caitlinisactuallyawritersname:
caitlinisactuallyawritersname:
(I just had a conversation with Katie @therealmartinsgrrrl that is fucking me up so hard right now.)
John Watson is a man who is a study in contradictions. He’s a soldier and a doctor, yes, we all know that. But he’s so much more complex than that shorthand lets on.
He’s a man who has a deep seated compulsion to care for and nurture others, yet has studiously avoid forming deep personal connections well into his forties. He’s pleasant and polite on the surface, but scratch past that and he’s a bit difficult, a bit salty and surly and not always a very nice person. He’s a friendly person that doesn’t have any friends. Not real ones.
The caretaking bit is an ingenious move. It’s a control thing, it’s a way of being in charge of every situation, of never being at anyone else’s mercy, of never being the vulnerable or needy one. I know this because I do this. I literally have made a career out of it, of never ever revealing myself yet focusing my attention and caretaking on many others. People like me, we like to see ourselves as the good ones, as the tireless givers, maybe even sometimes as martyrs.
We’re not always good people, though. Not necessarily. What we are, are people deathly afraid of being vulnerable, of being on the other end of that equation. Because needing others is a surefire way of getting hurt, and hurt badly.
Somewhere along the line, probably early in life, John Watson got badly let down by someone he depended on. Fanon often lays the blame at the feet of alcoholism running through the Watson clan (and as the adult child and grandchild of alcoholics, I personally tend towards this view.) Perhaps is was poverty, not of the grinding sort but the everyday, not-enough-money, working-two-jobs sort that tends to let kids’s needs slip through the cracks. Perhaps it was just a combination of a sensitive temperament and a home life that just didn’t have room for those kinds of needs.
Whatever happened, it made John Watson shut down the parts of him that needed, made him sublimate that basic desire for connection into caretaking, into doctoring, into healing the wounded, and in a war theater, no less, an arena that cranked the stakes up to do-or-die and left no room for emotions or vulnerability.
(Insert “And whatever the hell happened with John and Sholto” somewhere in here.)
But then…Sherlock. Why Sherlock? Why anyone, honestly? Whatever the reason, something about this strange, strange man awakens something so long dormant in John that he probably thought it didn’t even exist anymore. A feeling of needing. Of wanting. Of a desire for connection so deep and terrifying it hurts to much to contemplate.
John dates all these women in the interim. He probably sleeps with most of them at some point. But none of them are Sherlock. None of them reach that deep place of needing, of wanting to be understood. Not even close.
(And then Sherlock goes and does the worst possible thing and leaves him behind. Good God. No wonder John is traumatized and wounded and still angry as fuck three years later. Just think of the magnitude of that betrayal, of the one person you allow yourself to need wholeheartedly leaving you behind. It’s hard to even think about for too long.)
And even after all that, John’s need for connection to Sherlock is so great he doesn’t even hold out a week before he’s back in his orbit.
And that, I think, is what John is running from, what he can’t yet deal with, why he marries Mary even after Sherlock’s return. He’s not hiding from his sexual attractions. Well, maybe he is, just a little, but much more than that he’s hiding from the enormity of his own confusing and overwhelming emotional need, and the power it gives Sherlock over him, the way it takes away John’s control and ability to keep another at remove.
At the end of it all it’s not his orientation, but his desire for love and acceptance and true companionship from Sherlock Holmes, that are the actual skeletons in John’s closet.
(Am I projecting? God yes. It’s late and it’s tumblr and I’ll ramble if I want to.)
@may-shepard :0
This is beautiful to me, especially as someone who is right there with you on the caretaking-as-intimacy-replacement. I don’t do this all the time with everyone any more, but definitely it is a pattern.
Why Sherlock…he’s got everything, doesn’t he? He’s got the brilliance and the danger and the adrenal stimulation but he’s also got that thorny thorny hard to get along with, needs someone to help him with the mundane stuff, uh, stuff. He’s high maintenance. Speaking as someone who follows the caretaker pattern, that particular combo has, in the past, been crack cocaine to me. “I am the only one who gets you. That guarantees that I’m precious to you.”
And John is precious to Sherlock, just as Sherlock is precious to John.
This sounds vile but it’s also so, so real. For me, this pattern was the foundation of the most insanely intense relationship of my adult life. Yeah maybe it’s projection but I buy it.
AHHHHHHHHH YES THIS. THIS THIS THIS.
Honestly, what we’re describing here is the classic caretaker/borderline-slash-narcissistic codependency paradigm.
They would be a Chernobyl-level disaster in real life. Thank God it’s fiction, so they can get their happily ever after.
Why, no, we’re not working out our collective neuroses here. I don’t know why anyone would think that. *snerk*