My Ego-Ownership Problem
I’ve been writing a first-person story and in the middle of a page I needed to denote a person’s relationship to a person as being equal and bi-directional in a single word. I couldn’t find one in English. This made me dig into why this is. Here’s what I came up with.
My core problem is I was writing:
My friend
Your car
My sports team
Her marriage
Our city
It hit me that the words “my”, “your”, “our”, “theirs”, etc. all describe relationships, which is what I wanted, but inherently they are relationships of ownership. Some may argue that these phrases aren’t ownership, but I think they are still ownership of the relationship.
What’s the problem?
The problem is that these are all one-way relationships. I needed a way of saying:
“My wife” that implied a two-way relationship in a single word, without the connotation of ownership.
I hear someone yell, “marriage”! I’d still have to say “my marriage”. That’s a one-way relationship to my two-way relationship. This may be a moot point, ultimately.
The problem, in English, are words such as “my”. From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of my (Entry 1 of 3)
: of or relating to me or myself especially as possessor, agent, object of an action, or familiar person
my car
my injuries
my man
The key word is: possessor–ownership.
In English, it appears, there is no single word that defines a relationship without ownership.
English is ego centric.
We say “I” and “My” a lot.
“I went to my house to eat dinner with my wife.”
Ooo–look! You can say “eat dinner” and not say “eat my dinner”. But I can’t say:
“Went to house to eat dinner with wife.”
Well, you can, but it leaves a lot to interpretation. Whose house? Whose wife? Was the dinner good? [Sorry.]
I’m struggling to learn Japanese. Japanese people are thought to be a polite society. One reason is that their language considers the use of “I” and “You” to be impolite and ego-centric. In Japanese, if you want to say “my friend” you say:
友人 - yujin (friend)
Instead of
私の友人 - watashi no yujin (My friend. Literally, “I of friend”) which might be used when context is not enough.
Because the use of the word “I” is seen as self-centered.
“I of friend” is interesting. It implies a relationship in reverse terms. In English it makes more sense to say “friend of I”, or “friend of me”. It’s a causal relationship, which is closer to what I want in English because it bypasses the implied ownership of “my”. But no one talks this way.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking of ownership when I see the words “my”, “our”, “his”, “hers”. I wish I could.
And yes, I know I can work around the problem using multiple words, but I want one word.