single

A Ramble on Romance.

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One aspect of writing that I haven’t really tried my hand with is romance, likely with good reason. My version of romance is a bit different, and a combination of Nurse Patty’s long rant on dating combined with Darcy’s wonderful hook to what she’s writing had me thinking about that today.

To add to this, cashier’s at stores were wishing me a happy Father’s Day today and handing me swag, reminding me of some young woman trying to get me to try some version of Johnson and Johnson’s baby oil for some reason or the other.

“Well, thanks, but I don’t have a use for baby products.”

“But you must know someone who has a baby – or maybe your grandchildren?”, she responded with a big ‘I’m going to win at this introducing product‘ smile.

With arched eyebrow and an equal smile, I responded, “I haven’t been so pleasantly insulted in a while.”

“uhhhhhhhhhhhh”, she said, her eyes darting left and right.

Somewhere along the way, people decided that when you reach a certain age you have children, as if they magically appear from the sky. It doesn’t bother me as much as worries me; is this what they have pre-defined their own lives as, these younger generations?

In time, they may figure out that being alone is better than being with the wrong person. I’ve gone through some wrong people. We all have. It wasn’t about red flags but about a very simple concept most people don’t understand:

Just because someone is going in the same direction doesn’t mean that they’ve got the same destination.

I think for a relationship to work, the destinations may not have to be the same, but they have to be within a certain range of each other which likely varies from person to person. I don’t know. I’m not an expert.

Dating.

For most of my life, ‘dating’ was simply what other people did. This whole Hollywood, “Get dressed up and eat dinner and see a movie” thing never happened with me. I do not feel compelled to get dressed up, I’m comfortable in my jeans and a t-shirt. My ideal date is a woman similarly attired, no worry of makeup, and just hanging out and being herself.

Just getting to a date is a problem. In the 1990s forward, where people spend the majority of their time was a sexual harassment minefield, with some fair reason since there was sexual harassment. Everyone was on high alert, and very leery around attractive women so that something couldn’t be misinterpreted. A wrong word misinterpreted could be a visit to HR.

So you end up at bars, and I’m gonna let everyone in on a little secret: You’re unlikely to find someone you want to meet at a bar unless you really like bars. That’s just one-night-stand territory for the most part, and I’ve spent way too much time at bars toward that end.

Then there’s the people who try to set you up, and I have had horrible experiences with that. Even recently, unbidden, someone tried to set me up with someone and tried to sell it to me with, “She’s a gynecologist!”.

I’m not sure they understand what I’m working with here. It’s quite nice that she’s a gynecologist, doing great work with women’s health and it’s not something I don’t appreciate. It’s just not something that makes me thing, “Wow! I’ve always wanted to go out with a gynecologist!”.

An oceanographer? Oh hell yeah.

Speed Dating

I did try speed dating. That was amazingly annoying, overpriced, and more like an interview when I’m not actually looking for the job at that ‘company’. At a company interview, you research the company, you try to say everything that’s right at the interview… but on a date, I just want to know if it’s a fit or not.

I had wonderful conversations with some ladies, it was sort of fun, but there was this pressure in the air that had me smelling more adrenaline than hormones.

Then we get to….

Online Dating

This is the worst idea ever. If you’ve never been at the wrong end of social biases, you won’t get it, but there’s just a bunch of baked in biases that just get profiles passed over – and then women complain when guys are dishonest. I’ve never bothered being dishonest on a profile, and maybe because of that it has never worked for me – but I can’t imagine it working if I were dishonest either.

Just so many biases to work against.

Height

Besides, women generally overlook short guys, and I’m all of 5′ 3″. For dating profiles on websites, you can lie – which I don’t see the point of – or float around in the ether. Height matters in this regard, and I hadn’t realized how much this means culturally until I tried to generate an AI image of a short guy with a taller woman having a romantic interlude. All the guys were taller, every time – so I forced it to a dwarf and a woman, and that worked out for the image above.

That implies a pretty big bias in the images of romance. Nobody draws short guys and tall women.

I don’t have a problem with it, but there are guys who do. I’ve seen reels on Facebook about it and thought, “If they don’t want you, they don’t matter.” They don’t.

Race.

Race doesn’t bother me because it’s a made-up thing. I have been romantically involved with just about every sort of ‘race’ possible, and it’s never mattered to me – but on online dating, it’s easy to click a box that says, “my race”. I imagine that works very well for people who have a race. I don’t. I’m a mutt, I have no papers. So right there, Islide through the cracks. I am “other”, over there somewhere above algae, which is pretty funny if you consider how mixed up most people really are. ‘Race’. Hah.

I’m sure there are other biases I’m unaware of that women have.

But I have experienced romance.

Despite all of this, I have experienced and participated in romance, but not of the novel or Hollywood variety. It can be fun. And each time, it just…

Happened.

And so when people ask me why I’m single, I’ll just look at them and laugh because they’ll complain to me about their significant other in the very same breath. I’ve had women drive me nuts, but I’ve never talked them down because the ones who I have had romantic relationships were worth the respect of not gossiping about. Sometimes things don’t work out. It’s all temporary anyway.

And…

I want you to say this to someone today…

It’s perfectly fine to be single. If someone who is worth it comes along, go for it. And if they don’t, live your life.

Society expects things from you, but society doesn’t always give you what you need. How bad do you need the government to get involved with your relationship? How much do you need that tax break?

Be yourself. After all, that’s who you are.

The Single Narrative.

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Vipassana MeditationI was at a meeting, an informal year end meeting, and someone asked me how my Christmas was shaping up.

I responded, “Quiet.”

“How are you going to spend it?”

“Quietly. Maybe make a ham, a few friends might stop by.”

A woman interjects, “What about your wife, your children?”

“I don’t have those.”

“He’s a loner”, someone says quietly.

“That’s sad”, she continues, and I look at her – she immediately regrets saying it, I see, but I respond.

“Is it? I’ve not found a woman who I can stand, or who can stand me. There are women I like, who I have liked, but no one that I could stand or who could stand me. Yet there’s nothing wrong with me, I am whole, no parts are missing. And I am not sad, I am not lonely, and I’m not a victim of society’s narrative where people must get married, must have children…”

The table is silent, I realize I need to cut this short. Yet I see nods of quiet assent, even from a few married people at the table.

“Why lose serenity by chasing happiness?”

Single.

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MarriedSillyInvariably, I run into people who are surprised I’m not married or don’t have children. This is largely because I typically don’t run into people unless I choose to.

The answers I give vary. They’re quick, sometimes witty, and always as incomplete as a person who thinks that they need someone else to complete you.

But today, for lack of anything better to write about, I’ll tackle this subject. About why I’m not married, why I don’t have children, and why I don’t see it as important.

The whole thing is silly to me. That’s what it boils down to. That, though, is hardly a good answer for people – what I mean when I say that is that there’s nothing wrong with being an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and that I find most people regretfully boring. Those I do not find boring I rarely find a romantic connection with. It has happened. It may happen again. It’s just not something that I find motivational.

whynowI had a few of my paternal uncles try to encourage me down a path of marriage and children. One tried to be sly about it:
“I want you to settle down.”
“What do you mean, ‘settle down’?”
“Get married, have children…”
“You have someone in mind?”
“No… but I could look for you…”
“Sure. As long as you understand that I take a car for a test drive before I buy it.”

That conversation was never revisited.

Society was designed a certain way, and that way remains – as antiquated as it is. Young people are expected to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives even before high school these days. That’s folly. So how on earth would they know who they would want to be with for the rest of their lives at a young age? That seems like folly too. Toss in some religion, some parental pressure about grandchildren (how sad that is), and the notoriety of being single as you grow older.

societies shameSociety simply doesn’t know how to deal with people who don’t get married – exerting enough pressure to drive people into marriages that end a bit before, “until death”. Divorce. Children of divorce – of which I am one. My mother married 3 times, my father 2, and they didn’t stay married. And society, in it’s own way, has attempted to shame divorcees even as it shamed them into marriages.

What, exactly, is the point of that? Well, we could invoke some deity or the other, but I’ll invoke common sense: Continuity. The reason sex is such a pleasure – and I do mean such a pleasure – has allowed the population of humans on Earth to become what talking trees might call an infestation. The climate change debate? Less humans, less of a problem.

keeponpollutingThat some of us have figured out birth control is probably a good thing. But, by all means, keep polluting.

After all, society tells you what to do. Society tells you how to treat people. Society makes you feel like you are of value, even when that value works against a species.

No, you should probably thank us single people with no children for helping the planet last just a little bit longer.

Plus, we don’t have to deal with raising small humans, and we don’t stand the risk of being bad parents. Instead, we can help them enter a society and understand that they aren’t stuck doing and thinking as their parents and society dictate.

Live think dare different

The Rolling Stone

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Woman and BuoyThey say things. They don’t mean them as they are heard, but they scrape across a heart like fingernails on a blackboard.

That scraping sound you can feel in your bones.

They say, “One day, when you find a woman…” as if you’ve never loved a woman, or had a woman love you, or had the pure luck to have both at the same time. As if they know some secret that they will only hint at, that they cannot explain.

They act as if marriage saved them, sitting next to me telling me how a wife will keep you healthy – as if men need mothers as they grow older, as if men are incapable of taking care of themselves.

They say that you’ll never be complete, unless… or they’ll say that you’re still living your life as an explanation for how someone can live without the bindings that they live in.

And it’s all bullshit. All of it.

You can love and be loved – and you can have that more than once, misfortunes be damned. Maybe one will die in an accident. Maybe one will take her own life. Maybe one will simply grow in a different direction. All of these things and more are skipped over by those who choose the mundane life, defending it as if under attack – they feel besieged by those who can live outside of it. It is beyond them that the world could contain people who live differently, that implicitly something is wrong with someone because they are single. And sometimes they cling to their own partner even in the worst of circumstances.

Being alone doesn’t mean being incomplete. A single man or woman may have drank deeply of a partner, may have almost drowned in it and lived to tell the tale.

Single people are not broken, and while a rolling stone gathers no moss, one has to question whether moss is a goal worth achieving.