be willing to give yourself away. Matching someone’s freak is not something you do for another, but something two (or more) people choreograph and take part in together spontaneously and at will. When I think about it, tons of people have matched my freak, but very few have matched my freak in ways that matter.

brat has to be present here

Of course, the question popped into my head immediately upon hearing the phrase, does my boyfriend match my freak? Which is what led me to write all of this in the first place. So much of the answer to this question relies on the ineffable! On things you can’t fully express, on the invisible, on feeling. I *feel* like our freaks match, but I’ve felt that before, so how do I know when it’s a good thing and when it’s not? This is the rub: it’s not just about having your freak matched. I don’t need someone to just match my freak because certain parts of my freak, if amplified, would be detrimental to my well being if you know what I mean. I want someone to be mindful of the way(s) our freaks match. I want someone to nurture my freak in a way that coaxes it out of me, like my own personal freak charmer, and this is how I see my boyfriend.

I remain a mystery to myself and I want someone in on the unknowns, I want help in understanding. Each time I show my boyfriend (or anyone) a part of me that no one else has seen, I peel back a layer. When I don’t die from having shown it, I can go in again, find the edges of another piece, and slowly start to peel that back too. I get closer to myself in and through getting closer to others. I want to repeat the process, to get good at it. I want to be ready and willing and able to refrain from cowering in the presence of the freak of those I love, to help enhance and amplify their freak in ways conducive to their psychic wholeness and mine, to appreciate their freak in a way that teaches and reminds me how to treasure not just their freak, but freak in general.

Steinbeck has a quote: “Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as the audience.”

I think a lot of people take pride in their hurt. I’ve taken pride in mine before, multiple times, but in moments of clarity I start to see it for what it is: a defense that doesn’t keep anyone out but only me in. In more intense moments, that same defense can become a complex: a strong feeling and a defense against that feeling, i.e., “I want them, but I’m afraid of being hurt by them!” Balancing or wrestling with a complex can lead to a need for control, and people who like to be in control often have a hard time with intimacy. I know this and can say it because I’m one of those people. I wish people understood that having a hard time with something is not the same thing as being bad at it. Intimacy is mutual and anarchic and fundamentally incompatible with control, which is why it’s so good for people who are stuck in their minds, fighting their own constructed psychic wars.

I seek to control because I am afraid. Intimacy with other humans helps me get to know this fear, work with it, and transmute it into something else. A classic Jungian idea I love is that the psyche wants to integrate, wants to pull together to create a greater sense of wholeness despite the fact that all of us are given more to experience in this life than we can consciously bear. It’s scary to attempt this integration with someone else, sure, but it’s always seemed kind of clear to me that there’s no other option.