Sluggish Time
How slow the clocks can tick when one is waiting for another date? The follow-up to the story: Phenomenology of a Romantic Encounter
It was pouring rain outside. I was staring through the window, numb. As if the outside world was already describing perfectly well what was happening inside me. No need to say, think or feel anything else. Everything was out there.
The raindrops were thudding into the glass, sliding down with the help of gravity, forming thick lines through which I could barely perceive the landscape.
“Let’s explore this slowly.” These words that I whispered into the ear of a man while being in the most romantic mood [click here if you have not followed the story] were now crashing into my limbic system over and over again, provoking an increased irritation. With “slowly” perfectly synchronized with each peal of thunder.
Three months have already passed since I went for the after-work drink and kissed a man that I liked, a lot. After that, so many things happened. We exchanged an unimaginable number of text messages, various audio messages, lots of songs, some calls, and a few sexting moments that I immensely enjoyed. And yes, we also met.
Three times.
“Three times in three months?!” My friend, with whom I was talking on the phone, repeated the sentence in a high-pitched voice. I confirmed it with slight embarrassment.
“Three times?” she asked once again. I let the silence answer for me.
“I know that it might seem harsh hun but there is no other way to say it. He’s just not into you!” she answered. “But …” I quickly replied, trying my best to convince her with some additional facts, “he’s writing to me nearly every day, and it was also my fault. I canceled twice.”
“3+2 is 5, divided by 3 still makes it a bit more than one-and-a-half dates per month in a best-case scenario. I don’t need a Ph.D. to know that this is insane!” she replied. “This month, I have been to the dentist more often than you two have met!” she added, leaving me speechless.
What does Slowly Really Mean?
I finished the call with my friend in a worse mood than the rainy weather and tried to find some more evidence-based sources to compensate for her perspective.
I’ve checked the definition of slowly in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “Slowly: in a slow manner: not quickly, fast, early, rashly or readily.”
Unhelpful.
I opened the Oxford Dictionary: “at a slow speed; not quickly.”
A noticeable tension went through my upper chest to my throat and showed in my frowning forehead. What is this way of defining something in opposition to something else? Being happy does not only mean not being sad, as much as being healthy is not the absence of sickness. Is there no objective definition of slowly passing time? Any cut-off score that would help me making sense of these one-and-a-half dates on average per month? The dictionary definitions only reminded me painfully of how frustrated I was about the pace at which things were progressing with this guy.
Slow!
My sister recently said to me, “You’re a person who knows what you want, and you go for it. And if by any chance someone is not completely sure, you’ll convince them. But with this guy, you cannot do that. Maybe he needs some more time?”
She was right. My determination, combined with a relative lack of patience, was getting in the way. Grit, one of my personality traits defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” which predicts success in professional life, was not bringing me such exceptional results in the love department. Unlike when writing a grant proposal, I cannot provide substantial arguments for him to like me enough. It seems impossible to convincingly address the impact of our meeting on our future well-being. It is worthless to write a narrative to make him feel what I feel…
My frustration was increasingly proportional to the number of days that were passing.
Slow is à la Mode!
Let’s be honest, slowing down is trendy! Myself, I am very much into mindfully sipping my morning coffee, feeling the pleasant touch of the veggie milk foam on my upper lip. I like savoring slow walks in the park, appreciating how the sunlight flitters through the branches, and how the leaves are gently moved by the wind. Slow and mindful lovemaking brings me to a place where every gaze, touch, taste, and moan is perceived much more deeply. I am even trying to practice slow science, although some academics might argue that it sounds like an oxymoron.
I love slowing down, I even tried slowly eating fried potatoes once! But being on a “slow-down diet” for the last three months has started to get on my nerves. I felt like the guy was micro-dosing himself to me, and I have a slight preference for a high dosage.
While staying in this emotionally-uncomfortable mental space, I could hear the rain rhythmically tapping on the window glass, providing the beat for the background music playing in my living room. I have only now begun to hear it, thanks to a slight decrease in overthinking.
“Time is a social institution and not a physical reality,” said the calm voice of Alan Watts on the DJ Koze track, accompanied by soft guitar riffs and bird sounds.
When the song ended, I checked the quote.
“There is no such thing as time in the natural world (…) There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.”
“There is definitely no time or motion in this whole love story; it all seems pretty sluggish to me!” I said to myself with a sarcastic tone of voice, and kept searching for more clarification.
What’s Time Got to Do with It?
I typed “what is time” in the search engine and clicked on some sources that looked evidence-based. Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, gave me some answers. He states in his book that time is an illusion, and that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present, and future. I have not read the whole book — I only had time to read a review of his book by another smart physicist in Nature Journal, but what caught my attention was the review’s closing sentence:
“[The book] explores big issues that are very much alive in modern physics, and are closely related to the way in which we limited beings observe and participate in the world.”
I was just called a “limited being,” and that’s how I felt! So, what exactly am I projecting in these collections of three random occurrences between me and the man I like? Would it be that by changing my perspective, I would realize that the time between the two meetings would suddenly seem rather short, or simply disappear?
I continued browsing.
The concept of gravitational time dilation was even more appealing to me. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the gravitational force of a large mass, like our planet, warps space and time around it. The theory can be tested by putting a clock on the top of the mountain and another on the beach; we would then see that the time on each clock is different. In other words, time will move slower for the clock on the beach, which is closer to the earth (the gravitational force).
Out of a pure need for mental experimentation, or simply because it was a rainy day with not much else to do, I tried to apply the theory to my personal experience. I realized that I was living on the sea level, three minutes from the beach. An amazing place! It also seems to be where the clocks are ticking much more slowly. The man whom I liked so much and who was also taking a long time to schedule any future dates with me, was living in the mountains, 30 min away and up from the sea level. “Who would imagine that being in same country and the same city but at a very different distance from the big mass and its gravitational force would cause such time dilation,” I mumbled to myself.
After Rain Comes…
The wind was blowing in the background with the sound getting lighter and gentler with each passing minute. It felt like the outside storm was finally ending. I was drained. It was getting late, and I was still tangled up in my mental knots. As I dragged myself to bed, exhausted, my mind was still not giving up, recalling the words of a Persian poet, Shams-i Tabrīzī:
“The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals.”
I was tired of my own endless mental spirals, and desperately needed some rest. I wrapped myself in soft bedding instead, and closed my eyes.
The next day, the sky was clear, but the persistent drizzle continued to fall. The morning freshness enveloped my lightly-covered body as I stood up gazing through a window. As the sunlight passed through the morning clouds, I was starting to gain a new perspective. It was no longer about him being slow, me wanting things to be fast, nor trying to make sense of this whole sluggish situation. It was more about how I was relating to it.
I breathed in the fresh air and went to the kitchen.
I switched on my phone while trying to drink my still-too-hot latte and saw a message from a familiar face which said: “Good morning, beautiful. Such a lazy morning. I would stay in my bed all day listening to the rain.”
Who needs a watch in the mountains? Time appears to stand still there, and just when one thinks it’s finally making some progress, it loops back into endless spirals.
“Good morning,” I answered, ready for the next lap.
*This story is supported by Scientific Excellence Grants for Early Career Researchers (SEJIGENT from Generalitat Valenciana CISEJI/2022/46 and Beatriz Galindo from Spanish Ministry of Science BGP18–00035), received by the author.
