garote | Entries tagged with romance

I know what you're thinking: What right do I have to make such a list, given my varied romantic history? If I truly knew about "enduring", wouldn't I be celebrating a 30th anniversary or something with one person right now?

Well, you can make many mistakes with one person, or with many different people... What matters is whether you learn enough to keep history from repeating as you go!

I started this list somewhere around 15 years ago, and have tinkered with it ever since. The idea has always been to keep it short, so I can read down it and remind myself of things I might try or pay attention to. For a while I thought I would print out the numbered bits and frame it on my wall, like when I was in college and I printed out a sign reading "TIME TO KICK MORE ASS" and stuck it on the inside of my door so I'd see it every day.

But I never did do that, and perhaps because of something else: All the items of advice below are very personal, learned from things in my own past, and I don't think there's any way to shortcut that process. I mean, just because someone has a list, doesn't mean they'll embrace or even understand what's on it. I think that only comes from having the experiences. And so, what's the point of a list that you didn't make yourself?

So this ends up being just the same as a list you might find in "Vogue", "Cosmo", or "O" at the checkout stand. An idle curiosity, or at the very most something you use as a jumping off point to make your own. And, I am definitely interested in hearing what other people might put on their own list, especially if it contradicts things on mine!

Anyway, with that disclaimer in place, I now present the list:

1. A relationship is an arena for self-actualization. Not proof of it.

So you love someone who loves you. Adulthood accomplished? Game over, epic victory? No.
You and your partner will both change as your lives continue. Even if you resist it. Be willing to explore and embrace that change. Push your comfort zone. If you don't, you'll look back in your old age and wonder where your life went - and who your partner is - and who you could have been.

2. Make time to reconnect.

Dialogue - spending time talking, and listening - is the breath of life in a relationship. Career and children and hobbies can choke that dialogue. Sometimes you will need to fight for it.

3. Always try to tell more of the truth.

It's obvious you should try to tell the truth.
However, there's a habit you can practice that will improve your communication beyond that basic rule: There is always more truth to tell.
For example, the truth might be, "I think this pie you baked tastes awful."
More of the truth might be, "I usually love your cooking, and I don't want you to be discouraged from it, and I feel a bit like a jerk saying this, but I think this pie tastes awful."
Practice this. Do not pride yourself on being "blunt"; you are just forcing others to compensate for your lack of skill.

4. Passion is based on admiration. Encourage what you admire.

Your passion and attraction for your partner is something you have a stake in, and some influence over. You share some responsibility for those feelings.
So when your partner does or says something that causes you to lose respect for them, you need to talk about it. Don't let the idea that you "should never want to change your partner" act as an excuse to avoid challenging them this way. Sometimes the most important thing you can do as a partner is call them on their crap, and then advocate - with love - for change. (See items 1 and 3.)

5. If your partner is also your best friend, you might need more friends.

Just because you're partnered doesn't mean you can let your social circle atrophy. You are still a person in the world, and you still need to engage with it. If you don't, you may paint yourself into a psychological corner ... Or perhaps never emerge from one you're already in.
Getting along with a variety of people will also help to maintain fairness with your partner. A long-time partner can understand you so well that they will accept behavior that would be confusing or even unbearable to others. That can be convenient, but may also twist your relationship out of the realm of adulthood.

6. Learn to rely.

Independence starves intimacy - and dependence starves passion. Reach for the sweet spot: Be reliable. Be reliant. If you're only ever one of these, you're doing it wrong.

7. Sometimes things go badly, even when everyone is doing their best.

Infatuation is a fragile thing. It barely lasts one turn of the seasons. For your home to endure you must learn how to replace broken stones with solid ones, and a new stone won't fit into place if you can't sweep the fragments of pain or resentment away. That is done by forgiving, and seeing anew.
An apology from your partner is an invitation to help rebuild, not an I.O.U. that you stick in a savings account to buy your way out of emotional work when you screw up later on. If you're hoarding resentments, you're not running a partnership, you're running a workhouse, and in time your employee will quit.

8. Remember humility.

No one is perfect; not even you. If something is going badly, you may be a factor. Think about how, and try something. If you're not bringing your A-game, if you're not vulnerable, why are you even here?

The following is a long, semi-structured rant about parenting.

One of the weird cultural artifacts that I grew up with was a vision of the way people were supposed to raise their children. It was preserved, or to be more accurate, reconstructed, from the era of the 1950s a few decades before. It's still in force today, across large parts of America.

Women were supposed to stay at home and cook and clean and shop and be mothers to the kids, which generally took the form of dressing and feeding them and policing them and being nurturing -- an interesting word with a slippery definition. Men were supposed to have one foot out in the world, working some kind of career in order to bring home money, and their approach to children was more distant, instructive, and punitive. They could teach and protect, but they didn't cook, change diapers, or wipe away tears.

My own parents took this vision and applied modifications to suit their tastes, but still accepted its harshest compromises. For example, both of my parents had established careers before they married but when children started coming along, they could get by on a single income, and my father forcefully argued that since he made more money, he should be the one to keep the job while my mother stayed home. And so, for years, Mom had kids glued to her side all day, until the evening when Dad came home and she could, as she called it, "make the hand-off for a while," which usually meant just a short break before she had to put dinner on the table.

We all have multiple visions of our future clamoring in our heads, and for my mother the battle was intense, because she genuinely loved her work. It stung to have the choice seemingly made for her, not just by my father, but by the expectations of society, acting on that 1950s blueprint. Then there is the additional insult of the wage gap: The choice was only obvious because she was making less money even though they both had the same career. (They were both teachers.)

Over the years, when I've asked her how she felt about this, my Mom has given a range of answers, touching on the different ways it played out. She's said "I was as happy as a clam staying home with you kids; I loved being a Mom," but she's also said "I felt like I was being railroaded when it came to major decisions, and losing my work was one of them. I did substitute teaching but that was much harder."

I didn't become aware of this disconnect between the suburban-ish world I grew up in and the needs of the people who populated it, until I was in my mid-20's and trying to visualize my own destiny, as a romantic partner or a father. At the time I was still ready to buy into the traditional gender role and nuclear family, and if I'd met someone who also bought into it, I think I would have gotten married and had at least one child not too long after leaving college. That would have cemented things. By my reckoning, if that had happened, my kids would be grown and out of the house by now.

Instead I met a series of people who were questioning their future as much as I was, and I developed a strong feeling that traditional parenthood would require me to give up some part of my identity that I wasn't willing to lose. It wasn't something as selfish as "freedom" or "spare time", though there were plenty of people eager to tell me I would lose both. It was all the ways I felt and behaved that didn't fit into the box labeled "suburban American guy". And for decades, though much less so nowadays, the things I liked most about myself were not welcome in that box.

As my romantic journey has continued for all these years I've also met plenty of women who felt the same. In fact, I can now say, with confidence, that I have had a rich and varied dating life well beyond that of most people from my era. And there has no doubt been a lot of self-selection in the partners I stayed with, and the people I only dated briefly, but I have learned there are a lot of women in the world who not only do not want children, but are certain they would make bad parents to their own children or others.

They do not lead lives of loneliness or suffer from a lack of direction. They are often the most accomplished, interesting, and well-rounded people I meet. In part because raising kids simply takes time over the long haul and they're spent that time doing different things, but also because you have to be a bit of an iconoclast at heart just to push that far outside the expectations of your gender. There are still very few narratives for women without children in popular culture even now, rendering these people invisible. It’s as if that vision from the 1950’s is creeping around like a fog, obscuring entire sections of society. Without a cultural scaffolding, this group has had to re-invent itself with every generation, every time as outsiders. Likewise, from the other side of this mirror, women who are parents sometimes find themselves asking, "What else can I be, once this parenting gig settles down and I have time again? Is there anything out there I would be welcome in trying?"

I have intimately known plenty of women who had ambitions to start a family, and then, upon starting one discovered that they were embarking on a war with the infrastructure of society around them, to preserve their individuality. When you have a child, everyone around you, especially other women, suddenly has strong ideas about what you are doing with that child. Especially the amount of attention you are paying to them, and the degree to which you are bending the structure of the rest of your life to do that. Under this lens of judgement you make compromises, between what's expected, what your partner wants, what your child needs, and yourself. The pressure from the outside world is always on the side of the child, and second to that on the side of the partner for the sake of preserving your partnership. Your needs come dead last. Whatever you want to be that doesn’t fit in that box, as woman or man or person, is chopped at until the lid can close.

Pushing back against that pressure doesn't win friends. Doing something for your own sanity that has no visible benefit to your kids doesn't win approval. It’s true that once you have a child, your life generally should not be all about you anymore, but it’s just as true that your life should not be all about the kid, otherwise, why are you bothering?

Faced with the pressure to relinquish their identities, some of the women I know simply cracked under the pressure and wandered away from their children, and the partnership they were birthed into. None of them are proud of this. But for all of them, the choice felt as stark as leave and survive, or stay and die. Wide-eyed people ask, "How could a woman leave her own child?" With luck, those people will never have to learn how. But the frequency of this question illustrates how invisible this group is: No one wants to believe a woman can abandon her kids even in theory.

It seems obvious that if a person knows they won’t enjoy parenting, they should be respected for choosing to avoid having kids, rather than shamed. Less obvious is the need to examine all the frivolous restrictions and baggage that come with parenting, that make the role seem so thankless that people are driven from it.

That weird 1950s stereotype of a woman staying home evolved directly out of a previous situation, where a woman stayed on the farm. She wasn’t somehow insulated from the danger or complication of a career, she was just too damn busy working on the farm like everyone else - which had plenty of its own dangers - and patriarchal power structures like the Catholic Church used the idea of protecting her and protecting the family as an excuse to keep her anchored there. When suburbia came along, with handy slots for appliances and vehicles, the farm miniaturized into a kitchen, and women were transplanted into it, drawn by the promise of convenience.

And if they weren’t comfortable with that transition, there was suddenly something wrong with women. No one blamed suburbia -- it was too convenient and futuristic and safe. You didn't need to slaughter hogs, dig endless rocks out of the soil, chase chickens around a yard, or scare off coyotes with a shotgun. But what you did need to do, since you no longer had land, was make a living somewhere away from the house. And that was really all it took to split men away from women and start the construction of two entirely different pink and blue lives.

So, wind this forward 50 years, and multiple generations of families have organized their entire lives by a collective hallucination of gender roles, which were based almost entirely on that specific convergence of post-agrarian consumer goods and services we call suburbia. The more you stare at it, the more arbitrary and senseless it appears. And as we're all finding out, it's not sustainable. You can't take every child in a generation, break them into pairs along sex lines, and build each pair a single-family home with a garage and a yard connected to a highway system. What's more, why would your children want that by default? Any part of it?

Suburbia wasn’t a step in a progression towards an ideal. It was a massive experiment in standardization, including the standardization of parenting. Things that men and women were supposed to embrace, and project into their children, were invented from whole cloth by advertisers. Even sexuality had a binary range clamped down upon it, with men and women placed on opposite ends, created for - and then reinforced by - the products and stories targeting them.

And of course there's the church. This was a two-handed operation, with consumerism as one hand, and religion as the other. There is an obvious unbroken line, connecting the dictates of a church to go forth and multiply, with the celebration of marriage as a bond that is only legitimate for bearing children, with the unreconstructed desire of parents to compel their own children to reproduce in turn, with the absurd and extremely damaging efforts to punish any social behavior that blurs the imposed gender duality, and reject sexual or romantic behavior that does not directly result in a fertilized embryo and a home for it to mature in. That line is easy to trace, from the heads and books of the colonizers that appeared in America 500 years ago, to the homophobia and hatred of my current day.

Even my own father admitted, late in life, that if I had grown up as gay, or as outwardly effeminate, he would have handled it badly and probably ruined our relationship. "I just know I would have screwed it up," he said. "I wouldn't have understood you."

That was one of the things that deeply bothered me about suburban culture and its emphasis on procreation: The existential panic over men being sexually interested in men, and on top of that the existential panic over men not naturally wanting to stay inside the lane labeled "masculine", which included stoicism and football and beer and cowboy hats and war, but didn't include earrings and heels and caretaking and poetry and whimsy. Who drew these lines? Even my Dad, who was too old to be afraid of most things, only dared to push outside the lines a little. He seemed to have an admiration for those who pushed further, but he personally couldn't. He held a lot of the toxic masculinity of male culture at arms length, shielding me from it in the process, but to him a boy still had to become a man, or he was somehow lost at sea.

More than once I've heard perfectly liberal-seeming parents lament that their children, if they "turned out gay", would be doomed to a life of misery because they would never get to participate in parenthood. Once I was alone with the mother of a woman I was dating, and she confessed that she was glad her daughter was with me, because her daughter was bisexual and "could have just as easily ended up with a lesbian and then I wouldn't have grandkids." To avoid a nasty argument, all I said was, "We'll see," when what I wanted to say was, "Why the hell do you think a lesbian can't be a mother, or even a perfectly good father figure? How many lesbian parents do you know? Or do you think they're such abominations they shouldn't even be around children?"

Sex hormones can be strong, but they don't have the ultimate say in our route to happiness. I've met women who have told me: "My ovaries are screaming at me that I should make little carbon copies of you, but thankfully, they're not in charge." I've also heard: "I'm sex-positive and really into sex, but just the thought of someone putting a baby in me turns me off like a light switch." And I've heard: "Sometimes I get this visceral hunger for the particular smell of an infant. Ever since I smelled it, I sometimes get this ache for it, filling my whole body. Like the thing I want the most in the whole world is a little baby. But, at the same time, children are just terrifying to me and I don't want them around, ever." All these people are threaded into the world, finding their way, and modern culture is still pretending that they're curiosities at best. They all have the same equipment, but because they're not using it to make babies, the classic suburban vision has no place for them.

I’ve met and enjoyed my time with women who were taller than me, hairier than me, louder than me, stronger than me, less nurturing than me, far less interested in children than me, and in some cases significantly more violent than me. Society has labeled them as deviants, and the difficulty they have had is not from being different, but from the label. Many of them are also parents, and have had to struggle to come to terms with the difference between the way they want to parent, and what the world expects. The majority of them are not comfortable accepting a role at the head of a stove, spending their time for years upon years constantly being the sole minder and guardian of infants who are - let’s be frank - terrible conversation, and often quite gross.

Having gotten to know these different people in succession, and understanding how they work, my own perspective about my own role as a parent - or something adjacent to that - has also evolved. I have two sisters with six children between them, and among my closest friends, there are six more children to attend to. I take pride in being an uncle to them, according to a definition of "uncle" that I've had to hammer out on my own, and sometimes the support I provide them is a kind that their own parents are unable to, mostly because they lack perspective, or a necessary amount of detachment. One could say I operate a sort of finishing school for the kids in my life. Their parents let me take them off their hands for a few days, or in some cases, weeks or months. We travel together, we get up to various hijinks, and then I return them with additional perspective. I find it great fun and I have noticed positive changes in the lives of everyone involved.

And meanwhile, society at large is screaming at me that, because I have not impregnated a woman and brought several children to term, and then purchased a single-family home with enough plastic toys and shiny appliances to raise those kids unassisted by friends or extended family, that I am failing my parents, failing society, and failing as a human being.

That voice is much quieter now, even as my own interest in being a parent has slowly grown over the years into the "uncle" role I have now. But it's still there. Sometimes I'm ambushed by this intense loathing for just the physical layout of suburban houses, with their rubber-stamped chunks of lawn and flawless sidewalks, their wall-to-wall carpet, and their giant television sets. The idea of living in such a place fills me with an existential dread. The idea of getting up at 7:00am sharp to drive a car through angry freeway traffic to a building 30 miles away, then reversing the journey at night, makes me want to die. It almost killed me once already. Yes I would do it if there was no other option; if it was a matter of survival. That's what it was for a while. But now that I've found a way to live outside that requirement, I don't ever want to go back. I have come to loathe an existence that revolves around cars.

Assuming it wasn't in that kind of house, the idea of being a stay-at-home Dad, with enough of my own finances sorted out that I wouldn't even need to lean on my co-parent, seems appealing to me. The loss of free time and of my identity through my career would be difficult and I would certainly feel adrift because of that, but I get the feeling I would compensate by pouring energy into the kids. But then the feeling of suburban isolation crowds around this vision and starts to strangle it. My siblings and friends are too geographically scattered to help or keep me company, and without the ability to go where they are, how long could I remain alone with a few beings who are - as I mentioned - terrible conversation and often quite gross, before I start to go crazy?

It baffles me that people consistently tell me that their happiest family memories come from times when the extended family was involved, whether for a holiday, or a vacation, or just an extended visit, and yet we have all convinced ourselves, that the only true route to creating the next generation is to hide exactly two people in their own structure, with a collection of personal appliances, located in some arbitrary location anywhere in the country regardless of how far it is from uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on. As if, sure, it takes a village, but any old village will do, and what matters is the house with the fence and the driveway, not the presence of diverse and loving people who know your collective history and have charted a dozen different paths to happiness that you can draw from. Paths that include being an aunt or a godmother and so on, when not a parent directly.

Organizing society around the individual has a balance of pluses and minuses, but organizing society around the nuclear family seems to have a lot more in the minus column. If the definition of the family stops at the border beyond parent and child, we all make decisions by only considering the consequences up to that point, and the rest is easily pruned. If dad can make more money in a city 100 miles west, then clearly the wife and children should move, regardless of whether grandpa or grandma or aunt or uncle will remain close enough to be involved. Because more money means better appliances in the better house. This is the math people use in this nation of immigrants, where family legacy is often very short and there may seem like there isn’t even anything to preserve.

My own family was split apart by the pursuit of opportunity in distant parts of the state. My extended family suffered this fate to a lesser degree. Parents worked hard and drove great distances and arranged elaborate schedules to get the kids to socialize together, and it had a significant effect, but even a distance of five or 10 miles, just sufficient such that a car, and therefore an adult and a plan, needs to be involved, is enough of a wedge to split an extended family permanently into pieces, especially over the long haul of many years through adolescence and teenager-hood. I have lots of cousins and second cousins all over the state, but closer to the truth would be to say I had them, and comfortable silence eventually has become silence. I don’t think I would even recognize them on the street anymore. Or their kids -- most of whom are in college at least.

If being a parent means accepting this status quo, it's right to rebel against it. What if being a parent could mean helping to raise children that you didn’t give birth to or stick your genes in? What if supporting other parents was recognized as an important role worth acting to preserve in social structures? The term "godmother" has a religious origin, and is about taking responsibility for the religious education of a child. What if it meant more? What if taking an active role in the lives of your relatives' children as teenagers, even if you don’t like babies, had a name? All these options exist of course, and are taken up by a significant chunk of society, but they are nameless. They are vaguely seen as nice to have, but there are no rituals or holidays or even words to legitimize them.

I feel glad to have found some happiness and some ability to contribute. I still struggle with that frightening specter of suburban life and the 1950s vision of parenthood it has hauled into the present day. I fear being hemmed in by the father role and excluded from the mother role, and I fear starting a family with someone who is succumbing to pressure and will only become miserable in due time. I fear having every day reduced by some percentage of time trapped in a car, shuttling myself and passengers from one box to the next, in a loop that goes on for ten, fifteen, twenty years.

But at the same time I wonder, maybe there's a way I can do this that works for me. I imagine joining parenting groups and finding local help with new friends. I picture living in some place that doesn't have a stupid lawn but does have a nice park nearby, and putting a child in a seat on the back of a bicycle and riding out for a picnic. I can see myself forming some alliance with neighbors, or moving closer to family, to cooperate on meals and shopping in some negotiated schedule that always puts four or five people around a table to keep things interesting. There's some non-suburban, non-isolating, non-straitjacket version of this course that I'm sure people around me are charting and I could potentially move from "uncle" to something more direct.

But should I? Especially at my age? And with my tendency to want to go on bike trips for a month at a time? Is the fact that I can't decide, proof in itself that I don't have the dedication to make it work?

I have a lifelong habit of continuing in uncomfortable situations that are predictable and safe, rather than changing the situation in some uncomfortable way to pursue a greater happiness that is not guaranteed. I'm sure we all suffer from this habit to a degree, but I feel like it's really messed with my life. It's too easy to reinforce, because playing it safe today is more likely to get you to tomorrow.

At many points in my life I have also used the possible inconvenience of other people as an excuse to delay my actions. This is the worst kind of selfishness, based on the conceited idea that you know better than other people what they would choose if they had all the facts.

In the depths of this kind of self-imposed purgatory, I've often asked myself the question, "If I keep doing it, what am I doing it for?" If I didn’t derive some strong benefit from this pathology I would have ditched it long ago. Over time I've realized that the reason is subtle, but powerful: I keep trying to play a role, of someone who is as stable and committed and undemanding as the masculine role models I aspired to early in life. And while there definitely is a part of me that is remarkably stable - you need to have nerves of steel to deal with many aspects of long range bike touring, complex software development, and living in Oakland - there is also a part of me that is intense, difficult, boundary-pushing, and swings between craving solitude and craving disruptive, creative mayhem.

Without hard-won wisdom to temper it, this disposition has the following outward appearance: I find something that works really well and do it happily for long stretches of time, running it into the ground, and then with little external warning or apparent reason, I abandon it and make a lateral leap into something else. Sometimes I leap a few times very quickly. Then I find the next thing that works really well and burrow into it, for another long stable run.

The tempering wisdom is this: Being entirely stable is not the goal to aspire to, despite what the role models - of cowboys, and suburban husbands, and workaday dads - were insisting to me when I was young. The goal is to safely integrate change and adventure with the rest of your life, and the people in it. And that includes advocating for what you need in relationships, with a mixture of insistence and empathy, instead of being quietly discontent. And knowing the difference between what you really need, and what just sounds good because it would make you feel better. (Or eventually, feel anything.)

In the recent past I have not been particularly good at applying this wisdom, so I feel like I need to nail it down in words right now, and re-read it a few times to myself for good measure.

A familiar-looking painting.

Now it's time to take a left turn into a major part of my life: Bicycle touring.

For a long time I believed that my desire to go on long-range tours was pathological. I believed I was either obsessed with the idea of touring because it was a convenient distraction from other problems in my life and a good excuse to avoid "settling down", or I believed it was a kind of curse because if I went on long-range tours I would be logistically unsuitable as a partner for a committed romantic relationship. And for almost all my adult life, I've always either been in, or been eagerly pursuing, a committed romantic relationship. So it's either a case of: I'm avoiding my problems, or I'm screwing myself out of what I want.

Over the last ten years, without really understanding what I was doing, I tried multiple times to make a specific compromise to this: Having my romantic partner go with me on these journeys. One time I outright pitched the idea, and helped her shop for a bike, but she was physically unsuited to such long rides and found it miserable. Other times the idea arose organically, but got derailed by my own lack of experience guiding people comfortably into it. The most recent time I approached it with a healthy skepticism: My partner was already interested in touring before I met her, and as we got to know each other she casually set about buying a touring bike and gathering gear and discussing potential trips, and I soft-pedaled the pursuit because I needed to be sure she wasn't doing it because she thought it was necessary for getting closer to me. Meanwhile, whether these relationships were going well or going poorly, the desire to go on bike tours remained.

In fact I began to be plagued increasingly by a grand vision of going on a bike tour around the entire world, which would charge into the front of my mind and thoroughly distract me, then vanish for a while. It got the most intense a few years ago, when I found myself newly single, and with the financial and logistical means for the first time to actually attempt such a thing. I traveled for three months and then deliberately set it aside to attend to other matters in life, involving my family and career, and though I was not entirely at peace with the decision, it felt like the right one. I realized I could pick up the epic journey where I left off, and do it in segments. I planned the next segment with my nephew, and folded it into a foreign vacation with a big chunk of my family. We did practice rides and I made an itinerary and bought plane tickets. It was going to be awesome! Then COVID blasted those plans apart.

I shrugged my shoulders and planned some smaller trips. I was exploring a long-term relationship during COVID times anyway, and put most of my attention into that and my job. At the end of last year I went on a pretty epic trip with my nephew, then jumped through a series of exhausting COVID-related logistical hoops to get myself to the East Coast to visit my significant other, but when I arrived I was exhausted and uncomfortable and she was distracted, and then some absurd drama piled on top of that. I suddenly found myself entirely alone on the wrong side of the country with a bike and a pile of gear, three days from my birthday, with a massive storm approaching. It was another logistical nightmare getting out of that, with repercussions that took months to sort out.

The foul taste of that experience informed my most recent span of dating: I became convinced that any attempts to combine my bike touring plans with my romantic life would turn into a disaster, and the only sane option was to put one on hold in favor of the other. That worked for a good while, then the "grand tour" idea ran rampant in my mind again and I decided the only way to be rid of it was to clear everything else from my life - developing romance included - and just do it. I put a plan together, and then it was immediately derailed by a family emergency that made me reassess what I was doing. Instead, once things were under control again back home, I assembled a much smaller and easier trip, a return to a known quantity I wanted more time to explore: Iceland.

Not a tribute to the diversity movement, but to Bilröst. It's a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Earth and Asgard.

In this era of my life, after so much experience, I can confidently say that I am not pursuing bike tours in order to avoid problems at home. I go on bike tours, and I have problems, but the two don't correlate any more than other parts of my life. Still, they are great fun to think about, and I am guilty of obsessively planning the next one when my attention would be more useful elsewhere. It's taken a lot of effort to move away from that habit. It helps that I've accumulated a big list of potential trip plans I can just dip randomly into when there's time for a journey. Many of those are suitable for casual bike tourists, and perhaps I'll start a relationship with someone with that level of interest, and we'll explore those together. But I don't need that to feel fulfilled.

Now I'm happily single, and on another bike tour, and the other potential pathology comes to the foreground: Am I no good for a long-term relationship with all this traveling? Does a hobby like this really factor me out as a desirable romantic partner?

I don't believe that any more. I found a pretty good compromise in my last long-term relationship, with frequent enthusiastic sharing and check-ins and the engineering of visits along the way, and in retrospect that relationship died on its own terms, for its own reasons. That said, I do know I'm not in a position to start or nurture a long-term relationship while touring -- without some pretty specific coloring outside the lines of courtship. And I'm okay with that. What matters to me right now is the adventure I'm having, the work I'm doing, the stories I get to share with my family and the plans I can make to involve them, and so on. The bike touring is not the lateral leap; it's not the unstable question mark, it's not the vision quest or the segue into something else. It's a part of who I am long-term, and it can fit into other things without crowding them out. It provides a measure of both the solitude and the creative mayhem that I need in my life to complement the stability I desire, and that is extremely useful. I don't sleep around, I'm not emotionally distant, I don't escalate conflict, I don't get drunk and carouse, I don't blow through my money, I don't have ridiculous expectations ... but I do this. It's a pretty good package.

I look forward to the next romance, and aspire to make it long term. I'm looking forward to all the sharing, and jokes, and dancing in the kitchen, and the adventures. But dang if I'm not also happy where I am, riding around Iceland, building software and hanging out with cats.

Does this picture just scream "Halloween" or what??

Do you think you have ESP at all?

No. Eight hundred million years of animals evolving, and they've collectively evolved some amazing ways of sensing and communicating, many of which we are not equipped with. (Check out the platypus!) But, apparently, that's not good enough for believers in "ESP" ... They want communication or prediction by some means that is utterly undetectable by any instrument. Have you examined the psychological underpinnings of that "want?" Perhaps you just want to experience mystery! Try this: Go snorkeling around a reef. HOOOLY MOLY look at those things!!

Do you believe in karma?

No. Karma is more than "what goes around comes around", it's the belief that we are paying for the misdeeds (or enjoying a reward for the good work) of a previous life. I can't buy into that. That would mean that when innocent people die early, they deserved it, and that the wealthy and powerful became so by a kind of divine right.

Could Evolution and Intelligent Design both be right?

No. We used to believe God made plants grow. Knowing it's photosynthesis, is progress. Intelligent Design only exists as a "theory" (note the lack of testable hypotheses) because some religious folk wanted a god-of-the-gaps style backstop to protect God. Its only purpose is in saying "Let's do science all the way down to point X, and then stop, because that's God's territory." That's anti-progress.

Do you believe in the power of prayer?

I believe in the power of the placebo effect. But that's not the sorting operation that this question is designed to perform, now, is it! No; God is not going to close your wounds faster. While you being present and giving soothing words to the injured might help a little, God doesn't need to be involved in that.

Is disappearing (one party ceasing all further contact without explanation) is an acceptable way to terminate a romantic relationship?

I know the various reasons why people choose to do it. Fear of confrontation is the main one. If your SO is an abusive stalker and you fear for your safety you might choose to go that route. (Or that route might make things way worse.) But, in the general case? No; I think it's appallingly disrespectful as well as cowardly, and I've never done it. Though I have had it done to me.

Are some religions more correct than others?

The measure of any law is how well it respects humans as the agents of morality. (My own phrase, from about 20 years ago.) Ergo: A religion that ceremoniously cuts off the clitoris of every newborn girl, is LESS correct than a religion that DOESN'T do that.

Is a soulmate worth waiting for?

What kind of waiting for? Like "sitting on your hands at home doing nothing?" Or like "rejecting a bunch of people you really like because someone you like even more is potentially out there?" Sounds like a recipe for regret either way. To me, the big problem with the idea of a "soulmate" is, it's a really convenient excuse to ignore, fail to truly see, or pointlessly dump, an endless procession of perfectly cromulent people. (Perhaps out of a subconscious preference for being single that you'd rather not admit.) For thousands of years, people in villages of a few hundred managed to fall madly in love with someone close at hand. You now have access to millions of people. If it's hard to meet someone you adore, well ... Get out more! Or: Make space in your life or heart for them to exist!

Abortion, politics, the death penalty. A difference of opinion over which of these topics would most likely make you think twice about dating someone?

Badly formed question. Politics encompasses both abortion and the death penalty, but if you choose it you are deliberately leaving the two out. Makes no sense. And yes ... I don't think I'd want to date someone who believed in criminalizing the difficult choices made by other anonymous women out of some belief that they needed "consequences" to discourage their "loose sexual behavior" or whatever. Honestly it's a fool's errand. Pacific Islanders used to give themselves miscarriages by laying beneath huge hot stones. Safe? No. All they could find? Yes. Sex ed, birth control, and safe abortion are companions, not enemies.

Would you consider yourself a feminist?

Yes. I have a career in the computing industry. I need to have a grasp of feminist politics just to push against the subtle hostility that women encounter here. I'd also rather be with someone who says "yes" to this question because it's a litmus test about what they define "feminist" as.

Do you tend toward resolving conflicts through confrontation or avoidance?

Often the best approach is a mixture of these. Sometimes you need to avoid a head-on confrontation until you dig around a little and uncover more context or facts, or do some emotional sorting. Sometimes that can be done together, during the so-called "confrontation." But avoiding the confrontation entirely is a losing strategy. I am not a shouter or a ranter. That said, over the years I've become remarkably tempered by exposure to people who ARE shouters and ranters by nature, and learned to work with them. I don't fear or resent them, as long as they are, at core, kind people who seek resolution.

Do you usually pamper the person who you are with?

I've met some people who seem repulsed by the idea of being taken care of, even when they are really sick, or struggling, or emotionally wrung-out. I haven't worked well with those people. I like to - want to - care, and receive care, when things are tough. But even though I do this, I can't say I "usually" do this, because that implies that I pamper someone even when they don't need it. So; pampering? No. But: Bring you a latte and a biscuit from the bakery every morning, and read you a little bit of poetry every night? That's how I roll.

Have you stayed friends with most of your ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends?

I've parted from almost all of my exes as friends, though we've naturally drifted away over time. The exceptions were the people who did not know how to mend: The few who were abusive, or savagely cut off communication. I am always willing to talk. In sketchy moments I will defer talking only as long as absolutely necessary, to cool emotions or avoid danger, but finding resolution with a partner has always had very high priority for me and always will.

How important is a potential match's sense of humor to you?

Very. Sarcasm is alright, but I'm not big on it. Too much can corrode genuine emotion. Make a stoopid pun or roll with me on some improv, though, and we'll have a great time. Silly accents a major plus!

Do you find arrogance to be attractive?

Oh my, no. When I detect arrogance I instantly think “insecurity”, and then start deducting EQ points. (Also I suspect that people who are attracted to arrogance struggle with their own insecurity in some related dimension...)

Imagine that a first date picks you up in a car. The car is old and run-down, but otherwise clean. How would the car affect your opinion of your date?

It's all about the driver. I’ve known millionaires who are wonderful people, but drove screwed up old clunkers because their priorities were elsewhere. And I’ve known aspiring-middle-class dickheads that I wouldn’t acknowledge on the street, who drove Teslas and BMWs and the like.

Have you ever had a true one-night stand? (You met someone, had sex that night, and never contacted each other again.)

Close: I was 21. It was kind of sad; we met at a small party with mutual friends, talked for hours, went back to her place and had sex, then talked some more. I went home. We hung out again a week later; just talking. She cried and said she missed her family back in Michigan. I heard a month later that she moved back to Michigan. Never saw her again.

Do you find intelligence sexier than looks?

A person who doesn't seem visually striking to me can start up a conversation and - if they're intelligent - become sexy as hell to me in half an hour of talking. A person who is visually striking to me can start a conversation with me, and if it's clear they don't have much going on upstairs, they stop being visually striking in a matter of minutes.

Do you find that extremely intelligent people are intimidating?

I enjoy intelligence. When I feel intimidated it's generally because the person has some kind of social or concrete power over me and is acting aloof. I tend to steer away from people like that.

Is it okay for you to be irrational in making important life decisions?

Well, I live around here, don't I? Har har! But seriously, we may think we're highly rational people, but some of the basic, fundamental decisions about how we live can turn out to be completely emotional.

Do you believe morality is universal, or relative?

Universal to all living things would be way too paradoxical. (Bacteria don't care who they infect. Cats must murder to survive.) Universal to all peoples would give zero room to explain all the cultural differences we see around us. (In some places, sex before marriage is an affront, in other places it's de-rigueur. Some cultures eat dogs, some find that horrifying.) I would never say it's entirely relative, especially from an anthropological standpoint. But there is enough wiggle room that it's clearly not universal.

If after having a nice chat with someone on a dating website, they seem to be ignoring you completely the next day. What is your reaction?

I'd assume they're busy and leave them alone. Online dating can be very ambiguous. That said, if you're suddenly being ignored after receiving lots of attention it's usually one of three things: 1. That person is dating multiple people at once and distracted, 2. That person is not particularly interested in dating you, 3. That person is not into dating generally right now and their romantic life is in a holding pattern while they attend to other things. Wait a few days and hope for outcome #3. Whatever you do, don't get upset.

Do you believe that it is possible to experience romantic love for more than one person at a time without loving one less because of your love for the other?

Not exactly. You can feel separate love for two people at once, yes. You won't love either person less. But what you will have less of, is time, attention, and energy, to put towards maintaining each of those relationships. And as you parcel those things out, you will need to rationalize those decisions to those people. Insecurity and jealousy will lurk in the corners of your emotional life and you will need to spend additional time managing them. Personally I found that lifestyle to be more hassle than it was worth.

Should burning your country's flag be illegal?

Burning this country's flag should be part of a yearly ceremony, where we carry it aloft down the street as it burns, to demonstrate that our freedoms are legitimate and real and this flag is a symbol of precisely that.

Do you think the government has the right to regulate the ownership and use of weapons?

The government regulates the ownership and use of certain kinds of FERTILIZER. (And this is for good reasons, as these kinds can be used to make very powerful explosives.) Of course, most people who read this - and probably the original author of the question - will think about guns. But if keeping track of who buys fertilizer and how they use it is a good idea, the same is obviously so of firearms.

When in charge of others, how do you tend to be? Firm and demanding, or helpful and understanding?

I most enjoy leading through consensus building. That doesn't mean just asking what everyone wants and being a go-between, that means hammering out a synthesis of the best ideas by making dialogues happen in the right order and way, which involves a surprising amount of guidance. (I've done this for years at my job.)

Is a tongue stud a turn-on?

In college I knew a girl who would clack it incessantly against the inside of her upper teeth. She thought it was fun and clever. All I could think was, "what happens when you eat crackers?" So, no.

Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?

This question bothers me. Some people who read it will think "Oh this is a stealth question about God or karma!" Others will think "This is about physics!" And others will think "This is about having a learning attitude in the face of hardship!" Well fine, here's your answer: No, I do not think everything happens for a reason. But faced with this I think people often choose some post-hoc reason that makes them feel at peace, or like they've learned something, and then move on.

Are you totally anti-war?

Terry Prachett had some really amusing dialogue about this in one of his books. Something like, "I ask you, Nobby. War: What is it good for?"
"I dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves? Deposing tyrants?"
"That's right; absolutely noth-- what??"”

The picnic was well and truly underway, with snacks and drinks all around us and the sun twinkling on the blanket. Moving on from politics, we started to talk about dating.

Her friend said, "I'm in a new kind of phase, I think. Maybe it's because I'm older. I don't want to force anything. I mean, I want to meet someone serendipitously. Like, bump into them at some kind of social event and start a great conversation by accident. But there aren't any good options for that. Even without COVID. Where do you go?"

"Well, it's always been difficult for adults," I said. "The solution last century was lots of singles-only clubs and vacations and mixers, and they were always portrayed as these dank things full of people who were either a little too desperate, or somewhere on the creepy scale. But now the internet has blown that all up. It's created a renaissance for older people to find each other and connect -- even to connect in person."

"But it all seems so deliberate. You open this app that's designed specifically for dating, then flip through people and press buttons, and then you both deliberately go to a place and it's basically a first date. I want to just meet someone randomly, and then maybe the idea of dating them can occur later on, or it won't. I'm not saying 'friends first' exactly, I'm just saying, I want the idea of dating someone to feel spontaneous instead of planned."

"Well, I guess you can go for that," I said. "But speaking for myself, I'm way done with relying on serendipity to connect me to people. I find that the more I engineer my luck, the better it gets."

I gestured to my girlfriend, sitting next to me. "We apparently sat in the same coffee shop for as much as a year before we met, and there's a chance we might have met anyway, but the prompt of a date online actually put us together, and that combined with our relaxed and ready states of mind, and we had a really great couple of first dates. Only later did we learn that we often went to the same coffee shop. So, we were compatible and only a few feet away, but things clearly needed a little social push. Without an app to make us stand out in the coffee shop, I would have kept right on poking at my laptop, and she would have kept right on reading hew New York Times, and the most that would have happened is I might have admired her butt as she walked outside."

"Huh. I can see that but it also sort of proves my point. People hang out in coffee shops all day long, but they don't talk to new people there. If they did, things could be more spontaneous."

"Maybe there's a way to get that back. But I'm not going to stop engineering my luck. If there's an app, I'm gonna use it."

We talked for a while longer, then wrapped up the picnic. We saw the friend to her car, then we walked back the way we'd come, chatting about wanting ice water, and about dating experiences in the modern world. She bought some soda water for herself and a bottle of water for me at the cafe near the top of Bancroft.

"That's one good thing about online dating," she said. "If you're in that mode where all you can handle is a one-night-stand you can find one easily. There are lots of men out there who are nice for a couple of dates and that's about it. And they'd make terrible fathers."

"Hah!" I said. "Same with women!"

"My book about hormones calls it 'Cads Versus Dads'. Some men you like because they have good genes for making a baby. Some men you like because they'd actually be good parents."

"There's a similar thing for men too. If I was just describing it in a reactionary way, by standing the stereotypes for cads and dads on their heads, it would be this: Some women are fun for getting pregnant. They seem to invite and enjoy sex, without a lot of fuss, or they've got a really good body for manufacturing a kid and seem to be making it available, for some kind of price you can pay. Then some women are fun to be with long-term, and would make excellent mothers and companions."

"That sounds about right," she said. "It's sad, but there's still a lot of social stigma about the women who just want to enjoy sex. Like, the idea is, either you enjoy being a mom, or you don't and you're some kind of monster."

"Yeah. It's easier being a cad. I mean, everybody has a ready-made cultural box for men who just want to sleep around and have fun, and it comes with some stigma and judgement, but at least it's a box. It's a place you can be. There isn't even a place like that for women. At best you get, like, a bus stop. You've expected to hang out there for a while and then get serious and catch the bus to Motherhood City."

"Yeah. And there's women in the middle too, in these weird ways," she said. "Like, I've known women who really like being pregnant, and really like having a little baby around, but then they make horrible parents once the kids start growing up, so they call in aunts and uncles and grandparents and end up almost abandoning their children to the extended family."

"Ugh," I said.

"Then they suddenly want to be pregnant and have another little baby around, so they find a guy..."

"That's kinda gross. I've been lucky enough to avoid those women, I think. Or maybe I've just been good with my birth control."

"Birth control is great," she said emphatically.

"You know, ideally, I think the best long-term partner is someone who has some dad qualities but also some cad qualities. I mean, I don't think anyone can hit the exact bulls-eye on both those categories. I think if we all dig down into our heads we start finding things we like about cads and dads that are mutually exclusive. Like, our ideal cad rides a sweet-ass motorbike, but our ideal dad drives a volvo with crumple zones all over, so he won't suddenly turn into a quadriplegic on some random morning commute."

"Yeah you can't have both."

"So, I know I fit some of the dad qualities. You'd told me so. And I like that. But I also think it's important to have some cad qualities. Do I have any of those, from your point of view?"

"Oh, I think so," she said. "Definitely some exciting cad qualities. What about me? What's my balance?"

I thought for a bit. "I don't know. I might have to sit down and really work it out, but off the top of my head I'd say you have a balance. Or, maybe 60-40, with 60 in the mom category. You'd make a fine mom, I think."

"But I have cad qualities too, for sure. Like, sometimes I just say, 'argh I need to be alone and meditate, go away!' "

"I wouldn't put that in the cad area, really. I think that's just introvert stuff. I think your cad qualities are more ... exciting? I mean, it's probably obvious from my description before: To guys, cad qualities in a woman are mostly about sex appeal and liking sex."

At this point we were back in the car, and driving down the hill along College Avenue. Students were going about their business on the sidewalks, dressed lightly for the sunny day. They all looked so young. "They're probably all half my age, or younger," I thought.

"Ugh, how are all these young people ever going to work this stuff out?" I said, gesturing out the window.

"Same way we did."

"You mean, make a whole bunch of mistakes and try a bunch of stuff that doesn't really work?"

"Exactly."

"Yeah; I don't know. I still worry about it. I worry about them. All this history, repeating all around us."

"But it's not exactly repeating," she said. "It's got differences."

"Hah! Well hopefully not so many cads!"

Today, following up on a hunch, I spend a few hours trawling obscure torrent sites and gathered some digital transfers of ancient 1960-1970's porn films. The sex depicted was totally unremarkable compared to what you could get to in 30 seconds with a google search, but that wasn't the point. The point was the audio, which consists of weird session jazz music overlaid by "steamy" poetic narration, delivered by a woman with a low voice in an extremely pretentious beat-poet cadence.

By dumping the movies through a few demultiplexing tools I isolated the audio into its own file. The result is about 60 minutes of meandering low-fidelity jazz, badly edited, with absolutely hilarious "hot" narration breaking in every five minutes or so. Here's an example from "Fraulein Leather," circa 1970:

"Bizarre. Thrilling. Off-beat desires. Three gorgeous queens to be satisfied. Eager hot bodies that demanded poetry in perverse lovemaking. Every secret thought so long concealed now revealed itself. Pleasure undreamed of, at last experienced, and fully enjoyed. The french maid. So young, so lovely, so willing. Race, wicked thoughts, race!"

Hilarious!! You can almost hear the bongo drums and smell the coffee and patchouli, yeah?

It's incredibly amusing as background audio. And meaningless enough that I can work to it. But good lord this is music for headphones only. You play this out loud on anything and people will think you're some kind of maniac.

Anyway, we ate Thai food and talked about work.

The discussion veered into descriptions of her time dating men - what they were like, how they behaved - and I heard some interesting stories about people she'd dated earlier in the year and last year. Men in general, as she saw it, were sensitive to what she called "confusion and emotional derailment," but she acknowledged that it was a personal pattern and probably wouldn't hold up to further examples.

I enjoyed the dialogue and the subject changed to her experiences as a college student, seducing men rather easily by wearing a tight shirt that showed off her boobs and accepting libations or snacks from men, then making out with them on the dance floor, then escorting them back to her place for a sex act that was, as she described it, "aggressive bouncing on top of him just like the last dozen times you had sex because you don't know any other way to do it, until you get an orgasm and then send the guy home."

It was hilarious. I asked her to show me how she she did it. Wordlessly she took my hand and pulled me into the bedroom, then pointed at the bed. I laid down, and she climbed roughly on top of me, then peeled off her shirt and threw it on the floor. I had to admit, it was effective.

Afterward we packed a few things up and drove to the parking lot hear the Lawrence Hall Of Science and sat in chairs and ate ice cream. The Bay sparkled below us, and we were happy and thankful for our place in life and the time we had, in this weird pandemic era.

"It's funny," I said. "I know how to center myself and concentrate and feel at peace, but every now and then I remember just how much complicated work is going on in my body, hammered there by hundreds of millions of years of trial and error, just to keep me conscious and upright and fight off infections and pollution, all the time. Even when I'm feeling perfectly still, trillions of clocks are running in my body. More than I could ever count, doing more than I could ever know."

That's the real kicker, I think: Knowing how it works - being aware of it at all - is quite optional for us living creatures.

It's fun being an uncle. I'm enjoying the mildly subversive side of it. Drawing my nephews out of their shells, throwing him into slightly challenging situations... Or just hanging around with them listening to their weird observations...

Parenting is great like that. The enjoying and fortifying of the young minds part, that to me is glorious. The very dark Gen-Z humor resonates with me too.

Absolutely. So I guess it's natural to ask, "why should I even date?" when there's so much to do with these young people. But ... well, for some reason I still like romance ... and sex, thirty years after being a teenager.

How dare you! All our parts are supposed to be dried up or broken by now. And, you're supposed to be a bitter cynic who likes chocolate more than people.

Well I do like chocolate something fierce.

Dating chocolate sucks though. The conversation is one-sided; it's all "nom nom nom". Also, chocolate is calories, whereas sex burns them.

But there's no competition when you're trying to date chocolate! You'll never get rejected...

Hah!

And seriously, rejection is exhausting. If it happens enough you start to get paranoid. Hence: Chocolate.

That's another thing I'm not looking forward to, the rejection. Part of why I'm determined to make it less of a priority. Go a bit easier on myself.

I wrote this thing a while back called "The Man I Fear". It’s basically a picture in my head of the person I most resent competing against, in the dating world. Nailing it down on paper was weirdly educational, because I had to get specific.

Huh. So who's this guy?

The summary was this: He's taller than me, in great shape with broad shoulders and obvious abs, and has no gray hair. He has tailored clothes and a fancy watch. His shoes are super expensive. And he is supremely, endlessly self-confident and self-assured, and cheerful and smiling all the time.

Hah! I'd never date that guy. Like, ever. Also, that's so relatable. I could write to you about the woman I fear.

Oh do tell!

Well, I'm not sure if I fear her, so much as I've just come to accept she's out there. An army of her. I seem to stand out as different from her, which amuses some people in its novelty, but not enough to win out. She's the reason he abruptly stops writing to me, or looks distracted if we do meet. Or randomly, suddenly stops responding. He couldn't wait to see me before, but he's suddenly so very busy. Or he sends me some cold-worded text, to prove to himself he's a gentleman, and says I seem lovely but he's just got to focus on the woman who seems like "a better fit."

It's pretty sad that around here in this workaholic place, rejection usually sounds like a text message from an HR department. Like, work is all people know...

Yeah. So, she's unremarkable in any one way, but cumulatively she's too hard to ignore: Tall or petite, depending on preference, but definitely fit. Does a whole lot of yoga, which not only means a lot of staring at an ass he could bounce a quarter off of through the ubiquitous yoga pants, but also drooling over the possibility she can wedge her feet behind her head. If she's smart, she's not "too smart." She's entertaining, but never intimidating. She's somehow successful yet kind of a bimbo. She isn't distracted by silly things like her kids or her career, and she expects nothing of him, but is overjoyed when he spoils her. She's not challenging or complex, just light and easy. Like a human sundress.

Hah!

And you know? To hell with her. I kinda don't even care anymore. People dig me or they don't.

Preach it!

By the way, the man you fear... You say he doesn't have gray hair, but... Grey hair is hot.

Oh come on! How in the world can gray hair possibly be hot? I’ve heard that half a dozen times and I really honestly do not understand it! To me it just screams "old"!

Um, have you heard of Sean Connery? Sam Elliot? It just is.

Harrumph.

Buy hey, I also don't believe the very few men who say grey hair is hot on women. But if that plays in my favor, I'll take it.

Well, you have the complexion to match, so if you want to, you can dye your hair red pretty much until you're a hundred years old and no one will be concerned.

You aren't the first person I've heard say that.

That description though... It's funny how "the man I fear" and "the woman you fear" overlap: They're both shallow and selfish types, but they're so physically hot that it barely matters how they behave. They just vacuum up all the attention anyway. It's easy to imagine them out there, causing nice people who might be interested in us to just vanish.

What's a brain teaser for me is the opposite effect. When men say things like "I've never met a woman like you before. You're so this, and yet that, but not this other." And then they use that as a reason to vanish after the second date. Like, sure I'm amazing, but somehow also problematic? Hmmm.

I've been told all kinds of things. Everyone seems to get a different impression. Maybe because I evolve between them? I know there's something ... off about me. I can navigate male society but I'm not at home there. I hate everything macho. I'm full of songs and accents and dumb jokes, but I don't do sarcasm or teasing. I've learned that plenty of people say they want someone like me, but then they meet me and get disoriented and wander off after one or two dates, like there's something missing. I like to think it's the arrogance or macho-ness they're expecting, but when I'm feeling less secure I think it's because I'm gross or said something insulting that I didn't catch, and I'll never really know...

I get that. Some men think they want "a strong, independent woman" because their exes were needy or dependent or clingy or ineffectual. But when they realize you can exist without them, and just prefer to have them around... They don't get that "needed" feeling.

Yeah. Being "needed" is a kind of security. But here's an interesting thought: There are people on the other end of the spectrum who say they are "strong and independent", and it’s actually more like "unsupportive and mercurial." Maybe some guys feel like they're looking for the lesser of two evils.

I wonder what it says about our culture that they feel like they have to choose...

It's a conundrum. That which you focus on, you will have more of. And some things are only available to us for a limited time.

Well said! I was talking to my sister about this a few days ago. Kind of whining, to be honest.

What did you whine?

I said the pattern for this round of single life seems to be, I keep meeting people who are plenty impressive, but somehow I don’t feel a need to pursue them. I don’t care if she’s a lawyer; I don’t care if she’s physically a knockout; I don’t care if she’s climbed Mt. Everest without oxygen, worked with movie stars or CEOs or presidents, earned two PhDs, or won an Emmy. I met each of those people last year, and they all sort of glanced off. Just give me someone personally attractive in my own style, not in any major debt, monogamous, less than 45 minutes away... And then what really matters is how the conversation goes!

I so get that.

I keep telling myself: "This always takes time. You’ve always had to go through many people you don’t feel excited by, before you meet someone you do." And I’ve been trying to think outside the box with dating, because I don't want to repeat any negative history, but I also feel like I just want to give up, because my life right now is easy, great fun, and full of plans and adventure and nephews.

What did your sister say?

She suggested I take a break from dating. Especially online. She said I should join some social clubs and volunteer groups if I wanted to meet new people.

Ugh! Everyone says that. They clearly haven't dated in years. I could hang out in every hiking meetup, maker space, beach cleanup, book group... And never meet anyone.

Oh hey, I’ve done several of those!

Hah! Also, "don't find them, they'll find you" is harder when we're all siloed in professions, or working from home, or we never just walk around the town square like a hundred years ago.

Yeah. I mean, it could still happen. I'm pretty sure I had some near-misses out in public. Stuff that could have gone somewhere if I was quicker on my feet. But I'm such a ... wordy person? So meeting through words feels like a good approach. Words are so important...

They are! Speaking of, thanks for that look behind the scenes. I can definitely relate.

I'm a big fan of seeing behind the scenes! I've done too much hiding, to preserve a status quo at the expense of my needs. It's something I have to watch and work on. I'll probably struggle with it forever.

I also appreciate you being honest with me about the contemplation you did, over having children. I think I worried that would be hard for you later. My male friends in their forties are often asked if they'd still have kids... I know that's an option for you.

It is, I suppose.

It was one thing for me to help a man in his mid-thirties, who never previously wanted kids, see if he could handle it by interacting with mine. It's another to be potentially leading someone in their forties away from having their own. That first guy, he did love kids - mine in particular - but he also loathed having that many people in his life who all had needs, and feeling somewhat responsible towards all of us. In the end, he said he'd never date someone with children again.

Yeah, the kid journey... Wow, that’s such an odd thing. The more time I spend with my nephew the more I appreciate, on a day-to-day level, the sheer convenience of having someone to parent, or semi-parent, whose ass I have never needed to wipe off in the midst of a diaper change ... more than a dozen times or so. I mean, I changed his diaper sometimes, but it wasn't my job.

A friend of mine had kids and moved to England a few years ago. He's 48 now and divorced. She's taken the kids hours away from him and he sees them about four days a month. It's killing him. His gut response is to have more kids. Yikes; no!

Yikes! Yeah, kids is still on the table for me technically. And not hard to reach, if I'm indiscriminate with my sex life!

Younger women keep hitting him up. They want to procreate. I told him about my ex-husband with the twins, with them finishing high school when he's 65... Would he be game for that? If he had kids, they'd be learning to drive when he's retired. ... But who am I to say what's right for him? It's all I can do to care for the ones I have, in any sort of quality way they deserve. I can't add new ones.

My Dad had me when he was 42. I'm really grateful he waited until he had his head on straight and wanted to be a parent above all else.

Loving is all that really matters. Smart is handy. Ethical. Good teeth... Unbeknownst to me, my ex had braces and even jaw surgery before we met. Grr!

Hahaha! Well, loving is important, but here’s one thing that keeps me shying away from the idea: If I start a family with someone ten years younger than me, what’s her life going to be like when I’m pushing fifty, and she’s in her early forties?

Possibly, grand. I know several couples with spreads like those.

But here’s a dirty little secret: I may not have the energy to go chasing after two or three toddlers all day when I’m 53 or whatever. Or, well, I might have the energy, but would I be able to spend it that way, between them and work? So I'd probably be relying on their mom, with the greater share of energy. Doesn't seem fair.

I get the energy part. That's legit. But in my thirties I was also building a new career with two kids, both under 4, so...

That’s some serious energy!

One day while I was single and feeling really jaded by the dating scene, I sat down and asked myself an interesting question:

Who is the man I fear?

That is, who is the imaginary man I feel is out there, dating the same people I am, who I most resent competing with? The guy who I instinctively dislike, and am intimidated by, and who has way better success than me, at least in the short-term?

Coming up with a description of that guy was both educational and weirdly interesting.

Who is the guy I fear?

He is taller than me.
He is in great shape with broad shoulders and obvious abs.
He has no gray hair.
He has tailored clothes that hug his body, and wears a single earring and/or a fancy watch. He wears cologne and his hands are always clean and his shoes are always expensive.
He’s a great dancer and has been taking dance classes for years. He goes skiing and sailing often. He knows a lot about beer and wine. He hops on a jet to Paris when he wants; the expense does not concern him.
He is supremely, endlessly self-confident and self-assured, and cheerful and smiling all the time. Scratch the surface and he is also intensely arrogant, but to the people he pulls into his orbit, that's seen as justified.
He doesn’t do anything particularly aggressive, but just by looking the way he does and expressing mild interest, all the women I go on dates with instantly forget about me and decide they want to be with him instead, and flirt with him relentlessly on the first date. “I don’t know what it is,” they might confess to their friends later, “I’m just really attracted to him and I can’t explain it.”
He inevitably makes out with them on the first date, or takes them home in his fancy car, where they have sex on silk sheets in a house full of expensive furniture that kids would wreck in a few days, and though he isn't a very giving or attentive lover, the shape of his body and his imperious behavior make his dates overlook it.
When women I'm dating run into this guy, I never hear about it. From my point of view they simply ghost me.
A while later some of these women might pop back onto the dating sites, after being with this guy for anywhere between a month to a year, and feeling increasingly intimidated, exhausted, and paranoid for reasons they can’t explain. That doesn’t mean they’ll like me. They won’t. If they lose Mr. Amazing, chances are 50-50 they'll blame themselves for failing to keep up with him, and set about looking for another copy of him.

And this is what I imagine, in my more paranoid and self-loathing moments, when women mysteriously stop talking to me.

This is the guy I fear.

I sometimes think I see copies of him, chatting away with women downtown. The women giggle and touch his arm, picturing him naked, while their stomachs turn little somersaults.

I imagine covertly drugging his cocktail, so he suddenly craps his pants while they drive to his house, and the stink fills his tiny expensive car and makes her gag. She tries to laugh it off but he snaps at her because his leather seat has diarrhea on it now. He showers at his house but she doesn't want to join him. The spell is broken. She asks for a ride home, and he takes her with bad grace.

Then I realize I’m probably looking at a married couple or maybe two siblings and I have no idea who they are, and it’s all in my head, and I tell my brain to shut up and change the subject.

Still, he's lurking in his corner, in my mind; that guy I fear.

Is there a guy, or girl, you fear? A romantic competitor lurking in your mind?

Today I took my folding bike and my fine sweater, and rode Bart into "the city", and walked into a combination chocolate and coffee shop I'd never seen before, to meet up with Мелисса.

Since I arrived early, I used the bathroom to wash my face, then went strolling around the warehouse-like space gazing at the chocolates. A clerk wandered over from the other side of a glass counter, so I asked a few questions about the menu, and while I was getting my answers, Мелисса wandered up and said hello.

My first impression was of someone smaller and a bit thinner than her photos, but I wasn't concerned. She still had the same face. When the clerk finished his answer, she pointed out the wall behind me, full of chocolate samples. "Try some!" she said.

"Can do!" I said, grinning.

We walked over, and she grabbed a chocolate from the nearest plate, seemingly at random.

"Dive right in!" she said.

"I want to read the little info cards before I sample it," I said.

"No, see, you eat it first and then while you're chewing you read the card so you can taste the flavors they're talking about!"

"Ah, good idea!" I said, chomping a piece.

I gestured around us. "This is totally my kind of place," I said. "If this place didn't exist I would have to create it, because it's very ... me."

"You'd open a chocolate bar?"

"That's one of the great things about being an adult. You and your generation gets to decide what 'adult' means."

"Even if it's kid things!" she added in.

We put in an order and sat down along the bar.

Since the topic was at hand, I talked about my chocolate addiction. She said she was equally hooked, and that this was a cool place to meet up. I agreed. She told a story about getting a birthday cake from her Mom that read "Happy Birthday Sue" since that was what the demo cake said in the store display. "My Mom's a bit of a joker," she said.

I described an early photo of me eating chocolate cake in a high chair. That led into a story about my Dad's slide collection. She said her own Dad had a similar slide collection, which he organized meticulously, with location labels and numbering on the containers. I laughed and said I could relate, except my Dad's collection was in plastic cubes, since that was how his slide projector worked.

I talked about my epic task scanning slides and how slow the scanner was, then how I'd discovered my mother had even more slides she'd been keeping in a closet. That gradually shifted into a discussion about taking one's time, the slower pace of life in other parts of the world compared to the USA, and the Bay Are specifically. She brought up the example of a town she visited on the coast of France, on the Mediterranean Sea.

"Get up late, eat a meal all together, go down to the shore and chat as you play in the water," she said. "Then walk back and have a siesta, then another big meal. And that's the day."

I said it reminded me of my mother's Danish traditions and the way she ran the household. The importance of a sit-down meal and the conversations she scaffolded with others.

As we talked I found eye contact with her easy, and compelling. Her eyes were large and framed in half-moons - a facial feature that I associated with Nordic people - and when she laughed her eyes seemed to grow in size and sparkle, and her lower jaw pulled back slightly, making her upper teeth stick out and adding a goofy aspect to her smile that I found very endearing -- and that reminded me very strongly of Carolyn from 20 years ago. I knew I found this woman attractive, and her smile and upbeat, focused energy were feeding back into me, communicating at least an interest in the moment, that made me feel appreciated, and comfortable expressing some of my own goofiness. It wasn't a connection with depth, but it was something. At the same time, I had absolutely no idea what she thought of me, because I felt like she wasn't acting any different than she would talking to a friendly stranger or someone at work. "She's charming," I thought in the back of my head, "but she's also cute and she knows it." There was something else going on here, but I couldn't work it out in the middle of the date.

As we talked I occasionally had diverging trains of thought, and instead of slowing down and putting them in order I let them collide a bit, mixing ideas together and letting Мелисса pick up what compelled her. I was going for a kind of "befuddled professor" vibe, because some unfathomable part of me felt like this was the right tone to strike with Мелисса, or maybe it was just how I felt like being this particular night, regardless of the company. I knew her general cuteness was having an effect on me but I also still felt comfortable, and Мелисса appeared to be comfortable, so on we went.

She talked about social codes of conduct in France. You always said "hello" to a shopkeeper when you entered their store, and "goodbye" when you left. Anything less would be quite rude. We talked about cultural differences in the Bay Area, and how wide the income distribution was, and how that created strife.

"I was in a meeting recently," she said. "And when it was done, there was an avalanche of food left over from the catering. They were going to take it away and possibly dump it. So before I left I put together some sandwiches and snuck them out. On the walk home I started handing a sandwich to each hungry-looking person I saw, and I ran out after two blocks. All I felt afterward was regret, at not making more."

It was such a stark illustration of how disconnected some segments of the population were from each other. Why hadn't every single person there packed up a sandwich to give to someone else, when faced with such a mountain of leftovers? It didn't occur to them. On the other hand, did all that food really end up in the trash? Or did the catering company box it back up and donate it? Around here, it was hard to know. It would be a risk to assume.

I talked about how my aunt Kerna had done the same thing just a few weeks back, when we went to a Greek restaurant. We boxed up the food, and handed it to someone on the walk home. "I consider her the 'old guard' of the Bay Area," I said. "That sort of act is built into her worldview. But all the people who moved here to start tech jobs, did they pick that up?"

Мелисса shrugged. "I hope so. I know one thing: I'm sneaking out sandwiches from now on."

I asked, "Do you think there's any truth to the statistic that I heard that over 40% of the people that work in the Silicon Valley tech industry are from a foreign country?"

She said it was pretty shocking, but that she might believe it nevertheless.

The conversation drifted. I described the redwood trees and how I was a Bay Area native, and some of the places in California I'd lived. She talked about her travel history. When pressed, she identified the Washington DC area as formative for her. "It was where I went to elementary school," she said.

She mentioned the impeachment hearings and asked whether I was following them. I said I wasn't, because I was waiting for some kind of big announcement, or for the president to just have a meltdown, so I could know whether to feel relieved. It was too much to follow otherwise.

"You'd really like the live coverage, actually," she said. "The people they're interviewing are all top-notch career diplomats, and the responses they give are all really interesting, and the procedure in general is fascinating."

"Oh really? I'll give it a try. I know my Mom is following it all intently..."

The subject turned to Ukraine and Russia. I told her about the attitudes my Russian friends showed when talking about Putin and the politics there, and mentioned I was learning some Russian to speak with them better.

"Wow; Russian is one of the hardest languages to learn," she said. "Right up there with Chinese and Japanese..."

"No way," I said. "The alphabet takes some time, but after that it's easy. Mandarin and Cantonese... Tonal languages... Those are way harder."

She said she was still impressed. "Do you speak any other languages?" she asked.

"Well, not really. I don't really even speak Russian. I'm still learning. I had four years of High School Spanish and I can read at maybe an elementary-school level, but barely speak it. But! I can talk in a whole lot of silly accents."

She laughed.

"I'm tempted to start talking in one right now, but I'm going to hold back."

I mentioned an NPR podcast that asked the question "Is Europe at war with American tech companies?"

Мелисса immediately nodded, and emphatically said, "Yes."

I laughed and asked her what she meant. She brought up the way the EU was imposing regulations concerning privacy that arguably should be adopted all over the world, and how they were aimed directly at controlling what the big tech companies do. She mentioned the example of 23AndMe, and other genetic information warehousing and analysis services. "They could be doing anything with that data," she said. "It's a frontier. There are no regulations. Same with the way they report their information to consumers. There are no standards, and there are serious risks."

That led to an enthusiastic discussion about information privacy and the potential for both innovation and the harrowing abuse of personal freedom. A couple was talking loudly next to us and the woman had a piercing voice, and it was a bit hard to concentrate on Мелисса's words, but I leaned in and got them all. I wondered vaguely what she thought of me closing the personal space gap like this, even though it hadn't been my intention. That made me wonder about personal space in the back of my mind in general. How could I know how much of it was appropriate? Even after all this time and training and experience, how could I gauge what was an acceptable or invited amount of touching or an acceptable window of time? It remained as difficult as ever. I remembered having the same dilemma as an awkward 11-year-old sitting close to the girl I had a crush on in class.

The evening had worn on, and we both had work the next day. I nudged the conversation a little bit since I could tell she was getting slightly winded and might be looking for a polite out. She said she had a good time. I said that next time - if she wanted there to be a next time - she could pick the place. She said she was perfectly comfortable with me picking the next place.

"But I don't know San Francisco very well," I protested.

"You've had great luck picking places so far. This was an excellent choice. A refreshing change from getting a drink in a bar."

"Well I agree with you there," I said. "To tell you the truth bars are not really much of my thing."

I was worried this would disappoint her, like it seemed to disappoint other women from "the city". She was poker-faced.

I asked her about bicycling to gauge her interest. She appeared to be game, though not into anything competitive. That was fine by me. That led to a detour about how a bike isn't really needed in a place like San Francisco, and besides there are hills everywhere. "Good point," I said. "But over in the East Bay it's different."

I folded my leftover cookie up in some napkins and pocketed it, and we walked out to my bike. I asked if I should walk with her, or part ways here. She said we should walk. Along the way to the corner near the Bart station, where our paths would diverge, we encountered two rough-looking people and I gave one of them the cookie.

We talked a bit more about bicycling and food and travel. She said that she was in an interesting stage of her life, where there wasn't really a whole lot holding her to the Bay Area aside from her job, and her mind was very open to the possibility of living here or living somewhere else.

I brought up the analogy of Woodstock in the movie "Snoopy Come Home," where he builds a little boat out of sticks to cross a river.

"Wait, is this some kind of Tom Sawyer thing?" she said, grinning.

"No, no... Well, maybe?"

We parted with a handshake that turned into holding both hands together, with enough lingering to be clear that it wasn't supposed to be just a handshake. But neither of us felt like the vibe was right for a hug. For my part, I was trying to push against the assumption that a hug was mandatory or expected if it didn't feel comfortable, and not entirely for the sake of my date either: I don't want to press my body against someone I'm potentially dating until I feel certain that I can express physical interest. If I have to act stiff and pretend like there's none for the sake of formality, I'd rather not do it. What's the point?

She turned and walked away up the street, and I hefted my bicycle down into the Bart station.

The encounter gave me a pleasantly awake and warm feeling, and as the night aged and I prepared for bed, I found that the feeling of warmth had actually grown, and my anticipation of another meeting with her had grown with it. I had been thinking in terms of activities - what places we might walk through, what restaurants we could try, what games we might play - but with added time my visions were shading towards something deeper, and calmer. Perhaps we would both get books we were interested in, put together a picnic and some snacks, and walk together into a park, then sit nearby in pleasant silence and read, or read to each other.

It was nice to know that we both wanted a second date. But I remembered the thought I'd had earlier in the day, the one I couldn't quite grasp. Something about her knowing how cute she was, and me reacting to that self-assuredness. Something felt strange. I still couldn't sort it out.

Клэр had sent me a message when I was still in Iceland, and I held it in reserve, not knowing how to respond. She seemed smart, sociable, and outdoorsy, and her introductory message was about bike touring. She would probably make a good friend at the very least. But I just didn't have the time to invest in anyone, with the trip looming.

Several months later when I was back from my trip, I pressed the button that let her know I'd received the message, and gave a response. We had a short, enthusiastic conversation filled with puns and sci-fi references - very promising - and she suggested meeting almost immediately. She was a teacher, and also had a hike planned for the weekend, so the only window she could squeeze me in for was Friday. I didn't know how I stood with romance, but I genuinely wanted to make a new friend, and Клэр seemed ideal. So Friday evening - right after work - I threw on a Hawaiian shirt to look festive and flippant, and rode up to the Jupiter cafe where she wanted to meet.

I was chatty with the staff and a few other patrons as I locked up my bike. I felt like my social skills were slowly coming back to life after the long spans of introspection in the icy fjords. I couldn't spot anyone who looked like Клэр though, so I hunkered down near the front of the restaurant until I got a text.

While my head was down, Клэр walked up to me and introduced herself. She was taller than me, and I suspected she was stooping her shoulders a bit to reduce the effect. I wondered if she did it unconsciously. I tried to recall what her profile had said. Something over six feet. Six-foot-two? She had straight brown hair in a short pixie haircut that I instantly thought was cute as hell, a long chin, and intense, deep-set eyes with laugh lines at the corners. Her long, slender limbs and generous hips concentrated her mass in the center of her body, but she was not overweight. I guessed she was probably average for raw strength but had considerable endurance. I was looking at someone who could probably bicycle rings around me.

We grabbed drinks, then grabbed a table and began talking, and I instantly started having a good time. Just after sitting, Клэр raised her glass to me and said, "cheers to new acquaintances!" I returned the sentiment and we drank. Was she acknowledging that she felt we couldn't make a romantic connection? Or was she just putting us both at ease? I had no idea.

Клэр had an extensive knowledge of science fiction, anime, and all other forms of geek subculture, and was intimately familiar with the Bay Area, from Walnut Creek down to Santa Cruz. She was a local, and some quality of that showed through in her conversation. She was unabashedly goofy when she felt like it, and seemed entirely comfortable in her own skin. She laughed often and it was genuine. Something about her face strongly reminded me of my cousin Teri, and also my cousin Arno. It was around the eyes. I felt like I was catching up with a relative I hadn't seen in years but remembered fondly. "Oh look; it's Клэр -- wow I haven't seen you in ages! Tell me everything!"

Time barreled along. The conversation plunged from a random anecdote about growing up in my home town, to a nuanced inquiry about the nature of long-term memory and how language is reconstructed as technology changes, then over to a joke-filled co-constructed rant about memes and smartphones and generational divides. On the vast majority of first dates I have had to turn the crank of the conversation machine doggedly just to get a couple of interesting topics to fall out, but with Клэр the machine was hurling out so many that my hands were full and they were stacking up in piles on the floor. I'd forgotten what a difference it made -- the choice of conversation partners. It's not just a matter of me, and my mood, and my own level of effort.

Eventually I mentioned that East Bay Bike Party was happening soon. She said that she'd canceled her plans for a weekend camping trip and didn't have to get up early, so she would happily check out Bike Party with me. I knew my nephew would want to come along, and I asked her if she minded. She didn't. We arranged to meet my nephew at MacArthur Bart station and took off.

Along the way she pointed out a tiny metal license plate she'd wired to the rear of her bike. It said: КЛЭР. "It's even spelled the right way. I found it in the grass at a park, about a year ago. Do you have any idea how rare it is for me to find some random thing that has my name on it, spelled correctly? Super rare!"

I laughed. "That's awesome!" I said. "I like how it identifies you in a crowd. I want to shout, 'Follow Клэр, she knows the way!'"

She giggled at that, and we rode on.

It felt effortless, and zero-stakes. More precisely, it felt like dating had felt ten or even twenty years ago, when I always felt like I had plenty of time, and there was plenty to explore, and I didn't need heavy chemistry or to start immediately digging up answers to difficult questions. Клэр had a hundred things going on, and a hundred events to choose from, but she was perfectly secure in chucking them casually aside if the mood took her, and so our first date was spent exploring a chaotic, loud event that she'd never participated in before, with an element of danger, and she took the whole thing in stride and owned it, fitting in even more securely than I did.

Bike Party started with a big gathering of cyclists at a Bart station, drinking and dancing and playing loud music or just hanging around talking shop about bikes. Some of them had elaborate lighting kits, some of them wore costumes. People carried ridiculous things along with them in trailers - pets, boomboxes, coolers, lasers, floor lamps, reclining chairs, other people - just to add to the scene. A guy with a megaphone bellowed out a list of rules and blew a horn, and the whole crowd mobilized and flooded into the street. Клэр rolled right along with it. I was impressed with her adaptability.

She rode alongside me, sometimes ahead or behind, singing along to the music, whooping it up, making jokes, chatting with people around her, and even shouting cycling advice to other riders, warning them of cars and changes in the route. "It's my teacher instinct," she said to me. "I worry about the young people in the crowd." We improvised a call-and-response chant about Bike Party. We danced in the seat of our bicycles, as we drew near each thudding boombox. Клэр sang along with songs she recognized, and occasionally made up silly lyrics to songs that she didn't.

The crowd pulled in at the first rest stop, several miles from the starting point. Клэр and I parked on the bouncy tarmac of a playground, and since a boombox trailer was pulled up nearby, we began dancing to the music. Neither of us were great dancers, I'll admit. But between us, we gave zero shits. We laughed and hopped and wiggled and it was a party of two. Other people crowded onto the tarmac and a full-on rave began. My nephew rolled up and we chatted with him. Клэр asked him a variety of questions, pacing them out and genuinely listening to every response, and pretty soon she had a good conversation going with him too.

Her social position was plain as day to me. She was a nexus. She got to know everyone around her, with a natural ease, and could even start up a connection from scratch with introverts like my nephew and make it look like a coincidence. Even if I didn't end up getting romantic with her, I should keep her close. I liked her style; I liked what she prioritized in life. Even if she didn't know it - and she probably did - she had just won over a new advocate as well as a friend.

The lead bike took off again and everyone hopped aboard and followed. We sang and joked and drifted around together in the crowd. Then the ride got sketchy when a drag-racing car had some kind of confrontation with a cyclist ahead of us, filling the air with smoke. The lead bicycle stopped and the entire party crammed into the street around it, completely blocking the area. People took out phones and began to video everything around them, making sure that whatever happened was on record. Клэр and I stood around confused for a while, then decided to call it a night since it was getting late anyway. I gathered my nephew and we set out together for the nearest Bart. We cruised through a really rough part of town, witnessed a weird slow-motion collision between two people on the Bart escalator, and boarded the train and talked about work, music, and anime shows we liked, sitting close together so we could talk above the noise of the tracks.

My nephew exited Bart early, and Клэр and I rode up a few more stops, so I could linger with her. We got our bikes clear of the station, chatting about the experience of Bike Party and other cycling topics, and suddenly it was the end of our date.

"When do you wanna meet again?" she said.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I have to look after my friend's kids for a few days. We'll definitely figure something out." I honestly hadn't even thought about my future schedule, and was having trouble visualizing it after the sensory overload of the evening.

Клэр paused, and I could sense that she felt a little bit crestfallen, as though she'd been hoping for a more enthusiastic answer. I wondered if I'd read her wrong, and she hadn't intended to friend-zone me immediately with her toast at the beginning of our date, and she was genuinely hoping for a romantic connection.

"There's a San Francisco bike ride tomorrow, across the Golden Gate Bridge, if you want to come along."

"I don't know," I said. "Saturday and Sunday are my one chance to recover from the crazy work week I've been having. Well, okay, my two chances. I have two chances. Amongst my chances are such diverse elements as, Saturday, and Sunday." Клэр laughed but didn't get the reference, so she asked.

"It's a Monty Python joke," I said.

"Ooooh," she said, smiling. "Okay. Well let's hang out again soon. We'll be in touch, yeah?"

"Most definitely!" I said, and rushed forward and grabbed her in an enthusiastic hug, which she happily returned. I felt like blurting out, "Oh Клэр you're the best; I'm sorry we haven't hung out in so long!" But I held my tongue.

Back at the house, I texted her and we had a nice exchange to cap the evening.

"Thanks for a great time!" I said.

"Thanks for a very fun, enjoyable evening. Good night!"

"Very weird, I feel like I've already known you for some time and we just did some catching up. Is that how people usually feel upon meeting you?"

"The feeling is mutual! I'm inclined to say that doesn't happen often. There are only some certain people I can totally relax with and don't feel like I have to put on airs or feign interest. I think it's totally awesome to feel that I have the space to express my silly side. Very much appreciated."

"W00t! I think it was cool how you did this sudden dive deep into linguistic theory right in the middle of a random conversation about memories of my home town."

"That's just how my mind works, I guess!"

Online dating as an adult - as a real, middle-aged adult - is the mental equivalent of prospecting for gold. It compels you to throw all your time into the search, looking for that lucky strike, and it can easily become an obsession ... and drive you mad.

To keep it from poisoning the rest of my life, I have to give it only a small amount of my time. That creates a time pressure which interferes with having a real emotional response to the people I meet online. Sometimes I make a really promising find, and have a great text conversation with someone new, and feel invigorated and eager to keep going. But that initial connection always seems to fade quickly from one day to the next.

Sometimes I think it's just because the connection is always more tenuous than it feels, because it's with a person who is not integrated with my daily life at all. They can't help but be crowded out by all the things I already do, that don't involve them.

And sometimes I feel as though it's the act of browsing around and looking at other people that kills it; like there is something in our heads that wants to keep us in that more thrilling role of the seeker and pursuer, rather than the harder and more dangerous role of narrowing our focus and investing ... and that thing is encouraged just by the act of logging onto the website and seeing that little grid of new headshots. Like passing by a bookstore on the commute to work, and seeing another row of catchy titles lined up behind the glass every day.

Even more likely than both of those explanations, I suppose, is that when the connection fades it's because I am just not in the mood to actually follow up with people. I know that if I pursued - like, actively pursued - the people I met, I might have the chance to turn a lukewarm first date into something that really comes to life. I find myself thinking that all I need to do is break free of the regimented structure of dating activities, because sitting face-to-face in a restaurant trying to talk in-depth with someone who was a total stranger just days or even hours earlier inspires a lot of tension, and that's a big impediment to a real connection.

That's probably why all of the people I've developed real relationships with from dating sites - people I've seen not just for a couple of dates, but on a regular basis for a good while - were people that engaged in lots of text correspondence before we ever met in person. Sometimes text correspondence followed also by phone conversation, with face-to-face happening much later. It wasn't that we were afraid of meeting in person, it was that we valued those other kinds of communication just as highly, and since they were more convenient, we started there. Even people that I just ended up seeing for the mutually agreeable clockwork purpose of a nice dinner out followed by sex a couple of times a week -- even those people started out with an energetic written exchange.

This is definitely not the way most people operate. So, it must mean there's something weird about me.

I think of all the people who write a dating profile with only a few sentences in it, where they insist that they want to meet in person as quickly as possible to see if there are any "sparks", since otherwise it's just a waste of time. Part of me wants to dismiss them as being too focused on appearance, or obviously trolling for sexual entertainment and nothing more, but then my history softens my impression: Perhaps they're just not very verbal people. People like that need to find love too, and they're not going to find it by competing with life-long wordsmiths like myself, crafting dialogue they don't need or value -- and that's not a comment about intelligence either, since I've lived long enough to meet lots of frighteningly smart people who were just not good with written words. There is nothing wrong with their approach. What if I tried it?

During this recent round of online dating I tested that proposition. In addition to the usual correspondence-led encounters, I arranged a half-dozen dates on very short notice with a bare minimum of online chat leading up to them. One of them happened only about five hours from receiving the "like" message.

They all went like this: I walk up and introduce myself. We both smile. Sometimes I am offered a hug. (The hug always feels a bit forced, and I've started to just turn it down in favor of a handshake.) I observe that the person is physically attractive enough that I would enjoy making out with her, if only we can manage to connect. We sit down and smile and talk and look each other in the eye, and tell stories. I find myself keeping up more of the conversation than I'd like, and begin to feel a bit nervous that the date is going badly. After a little over an hour, she gives some signal that the date should end. Sometimes this is very blunt, like saying "Well it's time for me to go," without any preamble. Sometimes she just stops participating in the conversation and waits for me to get a clue. Either way, I make as gentlemanly an exit as I can, and that's it. She's gone and it's time to forget about her.

To be blunt, all these dates were excruciating strikeouts. Two of them actually went poorly but still led to a second date, and the second date also went poorly.

But eight dates going nowhere is totally normal. That's just modern dating. The interesting part, from my point of view, was how they consistently followed that template -- and that the template was debilitating. For eight encounters in a row, I tried to look nice, I worked hard to keep the conversation interesting, and afterwards I felt like all I did was mildly traumatize a stranger with my gross presence and waste an evening. I went home feeling like some kind of unlovable circus freak.

After that, I spent a couple of weekends eating ice cream straight out of the container and binge-watching horror movies, and wondering why I was even trying to date at all. In my head, Bette Midler was doing her comedy routine, lamenting: "Ugh, why bother?"

When I have a lively online chat beforehand, this outcome almost never happens. Instead of feeling panicky and uncertain, I feel relaxed and playful. If the date does not lead to a second - which is still par for the course in this online arena - I at least feel okay with myself, and like I have been treated humanely. The rejection from good communicators is more gentle when it's up front, or more stage-managed when it's not: Something like "Let's do this again some time," with a genuine hug, but no solid plan, and then mutual silence. I feel like I've had some quality time given to me rather than taken away.

For that reason alone, it's better for my mental health to filter people the way I do. Just to keep my spirits up as I battle through the dating gauntlet, it would be nice to stick with people who are good communicators.

So was that experiment even worth it? I don't know. If dating for other people is a parade of strikeouts like that, I have a lot of sympathy for them. I do value physical compatibility, and for a while I thought that perhaps I was the one wasting my time with dialogue, when it would be easier to weed people out by just going to a place and... But, no... Arranging a date, dressing up, getting there, negotiating the details like food and entertainment, only to be mysteriously rejected and go home alone... What a pain in the ass. Why not just filter people out in twenty minutes of online chatter from a comfy chair?

Well, because that too is work, of a kind. It can be mentally exhausting. And the connections I spin up with each person quickly dissolve in the intestines of a night's sleep, and often need to be rebuilt before we meet face to face, and that takes energy too. Sometimes that energy is needed elsewhere, in friends and family and work.

No wonder I'm taking it slowly. My own life is full of nourishing things, and the cargo cult of online dating is not one of them. And why participate at all, if I can't bring my A-game? Actually, that is the one core idea in this whole adventure that is the most important:

If you do not feel like bringing your A-game, just do not go on the date at all, because you are wasting everyone's time.

My time is limited, but so what? That's not a reason to rush this; it's a reason to savor my limited time. Use the platform to find that great conversation, and verify some useful facts. (Single, likes cats, et cetera.) And then ... apply the brakes a bit. Just have a good time with a nice person. If I find myself drawing them in, volunteering them more of my time, then I should go with it. The little grid of new headshots can wait.

I don't need to collect every cutting in the forest. But I do need to tend to my garden, or the ones I collect won't have a place to grow.

In that weird train-of-thought ramble in my previous entry, I said that there was a tension in modern culture between protecting women, and women having agency. I also made a bold claim: From one situation to the next, the socially acceptable - the "correct" - side to take seems to be weirdly arbitrary. I thought maybe I could illustrate that claim by telling a story from my past.

About 20 years ago I was working in a small software company, as a programmer. This was back in the days when software was burned onto CD-ROMs or disks and placed in a package, usually with a printed manual. (App stores and large digital downloads were not part of the landscape yet because the internet was still too slow.) We had an employee at the company whose job was to assemble and ship those packages. It was not a very difficult job, so getting it in a college town was more a matter of luck than anything else.

The woman who had that job was about 20 years old, three or four years younger than me. I could tell she found me attractive by the way she lingered by my desk asking non-work-related questions and generally being just a little too friendly and physically close than I was used to. Like most engineers I was bad at reading signals so she had to be very clear before I got a clue and realized that I could ask her out on a date -- which I did.

The date went well. She had blond hair in a pixie haircut, and wore a rough wool sweater in a pale shade of purple that made her intense gray eyes look like jewels. We walked around Santa Cruz, finally settling down in a park, and talked about previous relationships and personal growth. Her movements were calm and measured but I kept seeing little signals that inside she was seething. Something else was going on in her life. Eventually it came out in the conversation: She was just out of a very unpleasant relationship. Right now, her primary goal was to have fun, without getting too intense about it. I said I was fine with that, and by the end of the date we were at second base. We agreed to go on another date soon. That was Sunday, and Monday morning I was back at work.

The office was laid out in a crescent shape with the front door at one end and the stock room at the other. My new friend had a desk with a computer just outside the stockroom, relatively isolated from the other employees, but next to the printers and a big stack of file servers. Part of my job was to maintain those.

Around noon I needed to insert a CD in one of the servers. I walked back to them, and the woman and I began chatting like we always had in the past. But this time, after a couple minutes, we both looked up the hall to make sure no one was coming, and then pulled each other into an embrace.

For the first time, I was dropped into that awkward labyrinth of having a coworker for a romantic partner. (It was also the last time.) We snuggled up briefly and then broke the embrace before we could go any further since we were both too nervous about being discovered. In whispers, we both agreed it was not the best idea to get physically close during work hours. I walked back to my desk and attempted to put her out of my mind.

We respected our agreement for exactly 24 hours, at which point I contrived an excuse to go back to the servers and be near her, and she stood up, looked around, then opened the door to the stockroom and pulled me inside.

I was a software developer with a strong set of skills, working for a relatively low wage, so I wasn't nervous about being discovered. I figured that as long as I got my work done and didn’t interfere too much with hers everything was fine. But I didn’t think about the tenuous nature of her stockroom job. If the boss discovered her wasting time canoodling in the back room she could easily be fired and replaced with someone who didn’t draw the romantic attention of the developers. Even if I had been the one to make the first move, I would not have been the one punished. If I'd stopped to think about it I would have realized it was deeply unfair, and I was being terribly unprofessional. But, we were young and horny people and neither of us had a particular respect for our careers, such as they were.

Over the next three or four weeks we met for some quick hanky-panky in the stockroom on a regular basis. I don't know how many of my coworkers realized it, but eventually I just assumed they all did. The most awkward point was when her boss told her in private one day, “By the way, I don’t care exactly what you get up to back there as long as you get all the orders out,” which was fair-minded but also very embarrassing. So we both agreed to put an end to our hijinks.

Two weeks after that she told me in private that she was going to leave the job.

On the one hand I should have realized that her position would be at risk from any romantic involvement, and rejected her advances and never asked her on a date, for her own sake. On the other hand she seemed to know exactly what she wanted, and if she wanted to risk her job for it, why should I argue? We were both adults; our gender shouldn’t matter. Neither of us was a manager and our duties didn't intersect, and there was no regulation at the office that prohibited dating other employees. But her reputation - her ability to get along with her coworkers in general - was damaged.

The fact that we willingly stopped our canoodling in due time should have demonstrated that she was taking the job seriously, and her coworkers should have left her private life alone. But the three other employees that she directly worked with - three women, all slightly older than her - felt obligated to respond, each in a different way. She told me later that one of them made crude remarks to her and was clearly outraged. Another one got uncomfortably maternal and started asking all kinds of personal questions about our relationship, perhaps to see if I was exploiting her. And the third stopped talking to her, except through terse emails, as if to distance herself from a disaster. Her workdays became stressful and rather than swim against this tide she was moving on.

Did she need protection, or did she need to learn a lesson, or was she an adult taking a calculated risk? We drifted apart rapidly after she left the job, and broke up a few weeks later. It took me another 10 years at least before I started believing that I should have turned down the relationship for her sake, and then gently explained why. And not for any ironclad rule like “never date where you work,” either: It was specifically because we were both too young to navigate it well and that was going to cost her the job. Ideally, I would have known that, and simply dated someone else. But I didn't know that. Did that make me guilty of failing to protect her?

Even 20 years later, I am still sad that it cost her anything. I was good at my job, and so was she. By that metric, every consequence of our brief romantic involvement was bullshit. But I also know, practically speaking, you can't separate the sex from the employee, so you better separate the sex from the workplace. It was guaranteed to bother other people no matter how well it went for us personally.

The no-duh lesson here is "don't date where you work." And if you want to play it safe, check all the other political correctness boxes too: Don't ask your food server out, don't ask your doctor or dentist out, don't ask your attorney or professor or coach out, don't try and date the person who walks your dog, delivers your mail, paints your house... You get the idea. In fact, you should probably stick to dating people who live in another time zone.

So now that you know the story, try swapping all the genders. Would the stock worker I dated still have been forced to leave? Whose "reputation" would have been damaged, mine or his?

Part of me wants to argue that, no matter what the dynamic or the age difference, when a man and a woman get involved at work the woman is always risking much more than the man - even if she's the CEO and he's the janitor - and so we should be finding fault with the man involved for putting her at risk. Another part of me wants to back up a step, and fight against the gender biases that make it more risky for the woman in the first place. But that fight involves declaring a level of agency: CEO or not, her sex life is none of your damn business, so unless you think you're being passed over for promotion because the other guy (or girl) is good in bed, and can make the case in court, then shut up and get back to work. In other words, we shouldn't be concerned with protecting her, we should be concerned with disabusing you of your biases. (And that applies whether the "you" in this hypothetical is a man or a woman, because there's plenty of bias to go around.)

Then, I can back up yet another step. I can say, agency or not, women on average are more susceptible to social pressure than men, so we need to be unbiased and we need to protect them at the same time. That means the correct moves are: Teach men not to be so pushy, and teach women to be more assertive and independent. Except, codifying this into a consistent standard of action is messy, because as I said before, one of the things we can all take as gospel is that there is more variation within the sexes than between them. Some women have no trouble being pushy; some men struggle terribly with being assertive.

So ultimately, stepping all the way back, I arrive again at respecting personal choice. My co-worker and I chose a risky relationship, we learned a few lessons; next time we'll choose differently. We revealed the bias around us: She was scrutinized much more intensely than I was, based on her gender. Her choices were less respected, so she was subject to more pressure. That was wrong. That needs to change.

This strikes me as the sanest path to walk in a world of high dynamic range, even though it also feels like an endless one. I want to move towards a world where, for example, there are as many female fire fighters as male, and a daycare run by men will get just as many customers as a daycare run by women. Do I think we'll actually get there? To be honest, I don't, unless technology eventually completely overhauls sexual reproduction. Until then, we fight the good fight, so everyone who wants to work, can work.

I have heard it said that a woman's brain is roasted in parental hormones for a while after birth, cementing a deep instinctive bond with her offspring. That sounds plausible to me. It also sounds like it would have a profound effect on the behavior of anyone who becomes a mother, to the point where the course they chart in life would be clearly altered, and one could even see large-scale trends emerge to back this.

Yet after all these years I have not seen a simple piece of reference material that would answer a crucial question for me: How many women in the world, who are only partially in the workforce or not in the workforce at all, if you sat down and asked them honestly and confidentially, would tell you that finding a way to spend most of their time running their household and raising their family was a priority for them, chosen freely, even over other options? That is, how many of them actually sought their situation, and are willing to say so, confidently?

There seems to be a strain of feminism in this modern world that is built around a core assumption that has not actually been verified: The assumption that all women - as a collective representing approximately half of all living humans for all time - have been consistently coerced with psychological and physical violence to stay out of the workforce and become unwillingly subservient to their children and the men around them.

This assumption seems ridiculous to me. Let's back away from it. A more reasonable follow-on assumption is that most women, like a flock of sheep, tend to steer towards the middle of the flock, where conventional womanhood resides, but there are outliers - women who prefer to run at the edge of the herd or even leave it behind entirely - who are policed back into the flock on threat of violence and/or disenfranchisement whenever they try to stray towards things that aren't properly sheep-like (read: womanly). This frames feminism as supportive of choice, and supportive of accepting that there is variety in skills and temperament and preference that is wider than the collective difference between the male and female flocks can describe.

I can dig that definition. It makes more sense to me. But it doesn't say anything about why the flocks are shaped the way they are. It makes it acceptable to stray outside them - even celebrates the outliers - but does not explain their overall shape.

With that question still on the table, let me back up another step to view an even bigger picture. Now the view is of the entire landscape, with two flocks of people loosely gathered around these landmarks of masculine and feminine interest, and power, and experience. Perhaps from this altitude we can see subgroups and eddies and realize that even a basic gender binary is an oversimplification, and more diverse concepts are required. Much has been written and much has been illuminated about this landscape, but the detail that I want to focus on right now is specific:

A political writer waving the banner of feminism can publish a book arguing that men are collectively oppressing women through their aggressive overconfidence and assertiveness in conversations, e.g. "mansplaining", and therefore men need to un-learn this tactic because they are using it unfairly against women.

And another political writer can publish a book arguing that the constant portrayal of women as victims of male action, who need protection and defending from this treatment, possibly from other more sympathetic men, actually robs women of their agency and their ability to be respected and to wield power effectively.

Which side should I root for? The side that wants to call out men as "mansplainers", or the side that wants to portray women as capable of fielding just as much shit as men - including their blinkered bravado - and therefore just as qualified to run meetings and drop bombs? If I root for both sides, I am rooting for two arguments that cancel each other out, and I am effectively rooting for nothing.

Let me state this dilemma in more general terms:

Is there an inverse relationship between the level of protection we all insist that women need, and the amount of power and independence we expect them to competently wield? If so, do women need to be protected more, or do they need to be respected more?

I've concluded, regretfully, that the choice is a matter of fashion. It ebbs and flows, and is disturbingly arbitrary, based on the context or the target. Often it seems more a matter of signaling virtue to other observers for the sake of social or sexual competition, than a matter of grand philosophy or real empowerment. To give a blunt example: How many male college freshmen loudly declare themselves feminists because they know that's what women want to hear, then spend years psychologically manipulating women to gain and keep sexual access to them? Years later, how many of them become parents, and are deeply suspicious of all the men that express interest in their college-age daughters, no matter how politically correct they appear in conversation? On a case-by-case basis, one person will argue that you need more protection, and another will argue that you need more agency. I find it hilarious that those arguments often break down along lines of which man wants to merge his genes with yours, and which man's genes you already carry.

Maybe this effort is supposed to be zero-sum, and the result may actually be to prevent the conflict from ever ending, i.e. to prevent one sex from winning, because then we'd live in a sick dystopia and both sexes would lose. But I keep thinking about those vague flocks of sheep, and how they don't quite merge into one.

Here are some things I think we can all take as gospel:

The sexes are more alike than different.
There is more variation within the sexes than between them.
Men's interest in passing on their genes makes life more complicated and dangerous for us all. (But all the men who showed less interest have consistently been bred out of the population; duh.)
Anyone who says women are full of "sugar and spice and everything nice" is lying to get in your pants.
Anyone who loudly declares the previous statement may also be trying to get in your pants.

There is a minimum distance between the two major flocks of sheep - the general trends expressed by all our life choices, split across sex lines - enforced by hormones and hardware. Some political fashions move to push that distance wider. Some press against that distance, insisting that the natural state of society is for women and men to be collectively identical. I think the wisest move is to embrace the fashions that preserve and respect individual choice. If a woman wants nothing more than to be barefoot in her own sunny kitchen, that's great. If a man wants nothing more than to do the same, that's great too. Same with running a company, being a cop, serving in public office, and so on. That seems clear enough, but the real problem is in managing our own internal expectations so we treat all these outcomes fairly.

And if that's not a matter of grand philosophy, but instead a matter of virtue signaling, competition, and context, then no wonder it's so complicated and hard to do right, right? Accepting that others are free to choose is relatively easy. Accounting for our own subconscious bias, moving against the tide of fashion, victimhood, or self-interest -- that's hard.

When I was younger, I had this idea that parents and kids didn't get along because there were things wrong with the world that the parents were too lazy to deal with, but kids could solve easily if given the chance.

REVOLUTION NOW!!!! Et cetera!

But at the same time, as a kid, I realized there was a huge nasty roadblock to solving those problems: Other young people.

... Because collectively, young people are influenced by what they really understand -- and they haven't been around long enough to understand much.

That's why young people pay so much attention to good physical looks, popularity, and visible material wealth. It's what they collectively understand, so it's what they fight for in their peer groups, and that gives it value and makes it desirable.

When you get older, you realize that good physical looks are only a superficial indicator of attractiveness, and attractiveness is really driven by personality, wit, and poise. You realize that popularity is a superficial indicator of other things that carry real value - like integrity, talent, accomplishments, and power. And you realize that visible material wealth is just a superficial indicator of contentment, and true contentment comes from more subtle things, like friends and family, exploration, self-care, creativity, and romance.

When you are young, these are all things that you think you understand. What you actually do is imagine them as means to the ends that you do understand - talent as a means to popularity, self-care as a means to good physical looks, romance as a means to sex. In this way you devalue what you don't understand ... until eventually you get experienced enough to realize how backwards you've been behaving the entire time. (And by extension, how backwards many people around you are behaving, and how badly a youth-oriented culture misleads everyone.)

Of course, if you're fighting to stay alive and fed most of the time, this sort of enlightenment is no comfort at all...

This is coming to mind for me because I've been looking back at my own history, and finding value-transitions like this. Many times, I've gone from pursuing a goal that I thought would bring me happiness, to achieving that goal and feeling some measure of happiness, to eventually seeing that happiness fade even though the goal was still met, because it was actually dependent on some underlying quality of what I achieved - not the goal itself.

The best examples are with relationships. When I was a teenager I would explode with a combination of happiness and fear if a girl I had a crush on just spoke a few words to me. (For example, in 5th grade, a blond girl named Jennifer sitting down next to me and asking if she could borrow a pen.) It was all I could handle, up until the 10th grade, when I faced the fact that I wasn't really connecting with any of the girls I was attracted to. A few words or a nod in the hallway no longer meant anything to me.

I found that sense of happiness again by having longer conversations, where actual communication took place. In my Junior year I started doing my math homework in the school library before classes started. One day a girl named Tara showed up in the same room, doing her math homework, and we sat at the same table. She was pretty, with long straight hair, a round pale face, and a toothy, enthusiastic grin, but she never wore a revealing or form-fitting outfit, which made me feel safer somehow, and after we worked in relative silence for a few days I took the risk of asking a few non-math-related questions. She was friendly and intelligent, and though she made a point of mentioning that she was dating someone (without naming any names), she didn't shut down the conversation either, and I appreciated that. 25 years later I still remember that feeling of happiness, from learning real things - having a real dialogue - with someone I was attracted to, for the first time ever. (It's hilarious that I remember the feeling, but nothing of what she actually said. Hah!)

But that happiness faded too, when I realized I wasn't making a personal connection. I was always imagining that connectedness in my head, and the feeling I got was based on whatever small way the situation resembled what I imagined. I loaned a girl a pen, or saw her laugh about a story she was telling me, and I filled in the rest of the details myself. Sharing stories and playing 20-questions with a person isn't enough to really connect with them, and once I knew that, I wasn't happy with just any old conversation. I wanted intimate conversation. That took another few years to develop.

So was I wrong the entire time about what I wanted? Or was I just wrong about whether I had it? Or both?

For years my vision was something like: Me and the girl I love, staring into each other's eyes, quietly understanding everything we felt without needing to say a word. Also there would be candles or a fireplace, or we would be sweaty from some fancy outdoor activity like rock-climbing because we were both total badasses. It took me until my mid-20's to realize that that vision was not the pinnacle of anything, it was a relatively unimportant corner-piece of a much more complicated and interesting puzzle.

This all reminds me of a Savage Chickens cartoon that goes:

HOW TO ACQUIRE WISDOM:
* Live, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes.
* Repeat until wisdom is acquired.
* Realize that the wisdom you acquired is not really wisdom at all. (This realization brings new wisdom.)
* Repeat for the rest of your life.

I don't think there's a way to short-circuit this. It seems that with every goal, we inevitably find a mismatch between the vision we had, the happiness it promised, and the details of what we've achieved, like snapping a puzzle piece triumphantly into place and slowly realizing that there are just as many irregular edges as before. Of course, this immediately leads us to conclude that it's the process of discovery - the a-ha moment itself - that brings the happiness. But that's too simple of an answer. Sometimes we achieve a goal and it makes us miserable. Sometimes the picture revealed by the new puzzle piece is revolting. We need guidance in our goals, in constructing our visions, or things can go quite wrong.

If I was raised in a less respectful or thoughtful family environment, I might have taken the hormonal surges of sexual desire I felt as a teenager more literally, and embarked on a crusade to get into bed with a girl as soon as possible, by whatever means I had. Tell her lies. Flirt with her in that over-eager, sticky way that young boys can. Push her into doing something uncomfortable. There were times when my desire was so intense I tried to convince myself to behave that way, because I watched other boys that I didn't like, and they had girlfriends. Was being pushy the right tactic? How could it be when I hated being pushed? (It was my stubborn patience that saved me. Eventually I left high school and entered college, and there, most of the men who were threatened by quiet geeky types - and the women who spurred them on - had been weeded out.)

But my point is, when I was younger, my goals and my values were thoroughly constrained, and there was no way around it. "You'll appreciate it when you're older," didn't work; not on an emotional level. A lack of wisdom also worked against me directly, by harassing me with questions I just didn't know how to answer, like "Why do girls wear form-fitting clothing, and then get angry when I stare at them?" (Some men live right through their entire lives without figuring that one out.) As soon as I thought I understood what I wanted and how to get it, the game changed and my ambitions changed right along.

It's kind of ridiculous, but I'm not interested in raging against it, because it's also quite natural. I think it's the fate of all mortal, intelligent creatures to be turning in a kind of wheel of suffering based on learning one thing, and then learning how that thing is wrong, et cetera. What's interesting to me is, we have found a way to hasten and guide this cycle, by passing on what we value, through all kinds of cultural channels, some of then quite powerful, and many of them only recently made available with new technology. From holy books to internet memes, we can guide each other to figure out what really matters just a bit more quickly. Sounds great! I imagine some distant future, where all parents have enough time away from work that they can just spend 15 years caring exclusively for their kids, teaching them, letting them loose and then being there to answer questions, all while taking care of themselves and consulting with other parents as well so everyone's on the same page. A liberal society where you learn by doing, and curiosity - even of dark things - is answered with patience.

On the other hand, history has proven that we're collectively really bad at choosing the right things to pass along, in the right combinations, to bring enlightenment to the next generation. The aforementioned holy books being the biggest, baddest example. We have a tendency to simplify things down into absolutes, and ignore very important context. One good example of this is pornography. I don't think there's a "holy book" anywhere in all of history that has good things to say about pornography, even though the Venus of Willendorf is quite pleasant to look at and predates them all by thousands of years. According to modern Mormons, it "encourages destructive and selfish preoccupation". I think that's a bunch of malarkey. You know what encourages destructive and selfish preoccupation? The concept of original sin. (At least the Mormons got one right by rejecting that.)

And that brings this rickety wagon train of thought around to the recent election. I've seen a resurgence of racism, jingoism, and fear in politics. So many people my age, or way younger, with goals and ideas that seem dangerous to me. What's the best way to change their goals? What's the best way to put their twisted fears to rest?

Path: news.ucsc.edu!agate!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!204.246.1.19!news.tds.net!news
From: "Girdle Popper" <G_Popper@Hotmail.Com>
Newsgroups: alt.tasteless.jokes
Subject: Rules On How To Be A Man!
Date: 27 Jun 1998 20:24:33 GMT
Message-ID: <01bda207$4ddde360$8cd331cf@mypc.tds.net>

1. Name your penis. Be sure it is something narcissistic and unoriginal, like "Spike."
2. You are a man. Remember, no matter what, it isn't your fault.
3. Never ask for help. Even if you really need it, don't ask. People will think you have no penis.
4. Women like it when you ignore them. It arouses them.
5. Don't call, ever. If, God forbid, you have to talk to a girl on the phone, use only monosyllabic words and noises. Bodily noises are permissible.
6. Deny everything. Everything.
7. Life is one big competition. If someone is better than you at anything, either pretend it's not true or beat them up.
8. At any given oppertunity, point out how things look like genitalia.
9. Say things like "Wha...?"
10. You are NOT a virgin, ever. Males are born without virginity.
11. If your woman makes you go shopping with her, drive around until a parking spot right near the door opens up. If this takes hours, so be it: You will have the coveted "Door Spot" and others will worship you.
12. If you're ever forced to show emotion, just pick a random one, like rage, lust, or insanity, and display it at a random, inconvenient time. You won't be asked to do it again.
13. If you are asked to do something you don't want to do, first try your manly best to get out of it. If that doesn't work, go ahead and do what you were asked, but complain that you don't know how to do it and continuously ask questions on how to do each tiny part. If no one rushes in to do it for you yet, finish the job in the most half-assed way you possibly can and then yell "See? I TOLD you I couldn't do it." Eventually people will stop asking you to do things.

I rode home from work and took a shower, then settled on the futon to watch a movie. About a minute in, the computer beeped with a spontaneous message from Алексис. Her plans had fallen through and she wanted to hang out with me. I agreed to meet her at 9:00pm at the Cafe Au Coquelet.

When I walked in, Алексис had already found a table. She was quite small - barely five feet - with close-cropped red hair and a slender frame. When she looked up from the menu I saw a sharp chin and a sharp nose, and deep-set eyes with a mottled brown coloring that seemed to glow. She looked older than all her photos. Had she forgotten to update them? It reminded me that I should update my own.

She was wearing a loose sleeveless shirt with a ruffled v-neck, in a pastel color that would have complemented her skin if she hadn't acquired such a deep tan. In fact that was the source of my confusion about her photos: She was pale in all of them, but in person her skin looked mottled, like it had taken quite a while to darken and along the way had slowly burned as well. After a while of talking I got an explanation of sorts: She'd just returned from a two month worldwide trip, including a yoga retreat, and had gotten constant tropical sun exposure without bothering to wear long sleeves or a hat. I was secretly disappointed. She was still attractive to me, but less so than I'd been expecting.

Just after this information arrived, my brain did a round of gymnastics in the space of a few seconds. The routine went like this:

"You're acting like a typical man; applying strict beauty standards that you don't need to meet."

"No I'm not. I take obsessive care of my own skin. I wear a hat every single second I'm in the sun, and wear long sleeves and even gloves when I need to. I'm applying the same standard I use for myself."

"But if you got close to her and touched her she would feel the same regardless of skin tone, so how much should it matter, after the first few seconds of meeting?"

"I'm not going to see it once, I'm going to see it every day. I'm either going to like it every single day, or I'm going to find it off-putting. You're saying I should suppress my reaction and get used to it? To what end?"

"So you can stop being so shallow. She probably feels healthy for the relaxation and sun exposure, and here you are devaluing her for the way it's changed her appearance. That's misogynist. Change your ways."

"Shut up; I'm not going to make my personal physical preferences a matter of gender social justice. Is a woman who doesn't date any man shorter than her a misandrist? Or does she just know what she likes? Why can't I?"

"How dare you have physical preferences and be explicit about them!"

"Screw you; I'll do what I want!"

And there the mental gymnastics ended, and my attention was back on the moment at hand.

Алексис was lively and expressive. Pixie-like. I found myself enjoying her company, but not feeling any real sense of chemistry bubbling up between us. Perhaps this was a consequence of the bisexual nature she declared in her profile. With me it's either a complete miss, or a massive hit, depending on the details of the skew away from the norm. I was surprisingly vague on those details though, and mapping them out was an ongoing process. I really expected to be farther along with it.

Just as I had been with Аннесса three days ago, I began to feel the absence of something. A kind of playful mental aggression, or even a physical assertiveness. Алексис laughed at my occasional wordplay but made no jokes of her own. She never gushed about anything, never conveyed genuine excitement about the things she was describing. She was interested and engaged, but not actually excited. Or perhaps this was as excited as she ever got.

Perhaps she was also reflecting me. Perhaps my life needed more genuine enthusiasm. First meetings can be tricky that way.

We both ordered dinners and barely found time to eat them, since we were both constantly talking about our lives. She was good with general questions, and gamely followed my somewhat confusing attempts to explain what I did at my current and old jobs. We got into the details of her job for a while, and the trials and tribulations of information management in an entrenched bureaucracy. We compared notes about our impressions of eastern philosophy, sexism, a few plunges into politics, and the work of Richard Dawkins, whom we had both read extensively. We'd both reacted the same to his book "The God Delusion": It's good that someone wrote on the theme, but it was a too strident in execution. We talked about podcasts for a while and shared our lists -- always a good topic.

Things only trailed off at a few points - once after some confusion with a waiter, and once after paying the bill when we were both visibly tired and didn't know a tactful way to move the evening on.

Though she was worn out and needed to get home, she raised the possibility that we were biking in the same direction. We looked at a map. Yes we were! As we rode we kept close to each other, chattering the entire time about friends and way the Bay Area housing market had treated them and us. I hugged her no less than three times - once outside the restaurant, and twice in front of her house - and she accepted the gesture without actually reciprocating it. It was an odd combination of signals that I'd been getting a lot lately: My date wanted to linger and keep talking, but had no interest in physical closeness.

On the solo ride back to my house, I cast my mind back to the previous date - the one with Аннесса - and asked myself, "What is going wrong here? This is three strike-outs in a row. First that strange unreachable woman Сюзи, then Аннесса, then Алексис. Each time, something just doesn't click. I smile, I joke, I bring up topics that matter, I ask plenty of questions, I try to fit in chivalry when I can, I make attempts at physical interaction that avoid awkwardness... But something just isn't right. These women have glanced off me. And when the date is over, I feel perfectly content to just go home and never hear from them again. The only slight exception to this is Аннесса, and that's only because she's drop-dead gorgeous. There may be no actual chemistry with her at all."

Perhaps they instinctively sense that I'm not ready. Maybe it's my own attempts to keep a conversation going when it would otherwise just fizzle out that are driving them off. Maybe I need to stop trying so hard at being a good date, and just say what I feel. Would that be better?

I didn't know. At least there's a nice flipside to romance not mattering: I had no regrets.

Сюзи was another redhead, with a profile that showed a strong intellect and a love of the outdoors. She was eight years younger than me, and I was wary of that, so I sent her a friendly message, but not a flirtatious one. I was surprised when she responded with an invitation to meet. We met at a cafe a few blocks from my house.

She was small and skinny, and looked exactly like her picture presented. She shook my hand instead of offering a hug, which was fine, since our bodies were far enough out of proportion that it would have been awkward. She had very freckly skin and wavy blond hair of the kind that would snare up in your hands if you tried to pet her. As she stood in the harsh lighting of the Rudy's Cafe doorway I couldn't help noticing a collection of mustache and chin hairs on her face. Did she not care to shave or cut them? I didn't mind from a physical standpoint - in fact I found them kind of cute - but I was curious what that meant about her personality. Traditional standards of feminine grooming are weird. How did she choose her own, and why?

We sat down at a booth and she immediately began to barrage me with questions, offering no commentary or elaboration of her own. Her comport was very masculine - even a bit mechanical - and I could tell she was attempting to put me on the defensive. It was so relentless I had to deliberately comment on it in order to derail her, and start my own set of questions, then gradually release control of the conversation, just so things could even out.

We talked about houses and politics and dipped into our histories. She mentioned growing up in the midwest near Illinois, then moving to Seattle to pursue a doomed relationship, then coming down to California to go to school. We eventually settled into a discussion about the Bay Area and what was worth investigating, and various ways to enjoy it. Since she was a recent arrival I made myself useful offering a list of must-see landmarks.

She was self-contained, a bit harried, and utterly lacking in a sense of humor. Only about 15 minutes in I knew there was no romantic potential between us, and at the halfway point of the meeting I knew there wasn't even any social potential between us. She wanted to study, chill with her friends, doggedly pursue her political cause, and root around in her alternative lifestyle culture, well into the future. She was a universe away from being a real partner or an in-depth lover, let alone a potential parent. I got the feeling she was the kind of person who needed to "blow off steam" by using intoxication as an end-run around her emotional defenses, and was helplessly stuck behind them otherwise.

I'm not going to say it's a pattern, but it's certainly interesting, that while dating in my 30's I keep meeting women who drop so easily into this framework. They flee their home life, dedicate themselves to a cause, glom onto an older man who is also coincidentally involved in that cause, then stumble between repetitions of that relationship for years, growing more and more emotionally isolated, and increasingly reliant on the mind-altering trappings of their lifestyle to feel vulnerable and engaged. Then they smack up against 30 - or 35 - or 40 - and have some kind of epiphany that they don't want to stay in this scene forever, so they try to transition to another lifestyle. One of real intimacy and home-building. And they are horrified to discover that it's not the cakewalk they'd always figured it was for the "normies".

That normal boring conventional existence that those other women went for - those lame domestic women back home - it's not something you relax into, like a bathtub. It's not even normal, boring, or conventional. It takes skills -- emotional, behavioral, even spiritual skills. And now you realize you are behind in those skills, by a decade or even two. How do you cohabitate with someone you're romantically linked to, without turning it into a bloodbath that forces you to cut ties and move on? How do you advocate for the things that sustain you, without alienating your partner? How do you really know what those things are? How do you maintain passion in a sex life with someone you see every day? How do you run a household larger than a tent and a couple of backpacks? How do you do these things deliberately, forging ahead even when your own instincts are hard to read, without relying on luck or leaning hard on your partner? How do you develop the instincts?

It's all too easy to denigrate that work, push it into the future, and go on another safari.

Anyway, it was a cordial waste of about two hours, and when we hugged by my bicycle as I prepared to ride off, it was every bit as physically awkward as it promised to be. And wow; her hair smelled awful. I sincerely wished her luck with her studies, like one might wish for a college friend, and as I rode home I could feel everything I’d learned about her drifting out of my mind, as though the cold night air was straining it out into mist behind my bicycle. I had no doubts that we would never go on a second date.

This is the truly annoying thing about online dating. No matter how many times you've filtered out bad matches in the past, the bad matches keep coming at you. You never stop wading through people who look great on paper but are a clear "no" after a few moments face-to-face. I was sure Сюзи would find someone to warm her bed in short order. Someone much more aggressive, less keen on intimacy, and happy to do a lot of verbal jousting. That's not me.

When Шарли and I met, she was five months out of a divorce, from a marriage that had lasted five years and was quite torturous. About ten months later ... two weeks ago ... she very tearfully confessed to me that she just wasn't ready for a long-term relationship. It wasn't a surprise ... she'd been struggling with lingering fears during the entire time we were together, and made no secret of it ... but nevertheless, I was sad to see it end, because it seemed to be going well despite her hesitation.

From long experience I know that most of the onus of turning an ended relationship into a friendship is on the person who sought the end in the first place. There is a certain kind of processing that needs to take place. Unfortunately, it looks like Шарли is uninterested in making - or perhaps unable to make - the effort, so I am losing a friend as well as someone I love.

I've been there. I've been in situations where I was unable to make the effort, out of exhaustion or anger or both.

The entire time I knew her, I sensed that Шарли was the living embodiment of the Russian saying Ско́лько во́лка ни корми́, он всё в лес смо́трит. No matter how much love I felt for her - or inspired in her - she was going to dream of being single. It was just the timing that made it that way.

That and a gulf of experience, which made a lot of things that were totally innocuous to me seem portentous and disorienting to her. Looking back, this is the second - possibly the third - time I've had a relationship sabotaged by someone's lingering memories of their ex-boyfriend as a messy, emotionally distant, manipulative slob. But ... even so, people carrying baggage from their past are often determined to pursue a relationship in spite of it. In the final analysis, Шарли decided that she wasn't interested in doing so, and therefore there was something about me specifically that she found lacking.

Maybe she was repulsed by my stubbornness in debates. Maybe I wasn't attentive enough, or maybe I smothered her. Maybe it was something inane that she would never admit, like, perhaps she's impressed by people who wield power over others, and I'm just too damned easygoing. Maybe I just smell bad.

(I know I smell bad right now ... I just ate a bunch of garlic soup. The recipe turned out great, and I got to use up that container of beef broth that she purchased months ago and never used...)

Sometimes there's just no good reason. Sometimes the search for a reason only ends when you get sick of looking and pick something that allows you to move on.

I don't suppose it matters. The wolf is already back in the forest.

If I sound depressed about it, that's because I am. Why wouldn't I be. I love Шарли, her faults included, and I saw a vision of a future with her, and now that vision has to be shredded up into compost. That will take time and rest, and it will obviously be a while before I can bring my A-game to romance again.

I'm already past the state where there is just about nothing new under the sun, relationship-wise. I find myself a lot less curious and a lot less easily impressed these days. Nevertheless, I'm still optimistic that there are wonderful people out there. I've met my fair share, and they're certainly getting easier to find as I go.

In the meantime, I have a house to organize!

Let's see what happens next...

Current Mood: melancholy

I don't know why it took me almost 20 years to see the pattern.

Just about every woman I've seriously dated or fallen in love with or even had a short fling with, has had a strong bisexual side. I could go right down my dating history from beginning to end, and whenever there was mutual attraction, it was with a woman with some bisexual traits, whether it be a sexual history with women, or an assertive masculinity to her personality, or a tomboyish appearance, or et cetera.

Why??

Even the girl I had a crush on in the fifth grade had a tomboyish haircut and demeanor. Decades later I found her on Facebook and discovered that she had become a career navy officer.

What the heck is going on??

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Page generated May. 20th, 2025 09:19 pm

Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Entries tagged with romance

Advice for an enduring relationship

1. A relationship is an arena for self-actualization. Not proof of it.

2. Make time to reconnect.

3. Always try to tell more of the truth.

4. Passion is based on admiration. Encourage what you admire.

5. If your partner is also your best friend, you might need more friends.

6. Learn to rely.

7. Sometimes things go badly, even when everyone is doing their best.

8. Remember humility.

Examining the mashup of suburbia, gender roles, and parenting in my head.

Stability, disruption, romance

Explanations to questions I answered on a dating site

Picnics and dating serendipity

Hilarious erotica and a funny perspective

A conversation about dating and kids, part 2

A conversation about dating and kids

Who is the man I fear?

First date with Мелисса

First date with Клэр

The verbal connection

Long train of thought about gender bias: Story mode

A train of thought about gender politics

The young will always be at odds with the old, forever

RULES

A date with Алексис and some internal ranting

A confusing date with Сюзи

History repeats

A bizarre realization

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April 2025

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