“Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher had a theory of human relationships that was about porcupines and he used that as the metaphor. What he said was that in love and in relationship - whether that be with our families or spouses or friends - we are all of us on this earth because we are so uncomfortable with our emotions. We are, all of us, like porcupines who are out on a cold winter’s night. They get cold and they need to huddle together for warmth; they crave connection and they crave warmth, so they come together and then they prick each other (laugh) because they have these horrible spines. And it’s painful and so in order to avoid the pain, they retreat and then they get cold, so they come together and then they get spined (laugh) and so they retreat. And they get cold, and they come together. And this dance of intimacy is what defines our relationships with everybody that we encounter. There's this need to be close that’s followed by this need to be separated in order to protect ourselves from the inevitable hurt that happens when you get too close. And Schopenhauer didn’t have much of a remedy for that. He didn’t think that that was ever really going to end. He sort of saw that as innate to our human nature. What he suggested was that that those who have learned how to generate their own warmth were able to keep the safest distance from the other porcupines (laugh), which didn’t necessarily mean living a life of isolation. It just meant not impelling yourself on other people so that you could have that critical little space in which to be a little bit self-contained to create your own warmth, your own sense of your own humanity so that you could be close without being stabbed. The path to that is closest secret to happiness as anything I have ever learned.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, talks about intimacy and relationships and why people are like porcupines. From THIS EMOTIONAL LIFE (PBS, Jan. 4-6, 2010). http://www.pbs.org/thisemotionallife[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_qhdPflUb8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_qhdPflUb8]
Hedgehog's dilemma
