Rubber Men and Metal Women

We were in the kitchen. My friend was making bolognese.

We had just gotten back from a concert neither of us particularly wanted to see. We mostly just wanted to see each other, which became obvious when neither of us cared that we had arrived an hour late, or that my boyfriend eventually had to drag us off the sticky bar seats and into his car.

He drove us forty minutes. He's good like that.

We stayed for maybe thirty minutes before abandoning the stadium, calling an Uber, and giggling the whole way out. The best parts of the night are always the transitions between things—the drive there, the walk home, the conversation after everyone else has gone to bed. The things that aren't technically the event somehow become the event.

He listened to two drunk girls sing every song they knew while he knew none of the words.

That bothered me.

Not because I need the people I love to like everything I like. But because I want the people I love to experience the world with me. I want to turn to someone during a song and know that whatever is happening inside of me is happening, at least a little, inside of them too.

There are things like that in my relationship. We don't always share passions. Sometimes it feels like we don't interact with the world in the same way. What feels enormous to me can feel very small to him. And what bothers me most isn't necessarily that he doesn't feel the same way I do. It's that he doesn't always understand why I need him to. 

And yet, above all else, I love him. So I stay—I stay happily.

Maybe it was the wine, or the gin, or the shot of whisky I took getting out of the car, or the events of the night that has me thinking about this. About the difference between being loved and being understood.

Because I used to think there were two kinds of people in love.

Rubber people.

And metal people.

My friend, sitting across from me in the kitchen slurping pasta, was rubber.

I was metal.

At least, I thought I was.

Metal has a shape. It can bend under enough pressure, but it doesn't casually become something else. I've spent enough time trying to fit myself into other people's expectations to know that I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to become whatever someone happens to need just because they like having me around.

My friend was different.

She bent.

She bent toward people, toward circumstances, toward relationships. She could rearrange herself around someone else's life without even realizing she was doing it.

And I started wondering: if you bend yourself around someone you love, are you still yourself?

Maybe rubber would say yes.

I'm still me. I'm just flexible.

And maybe that's true.

Because being able to adapt isn't the problem.

The problem is when adaptation becomes erasure.

There is a difference between making room for someone and becoming whatever gives them the most room.

That distinction became obvious to us through years of embarrassing evidence; bad decisions, and people we probably should have left alone much sooner.

I met a rubber boy once. We were put into the same project group in an existentialism philosophy class.

At first, I didn't think of him that way. I just liked the way his cologne smelled when he took off his sweater at the MFA. I liked that he was always drinking iced coffee or chewing gum. Eventually he got absorbed into my friend group, and I liked having him around. I also knew he liked me. And I knew he'd always be there.

He was endlessly accommodating. He could become whatever I needed at any given moment. If I wanted someone to go somewhere, he came. If I wanted someone to listen, he listened. If I wanted attention, there it was.

He thought this was love. I thought it was evidence that he didn't really see me. Because how can you love someone who keeps changing shape around you? Maybe you can. But how do you know what you're loving?

If I say I love the version of you that always agrees with me, always comes when I call, always wants what I want—is that love for you, or love for how well you fit?

I had already been the rubber person once myself.

There was a coworker I became completely absorbed in even though he wanted nothing to do with me. I kept showing up. I helped him. I made myself useful. Eventually, he realized that I had two tits and a pulse. He treated me differently then, and I mistook being wanted for being understood.

He destroyed something in me—not to sound super dramatic, but after that, I decided I would never mold myself around someone again. 

Which is probably why I became so convinced I was metal. I wore that personality trait like it was a war medal.

I convinced myself I was the tin man—doomed to be the villain in every lover’s story. And that’s definitely a nice thought, but it’s also giving myself way too much credit. I’m not that strong. 

We like to think of ourselves as having fixed materials. I'm sensitive. I'm guarded. I'm independent. I'm a people pleaser. I'm stubborn.

But maybe personality isn't a material thing. Maybe it's a response to pressure.

The same person can be rubber with one person and metal with another. You can be incredibly flexible with someone who makes you feel safe because you don't feel like you have anything to defend. You can become rigid around someone who has repeatedly asked you to compromise yourself.

You can be metal in January and rubber by June. You can bend for someone you've known for ten years and refuse to bend for someone you've known for ten minutes. You can change on a dime. And that doesn't necessarily mean one version of you was fake. The version of you that bent and ended up sobbing on the subway home was real. The version of you that refused to bend, that left you cold and robotic toward the next few guys, that was real too.

Experience changes the amount of pressure you can tolerate. It changes what you consider worth changing for. Sometimes it even changes the shape you're trying to protect.

My friend has her own version of the story.

She fell hard and fast for a metal boy on the basketball team. She bent toward him; he didn't bend back. Eventually he graduated and moved to another state, leaving her with the familiar realization that she had built a life around someone who had never rearranged his life around her.

And suddenly the pattern was obvious:

Rubber is often attracted to metal because metal feels solid.

Metal is often attracted to rubber because rubber feels attentive.

Rubber sees certainty and thinks, I want to be held by something that won't move.

Metal sees flexibility and thinks, Finally, someone who knows how to move toward me.

We are often attracted to the qualities we don't know how to give ourselves. But eventually, rubber gets tired of bending. And eventually, metal gets tired of being asked to give.

My friend eventually fell for the rubber boy I had rejected. And, ironically, I think I turned him metal. Not because I wanted to. Not because I was particularly powerful. He simply reached the point where he realized that constantly changing shape for someone wasn't making them love him. So he stopped bending. And suddenly, there was a person there.

Maybe that's the cruelest part of the theory. Sometimes rejection doesn't make a rubber person disappear. It gives them a shape.

But no, even that’s too simple. Because if that were true, then we're back to treating metal as the goal—as though the lesson is to get hurt enough times that you become impossible to move. And I don't think that's it either.

Metal isn't inherently better than rubber. Rubber's ability to stretch is a strength. Without flexibility, some things simply break. But metal has strengths too. Sometimes resistance is the thing that keeps a structure standing. Both materials can be useful. Both can become destructive. Rubber can stretch until it no longer remembers its original shape. Metal can become so rigid that nothing can reach it. So maybe the goal isn't to become metal. And maybe it isn't to stay rubber.

Maybe the goal is to understand when you're bending, why you're bending, and whether you still recognize yourself afterward.

Because flexibility is not weakness. Sometimes love looks like changing your schedule to make date-night work. Trying someone's favorite restaurant even though you hate sushi. Listening to an album you don't understand because your partner knows every word. Sitting through a concert for a group you don’t care about because you get to sit next to someone you do.

Flexibility is good. However, there has to be a point at which you can still recognize yourself. You can only bend so far before you break. 

You can compromise without becoming compliant. And you can be changed without having been erased.

Back to the beginning, maybe that's why the concert bothered me.

He drove us forty minutes.

He sat there.

He listened.

He showed up.

And that matters. It matters a lot.

But I still wanted him to know the words.

Not because knowing the words would prove that he loved me. But because I wanted some evidence that he had entered my world—not just accompanied me into it. Maybe that's the difference between being accommodated and being seen.

The rubber boy accommodated me perfectly. He was always willing to become whatever I needed. He just never seemed particularly interested in who I actually was. And maybe that's the real danger of rubber.

Not that it bends. That it can become so good at bending that nobody notices there was ever a shape underneath it.

And there is a danger in metal, too.

You can become so proud of having a shape that you start treating every request to budge an inch as an attack on your identity.

Sometimes someone isn't trying to reshape you. Sometimes they're just asking you to make room.

And that's where I think the metaphor changes.

Maybe we're not rubber people and metal people at all. Maybe we're just people made of different materials at different moments, constantly being pressed, stretched, hardened, softened, reshaped. Maybe love is one of the forces that does that to us.

Maybe heartbreak hardens us.

Maybe safety softens us.

Maybe experience teaches us where we can bend and where we shouldn't.

Maybe the person we are with one partner isn't the person we become with another. And maybe that's okay. Because the point isn't to determine which material you are. The point is to figure out what you're building.

Some people bend more easily. Some don't. Some things genuinely need flexibility. Some things need to hold their shape. A good structure isn't made by forcing every piece into the same shape. It's made by finding pieces that fit together without requiring each other to cease being themselves.

Maybe that's what I've been looking for all along. Not someone exactly like me. Not someone who loves every song I love or understands every feeling the way I understand it. Someone who can be different from me without making my differences feel inconvenient. Someone who can bend without disappearing, and stand firm without making me do all the bending. Someone who doesn't ask me to become smaller so they can love me more easily. Someone who doesn't just fit around me, but actually wants to know the shape of me.

Because maybe love isn't about finding someone who fits. Maybe it's about finding someone who sees the shape you already are—and chooses to build something beside it. Maybe that's the evolution of the metaphor.

First, I thought the question was whether I was rubber or metal. Then I thought the goal was to become metal—to develop a shape nobody could manipulate. Now I'm starting to think the question was never about the material at all.

It's about architecture.

What happens when two people bring their own shapes into the same space?

Where do they bend?

Where do they hold?

Where do they leave room?

Where do they meet?

Because we're not supposed to all be just one thing, metal or rubber. 

We're supposed to be people capable of changing without disappearing, standing firm without becoming immovable, and learning from every person who puts pressure on us.

The version of me who bent was real.

The version of me who hardened was real.

The version of me who learns to bend again will be real, too.

Maybe that's not inconsistency. Maybe that's growth. And maybe the best relationships aren't the ones where neither person ever changes. Maybe they're the ones where you can change each other without erasing each other. Where neither person has to keep bending until they break. Where the pieces don't fit because one person finally became the right shape for the other. They fit because, somehow, both people got to remain themselves.

Love shouldn't be a mold. It should be a structure we build together.

And maybe, after all this time, that's what I actually want. Not someone who makes me rubber. Not someone who forces me to be metal.

Just someone I can stand beside—solid when I need to stand, flexible when I need to bend—and somehow, despite all the pressure, all the resistance, and all the changing, find a way to build a life.