Skip to content
- Unlike engagement, caring does not demand balance or perfect reciprocity: it is enough if one person can take the good of the other to heart.
- The more my husband and I “team up” to deal with childcare and household maintenance, the less we have to say to one another. How much is there to talk about when no one has left the house for weeks? It is possible to feel loved, safe and cared for, and, at the same time, to experience a lockdown of the mind. This too is loneliness, though of a very different kind.
- While care is intrinsically friendly, interaction isn’t. Indeed, the name for two people who interact intensely without caring about one another’s good is “competitors.”
- Within a game—and perhaps only within a game—all demands of care are lifted. I can capture your pieces without apology, simply taking away what is yours, purely out of self-interest. I can put down my Scrabble word with the precise hope of taking up the space you needed. I need not sympathize with your plight, even when it is only due to bad luck; in fact, I may rejoice in your misfortunes, actively wishing for the fates to curse your roll of the dice. Within the scope of the game, I want to eradicate you. You are another self—but not the kind of self I have to promote, or protect, or be considerate of. You are the kind of self that is an enemy.