Сэм and I meet for a day, then I get philosophical

The day after hanging out with Алисса, I slept until noon and awoke with nothing to do all day except read, hack, and eat my delicious leftovers. I felt calm and composed. The conversations of the last week had helped to settle my emotions. I was suddenly connected to a bunch of new people, with good things to say, and good ideas. It all seemed so much easier.

I received a message from a young woman whose profile I'd browsed a few times before. It was short but very forward: "Heya, handsome! How's your day going?" I responded at the same flirty level, and we did a back-and-forth that lasted most of the day. Her name was Сэм.

She outlined a tentative scheme to drive all the way down from Fairfield - an hour-long journey at least - to meet me in the evening on Wednesday. By the feel of the conversation, she intended to get a good look at me, make a few sanity checks on my personality, and follow or lead me to some secluded location of our choosing where we could make out for a while. I had a feeling she talked a bigger game than she walked, but there was no point in calling her on it. Besides, she was the one doing all the driving, and taking the lion's share of the risk.

It was the first time I'd actually agreed to future plans with someone, however small, in a while, and that brought to bear a curious pressure in my mind. What was that about? This lunch date with a nice lady was looming in my mind like a dentist appointment. How much unstructured time can one person need?

Сэм and I met at Cafe Trieste on Piedmont avenue. She was seated facing the window, reading a book, and easy to spot. She was tall, big-boned without being fat, and had a curiously rounded head and large eyes. She was a combination of good pieces that didn't add up to attraction for me, even while I could see how they would easily catch the eyes of other men. The biggest factor for me was her years of sun exposure. There was a large patch of thick, burned skin across the front of her chest, and similar patches along the tops of both arms.

Now, people can do what they want with their bodies. But I think many people don't realize just how severe the slow accumulation of sun exposure can be, until they start to get damage that it's too late to prevent. So I keep getting this idea of renting a billboard in the center of town, and putting up a huge sign that says, "PALE PEOPLE: INVEST IN LARGE HATS." Then a link to a website, laying out the details of UV light and RNA damage...

Sunburn or no, I was determined to have a nice time. I put myself forward for her, and began to tease her out of her shell. She never fully emerged, and never really relaxed, but she at least trusted me enough to be completely honest about her past, her plans, and her impressions. We told lots of travel stories and had fun comparing Bay Area life and culture to some of the other places we'd lived. I liked her but, as I'd done with Алисса, the feelings were turning into something between friends.

It was interesting comparing these two people, since they were fresh in my head. Алисса was more structured in the way she spoke. She would set the stage for something, then say it, then talk around it a bit to build the context the way she wanted. She was also more likely to speak up, and out, and grasp at questions. Сэм was different. More straight-ahead, and more about problem-solving and practical skills. As the stereotypes go, it was more masculine. She also kept an emotional distance from me by teasing.

It was something I saw in Аннет, too, but in Сэм it was constant. During our coffee shop discussion, and later at Rudy's Cafe, she jibed me about a whole series of things, most of which I veered quietly around, and it was only after my third or fourth reproach to her teasing that she got the hint and realized that it wasn't having the effect she wanted.

This is probably a case of me being oversensitive to the tactic, after an entire year of having minor arrows of judgement flicked at me by Эрика, in a tone that only had the veneer of teasing but was all business underneath. Nowadays I interpreted teasing as a power-play - an attempt to provoke me into accepting an inferior position, where my date's approval of me is cast as an act of generosity on their part. After 20 years of varied experience, that tactic has started to really turn me off. I was aware that teasing was used by some couples as a kind of tension relief, but it always struck me as a crappy alternative to vulnerability -- something grown-up children did. If they didn’t have the skills to express things fairly and tactfully, they just inoculated each other to a certain level of abuse, so they could smuggle across the important admissions of need or desire by wrapping them in sarcasm, which had to be unwrapped on the other end.

Eventually Сэм responded, and dropped it from her repertoire, but only after the date had almost entirely run its course. We hugged in the parking lot outside Rudy's and she drove away. There was no make-out session, and I wasn't surprised.

I cycled home, feeling curiously happy, just because I'd had the chance to be my outgoing and sharing self for a while with a person who was not a bitter misogynist like my housemate. I also checked my phone and discovered a message from a woman I'd written to the previous night, and was further elated by the warm reception she had given me. I was sure that Сэм wouldn't be interested in seeing me again, nor I her, so it was onward to the next thing. And that brought up the question of "Why?"

My housemate was out somewhere and the cat was curled up in a little basket in the living room, and the question buzzed around my head as I ate a snack and settled in to do some reading. "Why am I going on these dates?"

If I just wanted to make out with someone I could have probably convinced Сэм to go for it pretty easily. It was clear she thought I was handsome enough. It's true we weren't a great match in our communication styles and I didn't believe she was long-term relationship material, but it's also true that a part of me - an embarrassing but undeniably real part of me - was going on dates specifically to look for sexual interaction. It had been on the table just an hour ago, and I bicycled home instead.

When I was younger, I went right through my teenage years feeling indescribably horny, but never working up the courage to actually kiss someone, or do anything else overtly sexual. My imagination ran amok, picturing the things I might do with people, if only I knew it would be socially acceptable, mutually desired, and wouldn't summon the wrath of authority figures. But those things were never, ever clear enough. I was at war with myself, and something I firmly believed was that when the opportunity to actually kiss someone presented itself, I would take it, no matter who it was. It seemed too amazing to ever turn down.

That belief turned into a general belief, about boys and men: They were supposed to doggedly pursue sex, even with people they didn't care about or didn't even like; even with people they knew they never wanted to see again. Just because it was sex, and they wanted that more than anything else. Likewise, women were supposed to play the opposite side of this dynamic: They were supposed to be indifferent to sex at best, and put up as much resistance to it as they could muster, so the man had to work and wait for it, thus proving that he was committed enough to her specifically.

Since being a teenager, I'd met a whole lot of different men and women, and gathered a whole lot of experience, and realized that the dynamic I'd been shown by the culture around me was a lie. Not just a general guideline that was intended to be pushed gently past as a person came of age, but a straight-up lie, with a deliberate intent behind it to distort male and female sexuality for other purposes. And the lie was harmful, inspiring shame and self-doubt and a truly appalling amount of wasted time in myself and hordes of people around me. Women and men ran a spectrum, with some in both groups diligently pursuing sex, and some only wanting sex with people they liked in specific ways, and some not being particularly interested ... and people could also change positions over time. The stereotypes were blunt instruments used to validate the preferences of some people, and viciously hammer others down below the threshold of public perception.

There's a word floating around, that many people do not like because they think it means something "anti male". It doesn't. It describes a specific social system, one that screws up women and men alike. That word is "patriarchy." And those lies are part of it.

But that's outside the scope of this little piece of dating autobiography.

I knew better than what the stereotypes claimed, but even now, part of me struggled with the cognitive dissonance they created: Wasn't I supposed to be so eager to make out with someone - anyone - that it didn't matter how nice they were? A big part of my motivation for dating was the desire to have a sex life. Does it make sense that my desire for romance would be working at cross-purposes with that? Aren't men supposed to be "simpler"?

Well, no. And all I could do was keep looking.