Why do we simplify each other’s complexity? Is it to make sense of what we can’t understand? To protect ourselves because consistency feels safer than truth? Or does the mind automatically reduce what it can’t hold all at once? That thought popped up while I was sitting with my friend, shivering in the cold, lighting cigarettes as a measly excuse for warmth. She had gone ‘no contact’ just a few hours earlier; her ex-girlfriend had dropped off her stuff, they accepted the end, she cried.
“Why are you crying? This is what you wanted.”
That was the only quote she told me verbatim, everything else had been recounts of actions: the logistics of separation, the standard script of breakups, the blur of an ending. That was the phrase significant enough to survive as an exact quotation, while everything else dissolved into summary. The question disguises itself as confusion but functions as an accusation. It is a question that claims your feelings don’t make logical sense. As if feelings ever did. As if wanting something means you forfeit the right to mourn what it costs.
This idea of emotional simplification isn’t one in isolation; it is a common reflex often found in phrases like ‘if you really cared, you wouldn’t…’ in ideas of logical consistency applied to feeling, or even in the way we demand people to ‘pick a side.’ For a species defined by our capacity for nuance, you would think complexity wouldn’t be a liability, and yet we demand black and white.
You chose to leave, so you can’t miss her.
You said you were over it, so you shouldn’t still care.
You wanted freedom, so you can’t feel lonely.
The logic is always the same: one feeling cancels another, as if emotions follow rules of mutual exclusivity. As if humanity follows rules of logical consistency.
Maybe it is that very truth that terrifies us; that makes us squirm like specimens under a microscope. If their feelings don’t make sense to me, maybe mine don’t either. If someone can want something and mourn it simultaneously, then feelings don’t follow rules. And if feelings don’t follow rules, we lose the ability to predict them; and if we can’t predict them, we can’t control them. Control.
To have security, you have to have control of the unknown. Or move through it. Getting what you want doesn’t erase what you lose, but losers are weepers, and tears make you weak. Except, they don’t. The crying doesn’t make you weak. The demand for consistency does. Maybe what we need to know is simply how to move through not knowing. Which sounds clean in theory, but in practice, it looks messy.
It looks like deleting his number and hoping he’ll text.
It looks like moving to the city of your dreams and feeling homesick the first night.
It looks like choosing to be alone and feeling the loneliness sharply.
It looks like getting exactly what you asked for and realizing it costs more than you expected. The ‘and’ lives in your chest. It’s there in the cavity that the lightness of relief and the weight of loss share. It’s there when you walk away, and every step pulls you back.
We flatten each other while living in our own mess. Ask me how I feel about anything that matters, and the honest answer is: yes, and also no, and also something else entirely. The answer is never singular; it is layers, contradictions, the whole spectrum simultaneously. But let someone else exist in that ambiguity, and suddenly I need them to be legible, coherent, singular.
Why do we demand consistency from others when we can’t maintain it ourselves? Maybe we’ve mistaken complexity for malfunction. Or maybe fostering contradictions isn’t broken circuitry at all; maybe it’s how our systems run. With that being said, to try to find a simplified explanation would be a mistake, a collapse into the very thing I’m critiquing. To speak for all people would be another demand for coherence, another false certainty. I don’t believe that is for me to determine. What I can say is this: every time I’ve held multiple opposing feelings at once, all were true. The contradiction wasn’t a malfunction. At least it didn’t feel like one. Maybe that’s what minds evolved to do; hold more than one truth at once.
Some 50,000 years ago, when the game had been scarce for three days, the children were restless with hunger, and time pressed against them like a physical weight, a woman watched a stranger approach their camp. This uncertainty, as uncertainties tend to be, was one of possibility. With this possibility, emotions came in turn. A feeling of fear as the stranger’s hands remained hidden, curiosity as their gait suggested exhaustion rather than threat, hope that an alliance could mean survival through winter, wariness since trust had been betrayed before. All at once. The contradiction wasn’t confusion; it was a comprehensive threat assessment.
Act only on fear and lose a potential ally.
Act only on hope and leave the camp vulnerable.
The multiplicity was the mechanism that kept her, that kept all of them alive. The multiplicity is the mechanism that keeps one alive. I think about that woman sometimes. Her fear and hope happening simultaneously. It looks like a survival strategy from here. But maybe she didn’t experience it as a ‘comprehensive threat assessment.’ Do those words ever cross my mind when I’m looking back on an ex-relationship? Of course not. Maybe it just felt like chaos she had to move through anyway.
So what happens when we refuse to let each other move through it? When we demand the chaos resolve into something clean? Intimacy requires being seen fully; not just the parts that make sense, not just the feelings that align with our decisions. When I flatten someone into consistency, I’m asking them to perform a version of themselves that’s easier for me to hold. But that performance isn’t them. It’s a manageable fiction, and to be close to a fiction means to be far from reality. The flattening becomes a kind of distance. They learn what’s acceptable to show me and what needs to be hidden. The contradictions don’t disappear; they just go underground, buried where they can’t breathe but refuse to decompose. The relationship continues, but it’s built on edited versions of those who make it. Clean. Comprehensible. Fundamentally dishonest.
And then I do it to myself. If I can’t let someone else hold contradictions, how can I have my own? I start sorting my feelings into acceptable and unacceptable. The ones that make sense get to stay. The ones that complicate the narrative get pushed down. The criteria is self-imposed, built from the fear of being illegible and the impossible fantasy of internal coherence. I become legible to myself the same way I demanded legibility from others; through reduction. Through deciding that some truths are more real than others.
Maybe what we lose most in the demand for consistency is the ability to witness each other. To sit with someone’s mess without needing to clean it up. To hear ‘I wanted this and I’m grieving it’ without correcting them into coherence. My friend sat outside in the cold, feeling the emotions that resulted from personal choice, and I didn’t tell her she was being illogical. I didn’t ask her to pick one feeling. I just sat there. Lit another cigarette while I let her hold both.
But more often, we demand a resolution. We need people to land somewhere we can understand. And in that demand, we lose the capacity to hold space for what being human actually looks like; contradictory, complicated, impossible to flatten into sense without losing something essential in the translation. So why do we reduce each other when we can’t reduce ourselves? Who knows. Maybe the question doesn’t need an answer. Maybe it just needs to be asked.
