reflections from a cinephile

call me by your name and I'll call you by mine...

I was speaking with my sister last night about the film Call Me By Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino. I was telling her that my opinions about the film might be controversial- because I felt that the film was less about a romantic relationship between Oliver and Elio, and more so about parenthood. She disagrees, she thinks the film is about vulnerability: the act of releasing the things that live within, in exchange for freedom and peace. I told her that the only thing I walked away from the film unable to understand was what Oliver meant when he said to Elio while in bed, “call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine…” (side note: how romantic [insert crying emoji]).

There’s a chance that the meaning behind this quote has found me. Lately I’ve been consumed with thoughts about friendship. Maybe it is because I am no longer friends with most of my childhood friends. There are a number of reasons as to why those relationships have had to be severed but they all boil down to a lack of reciprocity. As most things in our Universe, relationships between people too are governed by Newton’s third law. And this law states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Balance and harmony are key principles to maintaining a connection. When the scale becomes imbalanced, that means it is time to start adding onto one side of the scale or remove things. In the cases of my friendships, we’ve had to remove things.

And that is probably because of complacency. When people enter relationships initially, they are excited and curious. They hold back on making assumptions and operate instead by way of intrigue and questioning. However, as time goes by, people start to feel comfortable enough within a relationship to a point of no longer asking follow up questions. How? Why? Those words decrease and “I know” increases. And behaving this way in relationships catapults the end into existence. This behavior brings complacency, misunderstandings, and worst of all- it leads to boredom. And when a relationship reaches a point of boredom- it is because that relationship has become stagnant. Reader, I recently read a quote that changed my life; it stated “only boring people get bored.” To combat boredom and stagnation in relationships, it’s important to remain curious and inquisitive.

If we do not inquire into other people’s lives, how will we know how to show up for them? People are forever evolving, never staying the same. This means that their needs and wants are always changing as well, in order to remain up to date on how to behave as a proper friend- we have to be curious. And curiosity partially helps to ensure that the scale is always balanced. My friendships lacked reciprocity in this way- they were just years of operating on assumptions about the needs of the other. And as they say, to assume is to make an ass out of u and me.

In Call Me By Your Name, when Oliver says to Elio, “call me by your name, and I’ll call you by mine…,” I interpret that as similar to the biblical “treat others just as you want to be treated.” Sigh isn’t it romantic that during this scene-they are laying down and calling one another by their names. I wonder to myself, if my friends had called me by their names- would they have shown up for me differently? If they had seen me, not as an entity separate from themselves but as an extension, would I have mattered a little more? And vice versa, had I called them by my own name, would I have remembered to behave differently? Oh… the intimacy of seeing ourselves in other people. But then I start to think to myself a very scary thought:

what if the way I was being treated IS/WAS the way they treated themselves? And vice versa, what if indeed it is true (and reader, it is) that my behavior in my friendships is/was a reflection of how I behave towards myself? OH! spooky…

They say that “we accept the love that we think we deserve” (from The Perks of Being a Wallflower). Reader, what kind of love do you think you deserve?

xoxo,

Kayitesi.