relationship shoes

I just really like the analogy of shoes for relationships.

When you try a really awesome-looking shoes on in the store, they might feel okay. You walk around, and it seems fine? There’s a slight pinch in the right toe but it’s so mild, you tell yourself. I barely notice it.

But start wearing the shoes, and that tiny, barely-there bump you felt in the beginning grows after repeated, subtle rubbing. It starts to hurt, and you’re like, fuck, should not have ignored that in the store.

There was lots of incentive to ignore that in the store, though. You were excited about how neat the shoes looked. You imagined other people seeing you in those shoes and being impressed. You were taken in by the department store smells and how squeaky clean the shoes looked and smelled. You loved how good it felt to walk in them.

But here, in actual use, the tiny warning signs have turned into big blisters, and now you’re limping.

And the shoe doesn’t want to be taken off. It absolutely refuses to allow you to try on a new shoe. And you’re out in the middle of your hike now, and getting a new shoe would be a drag - you’d have go all the way back, find a new shoe, and start your hike all over again. And maybe then you’d even have the same problems! How do you know the new pair wouldn’t end up blistering you just the same, except now you’re back at the beginning of your hike and you’ve wasted half the day? Can you really trust yourself to know which early twinges are ones to notice, especially when you’re hot with excitement?

And it can get bad. Your entire gait sort of crumples a bit to try to compensate for the pain. Maybe your knee or hip or ankle starts hurting; the rest of your body begins to suffer as you warp your stride to try to make the shoes hurt a little bit less. You have to keep going, after all. You’re just trying to find the way to move forward that’s tolerable. You didn’t know it was going to be this bad when you tried the shoes on in the store, but you couldn’t have known. Could you?

It has to get really bad for you to consider going barefoot. If you peel off the shoes they will be very sad, and now your feet will be single and meeting the rough ground of life without aid. Those shoes were blistering your heel or knocking into your toenail so badly, but the rest of your foot was cushioned and floating painlessly along the ground. How bad does it have to be to make going barefoot worth it?

Maybe it’s frustrating. Maybe it seems like all the shoes do this. Some people’s feet are more sensitive and soft than others, more likely to be blistered by shoes that other people can just throw on and run off with. You ask people “How do you find a shoe that won’t hurt me?” and people say “get one with padding”, and you get one with padding but somehow this seems to make the blistering worse somehow?

(Or maybe you’re very lucky, and it’s not that hard to find shoes that don’t blister! Maybe your feet are solid and not easily damaged. Or if you’re even more lucky, over time you figure out the kinds of traits in shoes less likely to blister you, and this valuable piece of knowledge makes your future steps so much smoother.)

Maybe you shouldn’t go barefoot though - maybe you should push through it, and over time you’ll develop callouses. Your feet will grow hard, scarlike tissue to resist the repeated chafing.

Or maybe the shoe will eventually soften and mold to your foot.

The worst part is it’s hard to know. How far should you travel with the shoe before deciding you should go barefoot instead? Do you really want to walk in the shoes for a long time, praying they’ll eventually stop hurting, only to find they haven’t stopped? You talked to a friend who swore their shoes became awesome after a few years of walking in them, you just need to keep at it. You don’t wanna be one of those people who throws away their shoes at the first little sign of pain. But how do you know that journey will be the same for you?

It’s so hard to know how much pain is normal. Are you genuinely unlucky with shoes, or are you a wimp with unreasonable expectations? You can sometimes compare actual damage to feet - showing your own blister or callous to someone else. This doesn’t work for pain in your knee or hip though, the hard ways you’ve adjusted your life to avoid any damage from the shoe itself. Those ways are invisible.

“No, I’m not bleeding”, you say, showing your feet, but privately wonder if this is just because you’re suppressing who your natural walk in order to avoid the damage in the first place.

It’s also unclear how much is the type of shoe. Some people wear high heels and laugh when you ask about it; “it’s worth the way I feel in them”, they say (though some seem like they’re just trying to fit in; this is what it means to be feminine). Other people wear casual flats meant for comfort and lounging and sidewalks, that work wonderfully as long as they stick to sidewalks. Others wear hefty hiking boots meant for rugged terrain, which is impressive but maybe overkill. You’re not sure which kind of shoe is right for you. Are you just accidentally picking up the wrong kind of shoe for your lifestyle?

And maybe this is all sad, but how much of it is in your head? You’re surrounded by stories of people who’ve had their same pair of shoes for twenty, thirty years. At this point the shoes are practically the skin on their feet. “Persisting was worth it,” they say happily, and you believe them, though you notice an occasional cane in the happy crowd, just common enough to inject into you a little suspicion.

And now and then you run across someone who went barefoot a long time ago and never bothered to stop by a store to grab some new shoes. Their feet are calloused now, toes splayed out for gripping, and they seem to be doing okay. “Yeah the tradeoff is sometimes I get a glass shard in there; it’s harder to handle unexpected problems with my bare feet alone. But I don’t really need shoes anymore. If I happen to find some shoes on the ground that fit, sure why not - but I’m not going out of my way.”

This seems great and peaceful, though you notice their toes have grown wide and strong - too big to fit comfortably into storebought shoes anymore. You wonder if being barefoot so long has actually made it harder to find shoes that don’t hurt.