The Table?

The question sounds simple enough. What do you bring to the table? People throw it around like it has a clean answer, like somewhere out there exists a person who has thought deeply about it and can respond without pausing, without deflecting, without the very specific kind of panic that comes from being asked to justify your own existence in a relationship. It is one of those questions that sounds like it is about standards but is really about something far more uncomfortable. It is asking you who you are when you take away the performance.

The honest answers are rarely honest. Ask the average guy and he will say stability, which is a softer way of saying money, which is a polite way of saying he has not thought beyond that. Ask a woman and depending on who she is, she will either say she is the table, which is bold and I respect it, or she will gesture vaguely at her presence, her body, her attention, all the things that are real but also feel like they dissolve the moment you try to hold them up to light. Both answers are trying. Both answers are also kind of hollow, because what they are really describing is leverage, not personhood.

Then there is the other group. The ones who have chosen to wait, to keep themselves, to practice celibacy, sometimes for faith reasons and sometimes for reasons they have convinced themselves are self-respect and sometimes genuinely both at once. And I am not interested in mocking them. I think choosing to hold yourself in that way is a serious and valid thing. I have been in that space before, at different points, with different levels of conviction. I know what it costs and I know what it means to believe that your body is not a currency even when everything around you is treating it as one.

Erykah Badu - Bag Lady

But here is the part that sits with me. When you ask those same people the table question, something interesting happens. They will say, there are other forms of intimacy. And they say it with such confidence that you almost do not notice that they have not said anything yet. What forms? Emotional depth? Intellectual connection? Spiritual alignment? When you push gently, the answers get thinner. Not because those things are not real, but because most of them have not actually sat down and articulated what those things look like for them specifically. They know what they are not doing. They are far less sure about what they are doing instead.

Which brings me to what I think the question is actually revealing. Whether you answer with money or your body or a vague promise of emotional presence, what the table question is really catching you in is the fact that most of us have not done the work of knowing who we are outside of what we offer. The celibate person assumes that removing sex from the conversation automatically makes them the most self-aware person in the room. The person who leads with security assumes that the practical thing is the whole thing. And everyone else is somewhere in between, naming things they have never fully felt and offering versions of themselves they have not quite met yet.

There is a version of faith that I think gets this right. The conviction that your worth is not contingent, that you do not have to earn your place at the table by bringing anything at all in the transactional sense. But even then, you have to know yourself well enough to communicate that. Believing it quietly is not the same as understanding it.

The question is shallow. But the way we answer it tells us exactly how shallow we have allowed ourselves to remain. Nobody is winning this one. We are all sat around a table we are not sure we built, arguing about who should have a seat.

What would your honest answer be, if you had to give one today?

Maybe a table,
Perre.