Expect Expectations

Here is a perennial question: What do you do when you meet someone in virtual reality and find an erotic fascination with exhibitionism? What do you do when you fall for his sexiness? His charm? His pseudo-innocence that plays with your perverse imagination? What do you do when there are secrets in which he does not know about yourself? Those hidden activities that makes one somewhat 'different' from the norm? How do you 'call the shots' when you have been very much shot into incongruity?

Oh... I realise the prepositional and singular noun mistake. But a question always leads insatiably to another and another. When do we stop telling the truth? Another question. I apologise. I have never lied... so far anyway. I have only altered the discourse that surrounds truth-telling. It is not a fabrication of my self, but only a sort of veiling of the self.

It's not as simple as saying, "I wear pink underwear." Not that I mind pink underwears, but the depression that entraps relationships are always expectations. If he, for example, expects that I wear black underwear, the signifier of pink may very well conjure contrary assumptions and cultural expectations that one has over another. Expectations thus becomes the problematic, meta-representation of semiotics. To expect means to anticipate and therefore must conjure representative images and signifiers that are linked to the symbolisms and meanings of language that are already wrought in discourse. To be expecting is an even more dangerous verb to use. Speech-acts are at once precursors to actions that one is expected to fulfil and, at the same time, incites a pseudo-confidence for the individual that believes he or she would be/should be satiated by a promise.

Expectations enable the conditions of promises. If I expect to be loved, I have written the dictums of love-making, and if one vouches to be my lover, one has consequently made promises to love me to the delineated criteria. You say, perhaps one should have no expectations in a relationship. I have never lived in a discursive vacuum and neither anyone else that I know. Remember Hannah Arendt? Remember her episteme of promise in the Human Condition? Well... one is not so easily forgiven when a promise has been achieved. The promise to tell no lie, and the promise to tell the truth, the expectation that I will tell the truth, will inadvertently damage this virtual relationship I have achieved. Arendt assured us that broken promises are meant to be forgiven, but she said nothing of promises kept with the possibilities of forgiveness. It was, and still is, assumed that promises kept need no forgiveness. I beg to differ. Divulging that one wears pink underwear might very well crush the relationship.

He expects masculinity... or is it simply my delusional self that found a way to intrude into the expectations of my self? He expects a suave player who will sweep him off his feet... but I am no player. I do not even know how to sweep! He expects a gender. And I am ambiguously cursed between. Help... help me. I am lost.

Should I speak and divulge who I am? What I am? How I am? Where I am? The last question is the simplest, but those before it seem impossible. Where are my guts? They have shrunk in shame and gaseous distaste.

So I expect that he will be most expecting in our next conversation. And there I will have a decision to make that may perhaps have only a simple and dichotomous answer. I shall anticipate as I have never anticipated before.