This won’t be the first time I’ve touched on the subject, and it won’t be the last time the absence of a woman’s companionship inspired a little perspective and introspection.

About a month ago, my thoughts returned to this blog, and I began formulating a new article. It would begin by acknowledging the mostly one-dimentional nature of what I’d posted here in the past — chronicling my pursuit of love and sexual fulfillment. Then, after an honest and brief examination of the past two years’ successes and failures, I’d arrive at the conclusion that I’m no different from anyone else. Yes, perhaps I was never great at picking up women, and yes, perhaps whatever skill I’d earned had rusted away after getting married. But now it was well past time to cancel the remedial classes.

At the time, I’d been involved with a new woman for about a month, and everything was wonderful. It wasn’t perfect, and circumstances were complicated, but the point was that occasionally I do find romance when I devote the necessary time and energy to it. The problem is that it’s by far not the only corner of my life in need of attention.

My small-r-relationship still isn’t perfect, and circumstances are still complicated. It’s begun to feel like we’re both keeping one eye on the exits, and I don’t know how much longer we’ll last. In short, enough melancholy to give rise to the paragraphs here.

I despise platitudes, and there’s one that gets slung around a lot — something about needing to love yourself before you can expect anyone else to. Well, I only seem to truly love myself once someone else is.

One conclusion seems unavoidable. If I spent half the time, money, and energy that I spend prowling on my career, on eating better, on getting a pinch of exercise, on putting stalled plans into motion — I wouldn’t need the prowl at all.

Imagine my surprise when I saw a spike in traffic over the last few weeks and traced it back to a witheringly succinct critique of my blog in a comment thread. Googling the commenter’s name led me to a writer I’ve probably got no proper business eliciting an opinion from.

So I sent a very nice thank you note.

…

In retrospect, it was probably just some troll using his name. Too bad. A good kick in the pants from someone who knows how and when to give one is great medicine.

I wasn’t Capitol H Happy with J__, but I’d decided to take a deep breath and see where things went. I disabled my dating profile — not because I wasn’t looking, but because there never seemed like there was anything to see.

I try to be confessional and honest here, and my fingers pause over the keys, not wanting to discuss whether or not I should/might feel guilty about sleeping with T__ after kindof-but-not-really agreeing with J__ not to. Definitely increases my douche-quotient a point. I did that thing where I told myself I’d already decided not to see J__ any longer (if anything, I’d been leaning the opposite direction). Regardless, she beat me to it, ending things the very next day (made me a bit paranoid actually). She said she didn’t think she could see me any more because I didn’t seem that into her. This was undeniable and somewhat self-evident, so it died, peacefully, right then and there.

My car gave up the ghost too, and I’m moving. I suddenly felt relieved to be officially single — one less complication (even if both that attitude and the situation itself are temporary).

In an embarrassing moment of weakness, I sent an email to E__ saying I missed her. It wasn’t crazy or anything — like three sentences. I’ve mused more than once that I wonder if I’m feeling a little how she felt before she moved — stressed, looking to simplify, looking to upgrade. Maybe that’s why I “miss” her. She wrote back (a-hem — twenty-four-hours later — long after I’d had plenty of time to curse my relationship with the Send button) with a kind, intelligent note that completely ignored the elephant in the room, but did invite me to her house to see her renovations.

I’m not sure how many days later I was back browsing the online dating pool. I didn’t send out (or receive) many messages — mostly, I’ve found myself increasingly disgusted with the available options. But, V__ was a face I hadn’t seen there before. She gave me a bit of that out-of-your-league vibe I’m so into. Sometimes it’s like I send these women notes just for batting practice — just to get back in the swing of things, as it were. Lo and behold…

We went to get beers yesterday afternoon, and I even got a little good-bye smooch. The first wave of summer finally broke, and the temperature’s back in the hospitable zone. It’s almost like a last taste of spring, and I fear for how short such a feeling must necessarily be. But god is it delicious right now.

–

Everyone Googles everyone now, right? Right? Guys? Hello?

I just found her creative writing master thesis. There’s a lot of different ways this could go…

Once again, T__ and I had been out of touch long enough I figured she’d gotten bored with me and moved on. And once again, it wasn’t too long after reaching that conclusion that she sent me a note wanting to hang out.

The story is a lot less interesting than the punchline, so although it’s not my habit, I’ll skip right to it: Yesterday I had sex with both of them.

I’ve never had the means or motive before. I ought to be victory-punching the sky right now, but my heart isn’t in it so-to-speak. Instead I’m depressed and in my least favorite way — for no good reason and in spite of many very good reasons not to be.

The closest thing I feel to love is the still-lingering obsession I have for E__. It’s absurd — it’s been longer since we stopped going out than we actually dated, and still, when my heart reaches out for someone to care about, it’s her. More than likely, a classic case of wanting what you can’t have.

It’s been a month or two since I’ve so much as seen her on the street, making this infatuation all the more ridiculous. So naturally I ran into her Friday night while crawling art gallery openings with J__. I had an immediate “oh-no” reaction to spotting her — like I’d been busted cheating. I try to remember the things about her I didn’t like (were there any?) or the signs that we weren’t compatible, but it’s all gone. A hazy dream forgotten months ago.

The dreadful no-man’s-land between the end of one relationship and hitting it off with someone new has always been unbearably long for me. A few weeks I can handle, but months — it’s too much. This is but one of many items in the “pros” column unmatched by “cons” leading my dating towards the more casual. Most people enter adulthood with their relationships decidedly low-key and slowly become more serious and discriminating over the years. At least that’s the narrative we’re supposed to believe is the normal one. I, for one, appear to be living this part of my life in reverse.

Dad duty this week left free nights on Wednesday and Thursday. T__ and I had rescheduled a sleepover at my place for Thursday — although I must say, I didn’t even count on it strongly enough to bother cleaning my apartment properly. J__ and I made plans for Wednesday, and my dishonesty-by-omission led her to believe I was watching I__ Thursday. I didn’t correct her.

T__ cancelled, as half-expected, but I took that as a positive since I’d found out Thursday was J__’s birthday. I asked if she had big birthday plans, but in the end decided to keep my change in availability to myself: 1) Don’t smother. 2) I had a few friends I’d like to hang out with. 3) Worst case — some “me time”.

On Wednesday, we had a nice dinner and I ended up spending the night. Thursday, I made last-minute plans to get an early dinner with A__. I’m totally in the friend-zone, but I don’t mind. We were sitting at a sidewalk sandwich spot as dusk fell and J__ drove by looking surprised. I smiled and waved.

Soon, an exchange of text messages began which, at the time, I mistook for a birthday-night booty-call. Instead, J__ wanted to let me know (in no uncertain terms) that she wasn’t comfortable having sex if I was going to be dating other people. “I just don’t want to get fucked over.”

“I’m not a fucker-over-er,” I replied to no effect. I explained that A__ and I didn’t have anything going on, but J__ didn’t seem to be buying a word of it. It was true, but I didn’t have any room for self-righteousness in the big picture. However innocent I might have been in the specific case, I was completely guilty in the abstract. If a man lusts after a woman in his heart…

Some questions are eternal and will never be answered to our satisfaction: Who am I? Why are we here? Is it too soon to have sex? Can we “see each other” but not fuck until we’re both prepared to be exclusive? If the answer were “yes,” would we even want to?

It was an I-didn’t-think-I’d-had-enough-to-cause-a-bad-hangover-let-alone-morning-puke kind of self-reflection. I never got hangovers in my twenties because I didn’t like to drink. I never had to think seriously about Alcoholism and whether any of Urban-America’s Normal, Self-Destructive Behavior had, in fact, become self-destructive. But now I find myself thinking about it sometimes. When the bartender gives you that stupidly over-long pour, is it love or hate? It’d be rude not to finish, but it’s still my fault, right? How many hangovers is it acceptable to have in a one-year period? Does the act of asking define approximately where one’s threshold is?

Music festival season will be upon us soon, filling weekends with endless bands and beer. I need to not hurt myself — too much shit to do.

Good Fuck

Sex And Salter at The Paris Review

One quick peek, I thought clicking it, somewhat guiltily. Inside was what appeared, at first glance an apology. I couldn’t help but feel better (plus a bit of the kind of bad which is really a different kind of better).

Too late now; I’m having dinner with J__ whose company is so undramatically pleasant, I’ve probably had no occasion to mention it yet. (Nah-nuh Nah-nuh Nah Nah)

Later, when I had a chance to actually read her message, I saw it was equal parts embarrassed, honest apology and irrelevant accounting of the bad day that preceded her “rude behavior” (her words).

I was tempted to reply simply with “apology accepted” which would have been honest, and c’mon — funny. K__ and I would often have arguments that only seemed to find resolution when I bent and apologized. On rare occasion when the tables were turned, I found it was better to simply accept the apology than discuss it further and risk reopening whatever foul business was currently on its way closed.

T__ displays signs of some similar tendencies, though I don’t know her well enough to be fatalistic. I did notice feeling a bit of relief when she showed me her ass, and I thought, “Well, that certainly makes things easier.”

…

Dinner was fun. We drank wine and made easy conversation. Afterwards we shared a cigarette on her back porch. “You don’t have herpes or anything…”

(Ok, I really do have to get an STD test, pronto. If only for my own fragile sanity.)

I talked too much as is my habit, but it seemed to have been alright. I got my goodnight kiss on and drove home happy.

…

I saw E__ today at the coffeeshop. She was on the phone, and I had in my headphones. We smiled but didn’t speak. I still miss her, and I’m not sorry.

So, in reply to a text message, I casually dropped that I needed to look for a sitter if we were hanging out Thursday night, and on the spot did our plans die a quick death. T__ insisted that I not “worry or bother” with it and “made other plans” before I could even hit send on my protests. I hit send anyway, and was not graced with a reply. (Ouch!)

I try not to let my expectations for how a relationship will go outpace the relationship itself. T__ herself set further, intersecting bounds, and I was thrilled with them. Plus, I’d already begun wondering how long it would take her idiosyncrasies to outweigh her charms, and I wasn’t really all that disappointed about having had the thought occur to me. I’d seen me-size holes in the notion that I’d ever fall helplessly in love — for instance. In short, my investment was small. In the abstract.

Concretely, I know she’s a little off kilter; I know to expect some chaos. This knowledge coupled with my emotional distance is supposed to protect me Goddammit! Why then, did this absolutely ruin my mood today? I can barely believe it, let alone explain it.

Well, ok, I can explain it.

It’s possible I’m misreading something — the tricky genre that is text messaging, T__s wild sense of humor, etc. But intent is far from my point.

If, I assume for a moment that T__ is messing with me on purpose, the whole thing is deftly explained away as an exercise in power and control. Easy. I don’t like the implication that I’m automatically the bottom, but the scenario makes fine sense.

If she’s not being manipulative on purpose, it means that I’ve abdicated this power to her voluntarily. Even worse, I somehow blindsided myself.

“There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”