Every now and then I have a particular sequence of thoughts and while often it just comes and goes, at other times it sticks with me for a bit. Time I wrote it out. Maybe I have done here already and I just don’t remember?
Who knows. I mean, it’s been 25 years of this thing. But let’s do it anyway.
— § —
In a sense, I’ve been lucky in my life to have had multiple serious, long-term relationships. Serious enough that I’ve had multiple engagements, multiple offers to bear my children. Strange phrase to write down now that I see it, but it is what it is.
Five years, two years, three years, a year and a half, eight years… Nearly my entire adult life until my divorce, looking back, I was rarely not in a serious relationship, as strange as it seems to realize that.
And now I don’t feel any particular need to be “with” anyone. Or to date.
But I think some of this apathy is really about what all of those relationships ultimately share, when I add them up. And what they share is that they were all lacking in the same way, and part of a larger lack.
And that lack is this: I don’t think anyone I’ve ever dated, or been engaged to, or been married to, has ever known me all that well. I haven’t felt known. Or in the end particularly cared for as me.
Now if you talk to my exes, more than one will say that’s because I’m a hard person to get to know, I’m a mystery, I’m a cipher, I’m a brick wall.
Here’s what I have to say to that: there are 25 years of my life sitting online in which I ramble endlessly as me, about things I think and things I feel. And yet nobody I ever dated cared to read more than a post or two. And several disliked the fact of its existence entirely and wanted me to kill it off, feeling threatened somehow by its existence.
(This “somehow” will emerge shortly below, if you look carefully.)
— § —
No, this is not a lament that my love life isn’t full of people who have read the 4,000 or more pages of my blog. I don’t expect anyone to do that. I haven’t done that.
But really, they generally never displayed the smallest curiosity. Quite the contrary.
The blog here, of course, is just a microcosm of what the larger picture has always been. In general, my experience of relationships has been one in which not only were the people that I was seriously involved with not all that curious to really know me, but in fact they were generally uncomfortable when I proactively tried to open up to them.
— § —
The first meeting was always the same. There is a look that women get. It’s not exactly bemusement, and it’s not exactly admiration. It’s a gleam in the eye, a particular tightening of the muscles around the mouth—just enough to suggest a smile, without actually resulting in one. Eye contact. Attention.
Every relationship eventually develops origin stories. “I saw him and he was…”
I came to dislike these origin stories. There was “something about” me that told them that I was a rock star. I was so brilliant and yet somehow so awkward and it was adorable. I took command of the room and carried the class and it was so damned attractive. I was a deep, eternal mystery, someone that was such a force of nature as to be unknowable. And so on. And they had to “get to know” me. If only.
None of those things are me. Or if they are, they’re not a particularly important dimension of me. They’re caricatures, and frankly I think they’re projections. Of peoples’ fathers? Of what people wish their fathers had been?
I don’t know. But if that’s who you are to someone, there’s not a lot of room for the things you like, for the nuances of your sense of humor, for your list of favorite bands, for your memories of childhood, for ordering Saturday noon take-out wings and watching a football game. For actual normal life.
— § —
Therein lies what has always ultimately been my experience.
Why no curiosity? Why anger, irritation, even disgust when the “real me” tries to muscle in and participate, share a thought, enthuse about a favorite in some dimension of life?
Largely because you can’t be Jack Sparrow the pirate or Indiana Jones the archaeologist or whatever other panty-wetting but rather flat role someone has cast you in when your mundane, guy-who-has-bills-to-pay and man-with-a-couple-favorite-songs personality is bleeding through the canvas and muddying the image being projected on to it.
— § —
Key stats:
Number of times I have forgotten a significant other’s birthday or anniversary in my life: zero. None. Ever.
Number of times I have spent hours or even days thinking, reflecting, working hard to make sure that I showed, on such a day, just how much I cared for—and how well I knew—the person I was in love with: Every single time.
Number of times I brought my significant other to tears with what I prepared: Nearly every single time.
Now, the flipside:
Number of times anyone asked me if I’d like to make plans for my birthday: single digits.
Number of times I received a birthday, anniversary, or other “mutual occasion” gift or card of some kind over more than two decades: single digits.
How often was I utterly bewildered by the inappropriateness or incongruity of said gift or card when I received it, thanking them while also realizing that it had utterly nothing to do with me, and more to do with them? Nearly every time.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about birthdays as such.
In fact, if someone had just once said to me, “Hey you, I know you like to think you don’t care about birthdays, so I’m going to indulge your conceit and stroke your ego a bit and plan nothing for it” and had winked and smiled at me as they said it… I mean, just once to have felt lovingly poked right in my interior like that would have been enough to carry me for years, nothing else needed.
But I generally received oh-so-tasteful clothes or other fashion items that people wanted me to wear that didn’t resemble a single thing I had ever worn, but did in fact resemble their fantasies of me, or I received cultural objects (a sculpture, an autographed tchotchke naming some artist I’ve never heard of that somehow ended up on their desk or wall instead of mine) that I had to research to identify.
The same thing, frankly, was often true of praise. Or what I knew was intended as praise, but at the same time realized was indication of a tremendous, often catastrophic gulf.
Generally, receiving gifts, or cards, or praise in my relationships was… weird.
— § —
In the end, I did the breaking up all but once. And it was always for the same reason: because they were coming to despise me, and it was obvious, and I was tired of being despised.
Ask them and they had come to despise me because I was failing to live up to my potential or had become needlessly contrary.
Ask me and they despised me because they were stuck with me and I was proving not to be the person they idealized—the rock star, the mad genius, the pirate, the brilliant professor. Or rather, I kept overflowing the lines of the persona that they had wrapped around me, shattering the illusion, by being just me, some dude trying to live life.
— § —
This is not to blame any of them particularly. After all, I chose them in return. And the fact that in every case I hung around for years is probably for the therapy couch (though I don’t actually have one) and some future discussion of abandonment issues and why I try to stay in relationships where I don’t feel seen and all that sort of nonsense.
But the real reason for making a post like this one, and the place where the train of thought always ends up is actually this:
I don’t particularly care to date, no.
But it would be a shame for me to come to the end of my life having never been known by a significant other with the same kind depth and care as I’ve been known by my parents, my children, or my friends. Not to mention even people like co-workers, most of whom have known me far better as well. I’m not some wall of mystery or force of nature to any of these people. I’m just me, and we talk and we live.
Fascinatingly, I’ve had a couple of women friends over the years (still have, in fact), who know me damned well—better than any of my significant others have ever known me by a country mile—and who always manage to make me smile by saying just the right thing, and who have often managed to make me feel heard in my darkest moments. This sentence is for you; you know who you are.
But isn’t your significant other meant to be the person who knows you best?
By that standard, I don’t think I’ve ever had one—though I’ve been one routinely.
And at this particular moment in life, I’m afraid I’m likely to arrive at the end of life having never quite known what that’s like, despite many years in “serious” relationships.
Boy did I somehow manage to fuck that part of my life up while I was still young enough to worry about it.
— § —
N.B. There is a large part of me that very much wants to delete or not publish this, as it’s self-indulgent, unavoidably boring, and really fairly embarrassing at any number of levels. But for that reason, and because I have a particular fetish for taking my medicine when I’m able to do so (which isn’t nearly as often as I tell myself it is), I’m going to leave it up just to spite myself.