[293] in Depressing_Thoughts
Yet more male/female courtship stuff, but at least it's more depressing than the weather.
amgreene@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (amgreene@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Aug 31 23:31:40 1988
Hi. Just got back and caught up on 248 coatrack messages...
There {\em is} a romantic "tinge" to most of my friendships -- real
friendships, not friendly acquaintances -- and that can be lethal. I
think I may have just seriously damaged a friendship because I
expected more from it than was really there;' and I'm certain that
that's what happened with Pam.
Anent the phrase "Significant Other..." To my way of thinking, one
{\em is} incomplete without the other. That's the essance of a
successful relationship, the attitude of "I'm hitching my wagon to
your star, and I want our two lives to become one." Maybe that's my
problem... but more on that later.
Sorry to dredge all this up again, but I spent three months in hell
and I did a lot of thinking about the "significant other" situation.
And I got really depressed. So some of you were complaining that
coatrack wasn't depressing enough? I've got thirteen weeks of
isolation gnawing on my brain, and it's all about to come out. Oxygen
masks and floatation devices ready? Then here we go!
I have lived the past ten years of my life (or so) as a fraud. When I
was ten, I developed my model of how the world worked, and I never
updated it. When reality conflicted with my model, I rejected the
empirical data and clung to my model.
This model, of course, was wrong. It was based on TV, movies,
religion, and general bullying by every other schoolchild at P.S. 26 Queens.
It involved certain assumptions about how adults were expected to
behave, and I (having been rejected by my peers) rushed to embrace the
adult world. So I disdained "cuss" words, violence, disrespect
towards my elders, etc. It seemed to work -- the adults in my life
considered me a wonderful person and a model child.
And then everyone else grew up, and I didn't. They started to take an
interest in members of the opposite sex, and I saw them being
generally foolish and silly, and I watched "Three's Company," and I
decided that I, as an "adult," was better than all that. So while the
others developed their "social skills," and learned how to deal with
rejection and relationships and physical attraction, I suppressed any
glimmer of those that might threaten my idyllic existance and the most
perfect human being ever to walk the face of the earth. (Or, at
least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.)
And when I finally did allow myself to acknowledge the possibility
that I might have taken a potential interest in Julie Blumenfeld, I
wrote her a nice letter asking her if she wanted to try to be more
than friends. I waited until after the last time I'd see her before
the summer, and I mailed it to her. And I got back the reply, "Sorry,
I don't feel the same way you do; but I'd still like to be friends."
And we are still friends, but...
But.
Anyway, the situation with Pam was similar. All notes slipped under
one another's door at XICTMD. We didn't even hug until six months
later. The entire "relationship," which it wasn't, took place thanks
to the efficiency of the United States Postal Service.
So I'm faced with a situation where I suddenly realize that I'm still
a ten-year-old when it comes to social interaction. Carol, you
remember last term when I kept straining that running joke about
making a big deal about coming into the office? Well, that was my way
of trying to make you notice me. I've done similar, silly,
pre-juvenile things towards other people. Because I have no idea how
the game is "supposed" to be played.
One apparently false component of my world-model is that it is "wrong"
to love someone who is not one's (future) spouse. Now that's
unreasonable, since one obviously cannot make the decision to marry
someone without first falling in love with that "significant other,"
if indeed that it what the other person is.
But think of the consequences for a moment: One shouldn't date
someone whom one doesn't love, therefore one shouldn't date anyone
except one's future spose. Etc. With the exception of my joining Pam
for her prom and her me for mine, I have never been on a date in my
life.
Now it should be obvious to the reader that the chain of logic
presented in the preceding paragraph is flawed in both its
antecedants. Nevertheless, that is what I believed until three months
ago. More importantly, it is what my gut reaction still says, depsite
my "intelligent" side realizing the faultiness of the logic.
It seems wrong to me to size up MOSes. It seems like a caddish thing
to do, the sort of thing that John Ritter would have done -- {\em did}
do -- in "Three's Company."
So where does that leave me?
This summer I had the fortune (good or bad) to find myself stranded in
a small town called Barrow. I spent many awful nights sitting on the
beach, staring out at the ocean, realizing that that very beach was
the proverbial "it," in this case the northernmost point on the North
American continent. It is not possible to grasp the way this
realization causes one to look at one's life as futile. It is an
utterly dwarfing sensation.
It also forced me to evaluate my life, and I was not happy. I
realized that, as I said before, I had been living a fraud. And I
decided to change that.
No more sitting on the sidelines waiting for G-d to hand me my perfect
mate. No more sitting around pitying myself because I'm a stupid,
worthless, spineless, immature abstractionalist. No more false facade
presented to the world like a multi-faceted, flawless, thousand-karat
diamond that should strike any observer with the most intense awe
known to mankind since the Revelation at Sinai.
No, I decided that I should go out and approach females (not "girls"
anymore, but not quite "women" yet) and...
And what? The fact remains: I know nothing about "relationships." I
never learned, and now I'm ten years behind.
So I made myself a promise. Next March I turn twenty. I swore to
myself that I would make up those ten years, and that I would face the
start of my third decade of existance as a twenty-year-old. I have
put off adolescence long enough; I think I'm finally ready for it.
But the world is such a scary place and "Andrew" seems to do so well
there. He has so many of those tokens of "success" that the world
seems to hold dear -- a spot in MIT, lots of friends, loving parents,
a summer job with NASA, etc. His model, though flawed, sure seems to
have done the trick so far. His false front, his fraud, seems to have
deceived everyone -- if not entirely, at least enough to get by
handsomely.
So why do I feel like I'm a failure? I {\em am}, at least at the
things that are important to me. Physics is fun, but it won't keep me
warm at night and create a family with me and stand next to me at
Ne'ilah and cry when I'm gone. I am utterly alone, even when I am
surrounded by lots of people who enjoy my company, care (at least a
little) about my well-being, and call me "friend." I am alone in the
one area where no substitute will do.
So I came back from Alaska a changed man. I wear jeans (sort of) now,
and I cuss (rarely, but with a non-zero frequency), and nothing's
changed. People don't seem to even notice that I have accepted the
conventions of modern society. Why should they? It's deviance,
difference, uniqueness that people notice.
But those things have made me more alone, more isolated, than I can
bear any longer. I want to make the effort to find a girlfriend and
somehow fulfill my longing, but these ten years of lying have socially
castrated me. I am emasculated, unable to participate in the courtship
rituals that our society uses.
Am I any less a person for wanting this? By my old standards, the
answer is an unequivocal "Yes." By my new standards... well, I don't
have new standards yet. I realize that our traditional art forms
present evidence that courting someone because of that one's beauty is
acceptable, perhaps even the norm. "The Pirate of Penzance," "Die
Fledermaus," and many others bear witness to "true love" or a one
night stand being decided upon a moment's sighting.
So I get back to Athena and coatrack and I discover that you guys have
all rejected the idea of actively seeking a significant other. I peer
inwards, gazing down into the abyss within my heart, wondering if
there exists in this world at all the woman who can fill that void,
who can be to me all that I expect from my predestined one. In a
world of five billion people and ten billion expectations, what are
the chances that any given individual will find his(generic) correct
other?
And if he(generic) does, what then?
