Loving you is easy ’cause you’re beautiful…

I have an acquaintance who is enamored of spiritual trends and quick-soul-fixing books. She is a devotee of “The Secret” (see below for my thoughts on that particular little volume). I get why she’s into this stuff – it’s seductive to think that all our spiritual woes might be fixed by simply writing a wish down on paper and expecting the universe or god or whoever to fix it. Or that coming up with a mantra and saying it daily for a couple of weeks might bring enlightenment.

These kinds of fixes generally do work, for a little while. They’re aspirin for a headache. But the don’t get to the root of the problem. The headache always returns.

Let me also say as an aside that I have quite the stack of self-help variety books myself (Hello, kettle! Greetings, pot!). But I’m a counselor, so I can write them of as a work expense.

I was pondering love today, which started off this little firestorm in my brain about the Twilight movies and Bella and what’s-his-face, and this question someone asked me about love  and….

OK, let me back up.

So someone said to me recently “Wouldn’t it be great to always be in love like they are in Twilight?” She said this wistfully. I replied, “Well you can. Just keep breaking up with your partner and falling in love again with someone different.” We had a good laugh but it nagged at me. I haven’t read the books or seen the movies, but I get the gist of the Twilight version of love: it’s all-consuming, possessive, intense, emotional, passionate, innocent, and pure. It’s first love, and I remember it – intoxicating.

We live in a quick-fix culture, and it’s easy to jones after this particular drug, and to feel disenchanted and let down when it wears off. When your partner starts farting in front of you without saying “excuse me”, or stops shaving her legs, or seems more interested in TV than in hearing about your day.

So in this quick-fix culture, we tend to look outside of ourselves for the answer. In this case, we look to romantic love and the intoxicating first taste of it to make us feel alive, connected, whole.

Which brings me back to my brain-fire-storm today. I was walking in the woods with my darling dog. The sky was so blue and the air was warm for Minnesota in November. It was perfectly silent, except for the swish of my shoes on the leaves. We paused for a moment, and I closed my eyes and just breathed. All around, birds called and a bald eagle soared silently overhead. It was perfection.

In that moment, my body lit up with that exact same feeling of first love. I was enraptured. Enraptured with nature, and those trees, and how lucky I am to get to go for a walk at 2pm on a Friday afternoon instead of being stuck in an office. I was simply in love with the possibility of my life right now, how it is all open to me and how anything can happen. I felt intense, total joy that I can be so very happy in my own company, doing nothing at all.

Maybe this then is the secret to a passionate relationship without end: you have to fall totally, rapturously, passionately, innocently in love with your own self. I’m not talking narcissism here. I’m talking about seeing yourself with the same eyes you use to view a new partner. See yourself as utterly fascinating, funny, kind, loving, and possessing limitless potential. Wake up each day wondering what you’ll do next. Do something nice for yourself with no expectation of return. Get dressed up and take yourself out to the movies, for no reason except the fact it’s Tuesday, and you think you rock, and you deserve an afternoon off. What about it?

Because this is the hard kind of love. The kind that takes a lifetime to cultivate. It’s not a quick fix, found in a stranger on whom you’ve projected all your wishes. And yet it is likely the one kind of love that will truly make a marriage work long term, and which will provide the fulfillment we all crave.

So go look in the mirror, and sing it with me, “Loving you… is easy ’cause you’re beautiful!” Do it. Falsetto and all.

No Thank You

I’m slowly working my way through Natalie Goldberg’s “Old Friend from Far Away”. Her book is a collection of essays and exercises about memoir writing. Each morning, I sit down and do one or more of the exercises, and today’s was titled “No Thank You”. You can see the results below. BTW, 1) I encourage you to do this yourself because it feels great; and 2) the job referenced below is not about my current job, which is awesome. It refers to the crappy jobs I turned down when I was hunting after grad school. Just clarifying! So read on, and enjoy. Or just read on. You can choose whether or not to enjoy:

No Thank You, I don’t want to go on a date with you. I’m not attracted to you and you have bad breath. No Thank You, I don’t need to get to know you better before deciding. I have very good instincts about these things, and I’m sure, right now, that I don’t want to spend any more time with you. We have nothing in common. I find you utterly boring, and your stories about your new huge-normous plasma TV do not interest me. In the ten minutes we’ve been chatting I’ve mentally wandered off at least eight times. And you’ve not once asked me about myself. So No Thank You.

No Thank You, I don’t want this sucky job. Your department is ridiculous. One guy has an ego the size of an elephant and that woman over there clearly has issues. She wears too much lipstick and she keeps making cutting comments about the dean. And she brags about how she doesn’t have time to eat properly or exercise. Seriously? You think I want to work here? Why do you think I want to take my perfectly nice life and turn it upside down into a crazy storm of stress and misery? Keep your stupid job. No Thank You.

No Thank You, I don’t eat tomatoes. Yes, I know you love them and you think they’re really great. But I hate them. I think the consistency is weird and I don’t like all those seeds and juice squirting around in my mouth. Ew. And you can keep those artichoke hearts for yourself, along with figs, olives, falafel, beer, the raw kind of sushi, and anything with “sun-dried” in the name. I don’t like any of this stuff, and don’t tell me “You’ll get used to it.” Why would I want to get used to something I think tastes disgusting? I don’t want to get used to gagging and dry heaving. No Thank You.

No Thank you, I don’t want to go sky diving. Or base jumping. Or bungee jumping. Or rock climbing. I have a thing about heights, and I’m perfectly happy being firmly rooted to the ground. This does not make me wimpy. I’m not missing some secret to life because I refuse to throw myself out of a plane. I appreciate that you want to do it, and I admire your moxy. But it’s not for me. I’ve climbed mountains (on foot) all over the east and west coasts, and even some places in between. I’m outdoors whenever possible. I love adventure. But I don’t need to jump out of things to become a better person. That’s just not me. So No Thank You!

And while we’re on the subject of sports, No Thank You, I don’t want to play volleyball or softball or kickball on your rec league team. I just don’t do team sports. Yes, I know you think it’s super fun. I’m glad you like it and it fills a need for you. But I am not dialed for team sports. In grade school when we’d play baseball I’d be the kid in the outfield daydreaming and staring intently at a blade of grass trying to figure out how it got that way while a hard, white ball was winging its way toward my head. I am a daydreamer by nature and profession. So solitary activities like running or hiking or biking are perfect for me. I can let my mind slip away and take a little vacation while my body is in motion. Add other people and a ball and a referee to that mix, and my soul starts to say, “Hey, man! I can’t wander off here! I gotta stay put and that’s just not cool!” So No Thank You.

And No Thank You, I don’t want to have children. I really don’t. It’s not something I’ll regret later on, and it’s not something I’ll grow into. In less than five months I’ll turn 38 and I’ve had almost zero urges to have children. This is a legitimate decision in life. I’m happy for you that you love kids and want lots of them. Go for it! I admire you. But please stop trying to convince me that someday I’ll change my mind. When you tell me that what I hear is, “I don’t believe you really know yourself, and I also believe you’ll be a stunted human being forever if you don’t go through this experience.” I know myself really well and I’m not at all stunted. I just love my life child-free. And I parent in other ways that are really satisfying: being an aunt by blood and friendship, and sponsoring a child in Guatemala (my lovely friend Melany, who is 11 years old). So having kids? No Thank You.

And, on a final note, I say “Yes, Please!” to far more things in life than I say “No, Thank You” to. So if there’s “No” on my list, I mean it. No Thank You!

Why you shouldn’t buy a copy of “The Secret”…

…or, Sure check it out from the library if you’re curious, but save your $20 for something more important, like Anna Karenina or something…

I may make some of you mad with this post, especially if you are a devotee of “The Secret”. And with eight loyal readers (give or take), even if one of you gets mad, that’s, like, 12.5% of my readership. I’m willing to take the risk.

About a year and a half ago, I read “The Secret” and I loved it. LOVED it. For those of you unfamiliar, this little book (and the movie version, which is basically the book read out loud by lots of famous metaphysicists) asserts that the secret to success is not in our action but in our minds. That in order to get what you want from life, be it a new job or $10,000 or a new car, all you have to do is fix the image of what you want firmly in your mind. Because as a stakeholder in universe, your vote is important. And the universe is conspiring to give you what you want and need to become the person you are meant to be in this lifetime.

Sounds simple, yes? What I liked about “The Secret” (let’s call it TS for short) upon that first reading was the gentle nudge to abandon my negative thinking patterns. I took this little quiz in my doctoral program to determine whether I am an optimist or a pessimist. Much to my surprise, I came out “mild pessimist”. And here’s the kicker, pessimists are less likely to describe being happy, less likely to marry, and more likely to die alone in a one bedroom apartment surrounded by cats and hoarded Life magazines from the 1950’s.

I made up that last part, but you get the drift.

And as someone who loves her cats but doesn’t want them snacking on her face after rigor mortis sets in, I decided to give TS a try. And for about a week, it was euphoric. I visualized everything I wanted in life in clear detail: The man, an outdoorsy, poet-type with good biceps and a tidy beard; the house, a small, cozy cottage right on the ocean, with a big desk looking out a picture window where I could write to my heart’s content; my career, in demand as a writer and a speaker, money would roll in on barges. Constantly imagining everything you want feels great.

But after that first week, doubts started creeping in. For example, I spend part of every summer in Guatemala. I have friends down there, and I do some service work out in rural communities, where people are very poor. Not, living-on-$30,000-a-year-living-in-a-small-apartment poor. That’s the U.S., middle-class perspective on poor. I’m talking poverty – a family of seven living on $2 per day, all in a one-room hut fixing food over an open fire kind of poor. I’m talking malnutrition, no health care, die by age 40 from overwork poor.

But the thing is this, these people are predominantly happy. And they’re not aspiring to own BMW’s or have beautiful houses. They’re just happy. And yet they have “nothing”. So if I believe in a benevolent, grace-full God (and I do), WTF? If all we have to do is wish it, then why doesn’t TS work for these people? Is TS only for people who can afford to order the book from Amazon or who have access to a library? That seems unfair. I think that’s a limited view of the love TS claims the universe has for us.

So I got online and dug a little. I found criticism of TS as a simplified, slickly-packaged diet-version of spirituality. I heard interviews with many of those featured in the book and the movie who were dissatisfied with how their viewpoints were presented. Apparently the hard part, called “faith”, was left out of TS, and many of the spiritual leaders involved with TS felt cheated.

This is what I know: parents who give their kids everything they want raise high holy brats. I think we all can agree on that. So why would an all-knowing and benevolent God simply give us everything we want just because we think we want it?

As humans, we are tiny, limited beings and most of us have no idea what is good for us. In part, this is because we (in the US) live in a culture that values materialism above almost everything. And even if you don’t generally ascribe to that viewpoint, it is in you, too. It’s the air you breathe. It’s impossible not to be affected by it. TS capitalizes on that cultural norm. It says (literally) “Picture that BMW and it will be yours…”

Here’s the trick. And the irony. What we ask for is given to us in such a way that we learn a lesson from it. For example, ask God to give you patience. What we expect, in our tiny, limited human way, is to wake up with this sudden and dramatic well of patience that kicks in immediately and makes us better people. What actually happens is God gives us unlimited opportunities to practice patience: the annoying guy in the “10 Items or Less” checkout lane with 37 cans of soup claiming they’re only one item; the crazy driver who cuts us off; kids who whine unrelentingly; and in my case, going through a long period of having no idea what path to take next.

Patience.

I’m not a patient person, but I’m learning. And I wasn’t given patience on a satin pillow because I asked for it. Instead, I got sent to patience boot-camp. So instead of instant gratification, I am gaining skills that will serve me for the rest of this life and beyond.

Tell me, honestly, which holds greater value?

So, lovers of TS, here’s what that little gold and red book neglected to say: that yes, you probably can have everything you envision. But you also need to be prepared for hard work. Not just physical work, but soul work. Be prepared to go down into the dark places you don’t like to visit and dig around in there. Prepare to know yourself, not just the pretty parts, but the parts you wish you could deny. The results, I promise, are worth it.

And that’s the true secret.

On lonely…

Uh. Oh. It’s happening already. WordPress is replacing my Facebook addiction (see entry below). I must restrain myself.

But with unfinished thoughts about being alone and experiencing solitude bouncing around in my head, I wanted to share the following two things, dichotomies in my journey toward wholeness (and probably in yours, too). So here is Ben Harper, singing eloquently about one side of being alone:

And here is Adrienne Rich on being alone:

“Song”
Adrienne Rich

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

Pulling the bits and pieces together…

I’m embarking on a little experiment. I, like many of you, have been feeling really fragmented lately – pulled in too many different directions, and wondering at the end of each day, “Where did the hours go?”.

There are lots of things I love to do, and I’ve been indulging in many of them over the past few days: long walks in the woods with my dog, writing, cooking yummy things from scratch, having friends and family over for dinner.

And then there are the days that just feel eaten up by little technological moments, like the hour I spent dinking around on facebook last night before bed. This had the dual purpose of wasting an hour of my time AND firing up my neural synapses so my dreams were weird and disjointed. Not good.

I also spend a lot of time swapping voice mail messages with people rather than actually talking to them. So our relationships become tiny sound bites instead of connections of substance. That feels pretty poopy, too.

And the last thing is, I’m feeling the need to get back in touch with my grounding – I’ve been looking to others a lot lately for advice, and it’s time to turn inside to the wise critter that is me. I read this quote by Eve Ensler and it just grabbed me:

“Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars… Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.”

I need to do more of those things, at least in the metaphysical sense.

So here’s what I’m doing: for the rest of the year, I’m going on a technology diet. What this means for me:
* I’m ditching facebook until 2010.
* I’m cutting back on my social phone calls (friends of mine, stop snorting. I know I’ve never been a phone person, but you get my drift).
* I’m cutting back on TV (one hour per day max)
* No more random googling of ex-boyfriends, myself, or questions best answered by god/goddess/universal truth (such as “why am I here?”. I have googled that. You have too, admit it. )

So if I’m dieting, that implies hunger. To fill me up:
* 1000 words of writing every day.
* 10 minutes (minimum) of meditation every day.
* Walking and/or showshoeing daily, weather dependent.
* Home-cooked meals. Hot things, not just breakfast cereal.
* A retreat over Thanksgiving to the hermitage.

This is the plan. I’m announcing it here because I know you’ll hold me to it, and mock me shamelessly if you find me on facebook killing hours.

I don’t want to kill any more time. I want to live it, inhabit it.

 

On stillness and mud…

I tend to be in motion a lot. My beloved dog Ariel who died two years ago lived in 13 homes during her 14 years with me. I love moving: discarding unused things, stripping down my possessions to nearly nothing, cleaning the old space and locking the door behind me, filling the new space in new and interesting ways.

And I love travel: If you were to ask me about the happiest time in my life, I would describe the two weeks I drove alone across country from North Carolina to my new life in Oregon in 2003. I think I could live quite happily in an RV.

But like all of our personal qualities, there exists a shadow side to my exhilarating need for movement. A friend close to me suggested recently that I skitter away when things get tough rather than staying through the hard times. Ouch. I don’t want to think that my adventurous spirit is perhaps protecting me from something darker and scarier. One thing I know for certain is that we grow through the hard times. I hate to think I’d denied myself opportunities for growth out of fear or ignorance. Ouch again.

Here’s a metaphor for you: If you want to look into the clear waters of a pond, to see the tiny minnows and crayfish who live there, if you want to witness your clear, true reflection in the smooth surface of the water, you must sit very, very still and wait. Clarity in water and in life cannot occur if we jump in to the muddy shallowness of it and thrash about.

Another: Parker Palmer (in “Let Your Life Speak”) says the soul is like a wild animal in the forest. If we crash along through the woods making all kinds of noise, shouting into our I-Phone, the wild animals disappear. They know better than to relate themselves to that kind of disjointed chaos. But if we sit quietly, letting the rush of the wind through the boughs of trees lull us to mindful peace, the animals will emerge and join us. I once had a raccoon walk right up to me while I practiced this. He never knew I was there until he was practically in my lap. It was magic.

Our souls are like those wild animals. When we crash through our days mindlessly, the soul stays well hidden. Facebook is not a friend to the soul. So days, and weeks, and a lifetime can pass by in a blur of activity and movement. It is only in those moments of perfect stillness that we hear the small, still voice inside of us gently directing us to what is true and right.

As winter presses in, my fourth in Minnesota, I’m scaling back on my movement. My freezer is stocked with soup and homemade applesauce. I spend one hour every morning quietly, meditating and then writing. I’ve got a solo retreat planned during the Thanksgiving holiday, a time to be alone and quiet in the woods, to reflect on the winter to come and on the 37 years that have already passed.

I invite you to find your own quiet place. There is a small, still voice inside of you as well, longing to be heard.

Nobody says it better than David Whyte. So I leave you with his poem, The Winter of Listening.

On marriage….

What I’m about to say about marriage is going to anger some people. That’s fine, I can take it. My disclaimer (in an effort to cut down on negative feedback) is that 1) I think marriage as an institution is generally a good thing. I like the idea of standing up with another person and saying, “You know what? Life is hard. And if we can pull together to support and care for one another and make our time here a little easier, then let’s do it.” And 2) I know a lot of people have great marriages and are very happy. Yay for you!

But here’s the thing: I see a lot of the opposite. And frankly, a I see lot of marriages that make the couple involved happy, but that would make me want to jump out of a window and run for the hills.

There’s a lot of love gone bad around me these days. Not so much in my own life, but within a lot of marriages between people I know. In the past year, I’ve heard stories of abuse, closet alcoholic husbands, anti-depressants, and general dis-ease. A lot of these couples got married young, in their early to mid-20’s. Now as middle age settles in, the flaws and cracks are becoming ever more apparent.

In my 20’s I envied these couples. I admit it with some reservation. I envied their evident love for one another, the big party thrown by their parents, the matching china and silverware. Eating at home alone off my chipped stoneware china from Wal-Mart seemed kind of pathetic after the elaborate commitment ceremony of a wedding.

But now, 10 or 15 years after that magical day, many of these couples are floundering. Some say a covenant before God has been made and must be honored at all costs. While I agree that relationships go through up and down periods, and that making love work can truly be work, mostly I wonder if we’ve set up an unrealistic standard for ourselves.

Let’s take, as an obvious example, Jon and Kate Gosselin. She’s become the martyr, he the devil who left her. I think both of them have displayed some pretty silly behavior in recent months. But maybe the reality is closer to this: two people meet, they fall in love, they live together for a while. Sometimes they grow together. Sometimes they grow apart.

It’s a radical notion, but what if instead of blame and lawyers two people could look at each other, thank one another for what was good in the relationship, and go their separate ways in peace to write the next chapter of their destiny?

On a personal note, nothing galls me more than family members of mine who look at me with something akin to pity that I haven’t married. Here’s the thing: beyond fleeting yearning after weddings, getting married has never been a goal of mine. Having children even less so. I am wired for movement – my goals in life have been to travel, expand my mind and my heart, meet as many people as I can, and to become the person I am meant to be on this earth. For me, this path has not included marriage to this point.

And what’s crazy is these same relatives who pity my contented singleness are in pretty lifeless marriages themselves. It’s insane to me that people living within a system that no longer works for them want desperately for people like me to join up.

Being conscious is hard. I’m not going to lie. But given the choices of following the status quo just for the sake of appearing “normal” or living an authentic life, I’ll choose option 2 every time.

Scared…

I was talking to my guru-esque cousin Kathryn last night about life and stuff. We are Olympic-caliber life-discussers. I attribute about 92% of all the good advice I’ve ever gotten directly to her, typically while sitting on her couch eating popcorn and drinking baby Cokes, the kind in the 6.5 ounce returnable glass bottles. They’re the best. If they stocked baby Cokes at the UN, those clowns might make better decisions.

So I called Kathryn in the midst of a mild existential crisis, predicated by the end of my relationship with my boyfriend of the past four months (a spectacularly fiery blowout, really impressive) and onset of winter. Feeling stagnant and kind of frustrated, I longed for her brilliance. For clarity.

I’m torn right now between my responsible self (see previous post) and the part of me that wants to buy that pink RV I saw for sale by the side of the road. That part of me wants to see the sun rise over the Grand Canyon in the morning and set over the Pacific Ocean in the evening. The wanderer, ever restless.

The wandering part of me wants more than a safe, academic life. It wants me to be a writer, someone who eats cereal at 2am while pounding out a chapter, who rejects conventional ideas about an appropriate bedtime for a 37 year old adult.

At the same time, this scares the shit out of me.

Because by golly I could fail miserably after months of slacking off, end up living in my parents basement watching TV at 2am and wondering where my life went tragically wrong.

I tell Kathryn this and she gently says, “Have you ever done that before?”

Well, no.

“Do you think you’re a slacker?”

No, probably not. I have a PhD and I ran a marathon and wrote a textbook and everything. So just maybe I’m a hard worker. “So what do you think I should do?”

“I think you need to do the thing that scares the shit out of you.”

It’s powerful medicine, to think of life this way. To turn it upside down and realize that what excites us and what scares us are just two sides of the same coin.

I still don’t know what the next phase of my life is going to look like. I have it good here, and I like my job. But it’s an enlivening thing to be open to that which is terrifying, to know that that which threatens and scares us might actually be the path, the way.

So what about you? What scares the shit out of you, and what are you going to do about it?

And when you feel scared, why not turn to Michael Franti?

Responsible to who?

I’m going to admit it. I’m a responsible girl.

I want to be punk. I do. I really, really want to be a crazy, hippie, free-spirit type. I want to not care what anyone thinks about what I say or do. But I do care. I care right now what you’re thinking about this as I write it. And I may not even know you. How weird is that.

I blame my genetics in part. My grandmother (let’s call her “Nana”) is the most responsible person on the planet. In fact, she believes she is responsible for everything. She worries incessantly about me. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. Her worry is unceasing. In my family, if you’re late for dinner it’s because you are dead by the side of the road in a car crash or you’ve been abducted or attacked by tigers. Common causes for mild lateness are discarded like used tissues: stuck in traffic, lost car keys, or late meetings are never considered as possible causes. Only death and dismemberment will suffice. Nana believes her worry will keep me safe. In fact, all it does is keep her safe from accepting that I like to travel and move around a lot. She would really like me to live near her so she can keep an eye on me. You can imagine how little I fancy that idea.

So I feel responsible to my family (all of whom are worriers to different degrees). I want to lessen their concern, I do. But I keep doing crazy things like moving across country and getting graduate degrees and dating strange men. I feel guilty sometimes, but at the end of the day, when choosing between making them happy and making me happy, I choose myself most of the time.

I used to wonder if it was selfish, this single-minded quest for fulfillment and self-actualization. Whether in the pursuit of my dreams I was accidentally screwing up someone else’s. Like Nana’s dream that I will settle down, marry a nice man, and have babies.

Brace yourself, because I’m going to propose a radical idea here. What if we were all a little more selfish? I’m not talking about walking out on your family or stealing from corporate or anything like that. I’m talking about higher-order selfishness. The belief that we each have a significant contribution to make during our short lives here on this tiny planet, and if we don’t get around to it, our contribution to the symphony of life will be lost forever.

See, I’m torn by my responsible nature. I want to work hard, save money, do the right things. But often what is “right” for me is confusing or downright threatening to someone else. Nana doesn’t understand why I travel to a third world country every summer. It scares her pantaloons right off. But it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel the responsibility in my bones to contribute what I can to create greater equity in the world.

At the same time, I fear destitution. I fear living in the van down by the river. So even though other paths call to me (writer, poet, wandering muse) I keep them tucked safely into an hour or so each day until I’m strong enough to leave the safety of these shores and begin an even larger journey. This is my struggle. What is yours?

To whom are you responsible? How do you keep yourself trapped? What keeps you from selfishly liberating your dream from it’s tiny box and letting it roar into life?

If you’re not responsible to that dream, to your calling, then what are you missing?

Dating – a Memoir…

This is a piece I wrote about dating post break-up, about seven years ago. I am happy to say that my current dating life looks like this: With Oscar, sometimes in Las Vegas, sometimes in Rochester, sometimes in Guatemala, sometimes in…

Read on! Enjoy -

The Thing About Dating

And here’s the thing about dating: I hate it.

I hate it so much I think there must be something wrong with me, so I buy books on how to do it so I can feel less like an ass when someone asks me out on a date.
And all these books, they have the same message: that dating is fun and everyone (i.e., me) has the wrong attitude about it.

According to this book, I should have two, three, four men in rotation at any one time. I should create a graph to help me track my many, many dates, and to note where in the courtship process I am with these many, many eligible men.
Here’s how my graph would look right now:

Scott – Had first date. Terrible. Nothing in common. No desire to ever spend time with him again (yet the books say I should give it time, not to judge too quickly). Will avoid his calls for the next couple of weeks until he finally gives up.
Joe – Does not want to date me. Has other relationship that seems quite serious. Yet will drop everything and run to him the minute he calls and begs forgiveness.
Security Guard-guy on campus – Came by office and asked for my number. Found out later he’d just been fired for dating an undergraduate student (not allowed). He stopped by my office just before being escorted off of campus. Does not look promising.

My graph sucks.
And then there’s the whole flirting thing. I can flirt if it is planned and expected. So for example, if I am at a party and see a cute guy with no wedding ring at the buffet table, I can take a moment, gather myself, come up with a pithy, witty line. I’ll walk up to him and it will go something like this:
“Hey, you gonna eat all those cheese cubes, or are you gonna share?”

Seriously. This is the best I’ve got. Most guys just look nervous and shuffle away, but at least I got to flirt on the offensive. In bars or other settings where I don’t have a chance to gain the upper flirting hand, it’s even worse.
He approaches me: “Hey, how’s it going, my name’s Jim, what’s yours?”

Me: “Oh, hey. Umm (spill some wine, now it’s running down my chin onto my shirt). I’m Cyndi. How’s it going?” I mop red wine off my white shirt and by the time I look up, he’s moved on.

The thing is, see, I don’t want to have to do the work it takes to weed through most men I might date. Most of them aren’t right for me, really. Most don’t give a crap about poetry, or these little stories I write, or politics, or determining the nature and existence of god. Most aren’t enchanted by my collection of Audrey Hepburn movies. Most don’t understand my existential need for acres and acres of psychic space, or my anti-social behavior in the morning. Most won’t understand why I want to travel alone sometimes, or my deep need to make a difference in the world.
So now the books sit quietly on a shelf, read and understood but not implemented. Because I don’t want to date, frankly. I want to find myself on a quiet Friday night, sitting in comfortable silence in the dark shadows of my back porch. I want to sit next to him, an inch or so between us, so we can feel the heat of one another without actually touching. I want us both to look up into the night sky and marvel at the stars, the sound of city traffic reaching us through the trees, crickets and cicadas singing and reminding us that summer is fleeting and this moment was created for just this very purpose, just for us.