Hello, hello! I keep going away to do various tasks. Most of them are related to writing, but since this account is pseudonymous I can’t connect you to them! Inconvenient.
I wanted to discuss relationships today, and why I’m so *bad* at them. Or, if an observer wanted to be nice and say “well, Alex, you’re not all that bad at them.” I could give the evidence that I’m in my late thirties and single, and therefore, I’m doing something terribly wrong.
So, I’m seeking to explore what may be going wrong with the hopes of correcting it.
Multiple errors
My failure in dating is surely the result making errors throughout process. Elsewhere I wrote about my fear of the first stage, which is related to meeting women, i.e. the fear of rejection.
Well, I’ve met some and have a pipeline coming in now. Thank you, thank you. On to the next type of fear. I’m not sure what to call it yet. Let me first attempt to define it. It’s tricker than the first.
Fear of…
Here’s what happens. You go out with a girl. You get to know each other. You drink in the park. You learn how many siblings she has. She tells you something embarrassing or traumatic or sad and you feel the vulnerability seeping in, or rather you feel the vulnerability cracking something open; the new world is beginning to expose itself to you. I have earned your trust! Open sesame. Peering inside of this new world, past all the ephemera she’s eager to show you, is her heart, now all unprotected.
The next level of fear: will I break this heart?
I hate breaking girls hearts. Seems a silly statement, but truly it’s the closest thing to a living nightmare I’ve ever experienced. It terrifies me. I have broken two girls hearts. Each time was excruciating. Each time, I didn’t date again for years.
When breaking a heart, when setting your previous relationship on fire, you oscillate between fleeing from the wreckage and running into the burning building to try and save her. But soon you learn you can’t save her. You’re the arsonist! And just as in John Mayers’s classic and sad “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” you’re both in it and when you finally escape, you have to leave her behind to find her own way out. You’re no longer the protector. On the contrary, you’re now the enemy. You’re the pyro who destroyed the beautiful house you were trying to build together. Asshole!
“Sorry!”
Not good enough, but “Hey! That’s life!” We all go through it. We’ve all been on both sides of it. I’ve been the one left in the burning house, all sorrowful, my mind racing w/ self destructive tendencies. You’ve been there, I’m sure, utterly helpless.
The messy parts
Getting your heart broken, or breaking another’s heart, is one of the messiest parts of life. Though I am a Christian and believe in the benevolence of God, the messiness of breakups are enough to get me to go “Hey! What the heck are you doing? This can’t be right!”
But messiness is an inescapable part of reality, also under God’s dominion. Let’s take for example how nutrients are recycled: through the putrefying corpse of a dead animal. Nobody would choose for that to be how matter decomposed into it’s constituent parts to then be made available to other organisms. First a living thing, a miracle. Then, it’s dead. And it starts to bloat and stink. Then the flies come and lay eggs on the decaying flesh to eat it up, and vultures come by with their weird calloused heads and tear the carcass apart. Eventually it is simply bones inside of a hide. Then grass is growing through it. Then worms eat what’s left. Finally the worms poop (well, everything along the line pooped, to be accurate, but anyhow, the worms poop..) and all of those nutrients are made available to be absorbed by plant roots which, in turn, become food for another living animal, another miracle.
But it was pretty smelly and gross in the middle there, despite being part of God’s design.
That’s life…
“That’s life, Mama mix the vodka with the Sprite,” as Saba says. Putrification, decomposition, burning houses, tears, they’re all part of the cycle of life. Or, as Deca puts it, “Flowers grow from the corpses of dead magi that fertilize a new earth and our tears feed the seeds in the dry season.”
Relationships are perilous, and every new one bears within it the potential for its own death. But, also, they cannot be avoided. Have I gotten too dark?
Anyhow, so what to do then, with the second fear? The advice I’ve been getting lately is to date a lot women. Not to fuck a lot of women, a worthy distinction. The goal isn’t to be a playboy. It’s to date a lot enabling you to not get too serious too fast. You get a feel for the qualities of an array of women and from those qualities to choose wisely, and not too quickly. And the next time a heart is revealed, I’ll feel comfortable taking some responsibility for it, or so the theory goes.
Because there is no way for relationships not to be messy. There’s no way for them not to contain risk.
I would like to end this on a positive note. To cleanse the pallet after that gross description earlier. But there’s no time for it. Instead, I’ll respond to these five messages waiting for me on Hinge.
