The Write Thing

I promised myself I would not talk about The L Word in this posting. However, this week’s episode of the fifth season of the series pushed me to break my promise. Actually, I am writing this because I had the title for the posting long before the words I wanted to use. I am not sure if the show is known by whoever may read this post one day, but the line of the main story that is resuming importance this year has to do with Bette Porter and Tina Kennard. These two women used to be in a long-term marriage (they never got married, but that’s a technicality), but grew apart throughout the seasons. In Season 5, much to the delight of a bunch of followers, they are finding out all is not dead between them. Bette has started a relationship with someone else, whereas Tina has gradually come to terms with her own insecurity and is now a free woman (still in love with Bette). The title of this posting has to do with the personality type the character of Bette was given. I have been doing intensive research on Alpha types but there is nothing much online to rely on. So, I said to myself, I’ll have to depend on Bette. However, Bette has now also put herself in touch with her own insecurities, those of a Type A personality. It’s odd, but she now seems mellow, as opposed to Tina, who has decided to take life in her own hands.

Personally, I’ve always felt closer to Tina, we may share some ways of being. With this season bringing us closer to the voyage of these two characters in the amniotic fluid of rebirth into new beings, I realize we may have a personality type to display on the shop window, but we are bigger than that, more complex and, as such, more fascinating.

I normally would not be writing about this, but I have just finished watching the fourth episode of The L Word and it set me thinking about affinity between human beings. We tend to associate attraction with chemistry between two people, and from there some of us — or most of us — construct relationships. However, I consider chemistry to be only a small portion of the whole sensual experience of loving. It is only a start. The rest, the foundations of what later on will be the bond, is affinity. I looked the word up at Visual Thesaurus and found a couple of definitions for this term:

a close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character

a natural attraction or feeling of kinship.

The episode ends with a deep, passionate and sad kiss between one of the leading couples in the series, Bette and Tina. Well, I’m not going to digress with the full story of these two, as that would involve summarizing five seasons. So, if you are a follower you will understand what has just happened. If you are not, the DVDs are for sale. Maybe eighty percent of the viewers felt the same, or something similar, when they saw their kiss last night. In the last scene, the kiss is the only substitute for the words that they use to pretend they are doing fine dating other people when, in fact, every step along the way they realize more and more where they belong. Why? Because the affinity is there.

Now, is that enough to sustain a relationship or to keep a couple afloat? Maybe not. Sometimes people need to move on to other things. Sometimes, they need to move on, only to come back to the beginning strengthened from the experience.