Something few people understand about my precious midwestern culture is that when I'm being friendly, affectionate, and polite, I fucking hate you and I want you to die (jk ur alright). And when I'm being rude, cruel, and improper, I love you and trust you as my dearest kin.

This is called public/private register. With outsiders and strangers WASP types (for lack of a better term) keep a polite distance, and act emotionally and materially generous. This is, in a sense, arrogant. It's out of noblesse oblige, a sincere paternalistic belief that the commons and its people need to be respected and nourished, and that cultural outsiders are best kept at a moderate distance. Not treated intimately enough to be kin, not treated coldly or pushed away like enemies. It's an arm's length relationship.

With kin we tend to act playfully cruel, pushing boundaries, picking at egos, admitting our worst impulses, acting judgmental and crude and xenophobic. There's almost a savagery or barbarism to it, and people who aren't used to seeing it tend to see it as "true colours," being revealed, as capriciousness, but in reality it isn't particularly emotional or committal at all. It's an empty cold form of play, theatrical and fun, almost like verbal grooming. It's a form of vulnerability, and thus intimacy, and I would argue the inevitable and healthy JUNGIAN SHADOW of such a deep and responsible reverence for the commons.

It's easy to think that the public register is a dishonest face and the private register is the real reveal of our internal world, which isn't quite true. The public register is still ultimately the way we engage with the world at large, it colours our political beliefs and actions and how we engage with the community and other peoples. It is the manifestation of systemic thinking—of carefully weighing one's feelings and instincts against pragmatism and strongly held values—and choosing the latter. It is absolutely sincere, because it is our actions and our respect for the world, and what could be more sincere than that?

On the other hand, despite its playful and non-committal nature, the private register really is revealing of the internal world. Downstream of a friendly face is a savage interior, and the only way to keep that in balance is by expressing it somewhere; and so it is sincere and vulnerable, but it is tempered by the awareness that the friendly face is equally real. They're both theatrical forms of roleplaying, culturally designed to express one's sincere values and soul in the places where they should be expressed.

This does lead to one very common conundrum though. There is a sort of cultural initiation ritual for becoming kin, which I can only describe as a testing of the waters by bit by bit dropping the public register for the private register. To outsiders this is the capricious moment, the reveal of some dark internal world which suddenly signals danger. To some people it even comes as a sudden downgrade, the public face feeling intimate and the intimate private face feeling cold and distant. To us it's a sign of intimacy and love, a genuine and cherishable invitation into a shared folk relationship where we can drop the mask, mutually understanding that each other's hearts contain darkness worth loving, even if that darkness is well mastered, kept under lock and key.

The other common conundrum is a weird sort of down to earth parasociality, similar in nature but different in context to the parasociality celebrities deal with. When the face you show to people you want to keep at a distance is polite and affectionate, a lot of people will take that for real intimacy instead of the tactical emotional wall that it really is. I find it bizarrely common for even solid friends of mine to have a view of our relationship that is deeply at odds with how I actually feel about them, and it's very common for them to despise the intimate private register I want to share with them, or presume I have some hidden malice or hate. This applies doubly so to strangers who often view my calculated distant affection as a sudden and deep spark. On the other hand, I've never once dealt with parasociality from someone who comes from the same culture as me, who always understand the right separation of the spheres.