Another Post about Dating

 I feel like I blog about dating a lot. I think it's because I lost the journal I usually use to write out my experiences and feelings about the guys. I do apologize if I'm boring both of my readers.

So mixed in with the general male rejection of me, which is to be expected and isn't a thing I'm worried about correcting at the moment, another pattern is beginning to emerge: men who date like fireworks - it explodes pretty for a few minutes, and then fizzles and dies.

Covid still exists. It's by parts mundane and overwhelmingly horrifying, and there's not really a way to predict which will happen to any one person. It causes brain damage, permanent heart damage, and fatigue in otherwise healthy individuals who may or may not experience symptoms. I'm willing to take precautions to avoid it, and the fewer precautions the public takes, the more I am willing to avoid everybody else.

Many men express a preference for in-person contact, and normally, I'd agree with them 100%. I'm willing to drive the four hours to Utah to meet them. Except right now Utah is particularly bad at containing Covid, and that means waiting until I'm vaccinated. In July.

So when a man pops up on Mutual and says, "I love you, you're perfect, come meet me!" I have to say, "Absolutely! What are you doing at 7:00 p.m. on August 15th?" and then he says, "Sure, that sounds nice. . ." and then within two or three conversations, the tone sours and suddenly I'm processing rejection vibes again.

Movies have taught me that some people believe in this sense of timing, as if falling in love is like catching a train - you have to be waiting on the platform just as it pulls in, and just before it pulls out. Except the movies tend to emphasize that the person wasn't actually waiting for a train, they were trying to do something entirely different, and accidentally ended up at the train station at just the right moment with a ticket in their hands, and without pausing to wonder where the train is going, they get on and take a ride.

I love trains. Catching a train in real life is a bit more complicated than it is in the movies. Sometimes you stand at the station for a long time watching the wrong trains come and go. You eat a pastry and complain in your head that the homeless people have taken up all the benches. Sometimes you miss your train, and have to wait for the next one which can take a long time (not as long as waiting for a date in your 40s, though). Catching a train during Covid. . . now that's another story.

The train metaphor implies that there is some external time table - some schedule set by the powers-that-be - and we are helpless against it. We catch the train or we miss the train, but we do not control the speed or time of arrival or departure.

Humans are subject to many natural laws, but we have a particular gift: agency. Humans can choose not to be like trains or have explosive relationships. Humans can choose the slow burn, or the long path to achieve their aims. If we don't get the immediate reinforcement or reward for our current behaviors, we are still capable of choosing to continue on faith. And we are capable of deciding for ourselves whether that sounds like the right thing to do.

So perhaps, for me, this means that although I know by experience that I am capable of taking the long path (like earning a PhD., adjuncting, or working through interpersonal differences long-distance), and I'm waiting for a relationship that is worth that long path. Marriage is a long path, and perhaps I don't have the faith that chance encounter on a train platform can weather the mundanity of it. Or maybe one of the things I truly admire in men is tenacity, and that can only be proven over time. Maybe I need to date a farmer or gardener who knows the patience of growing things, and can put those same skills into growing relationships.

Shakespeare wrote, in The Merchant of Venice, a woman whose vast fortunes were tied to a riddle: any prospective suitor was presented with three caskets (boxes), one of gold, one of silver, and one of lead, and on the lead box are the words, "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath." Portia's father wanted his daughter to win a man who was willing to take risks to be with her, not somebody who was too tied up in money or himself to be invested in her or their union.

    This reading is, of course, partially skewed by our contemporary ideas of marriage.

Maybe my path is too long, and I ought to lower my standards? *laugh*

With or without trains, my life is good and I'm having fun.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High and Low Horses

 I have not blogged in a LONG TIME and I'm so rusty.  Politics these days, amirite? My little brother pissed me off a few weeks ago in the throes of a political kerfuffle (not reasoned enough to be an argument by either definition). He accused me of posing - I don't remember exactly what he called it, but it was something like "virtue signaling." And very, very rapidly, I was trapped. I could not even attempt to do the right thing without knowing that I was doing exactly what he had just sneered at. I suppose I could go back and carefully analyze the rhetoric of the conversation and delicately unravel exactly what was happening. I am capable of that kind of analysis, but this is a blog, not a school paper, and I'm more interested in the abstractions at play. I'm always more interested in the abstractions. Let's imagine that you have a stick figure in a two-dimensional world. I'd draw it and upload it for you, but somebody stole my reMarkable. Stick fig...
Read more

The Species of my Faith Tree

Image
 Last week I wrote about the space that faith fills in the epistemology of the gospel: specifically that it extends beyond the known, but can be felt and experienced as a sensation as if something is growing inside us. I reiterated and complicated Alma's description of how to tell when a seed is good, and when we should keep watering it. As a metaphor, planting "the word" as a seed is extremely helpful for those who are new to the idea of faith, and those of us who have begun taking it for granted. And yet I find that there is more to say. What exactly is this thing whose tentacles/branches/nerve cells want to invade every part of me? Must I let it grow before I know? What is the nature of the growth? Is it a cancer? A parasite? A symbiote? How much of it is me, and how much of it is not me? Will I birth it like a child, or absorb it into my cells like a protein nutrient? Maybe. . . Maybe a better metaphor is gut biome - it's a thing that biologists haven't quite ...
Read more

The Love-Doctrine Tightrope

Image
 LDS news is abuzz with Elder Holland's address to BYU faculty last week. His comments about gay students was particularly concerning, especially when he lamented how few people were willing to wield a "musket" in defense of eternal marriage doctrine (which doctrine is exclusively heterosexual when it is not a polygynous variation thereof). Perhaps a blunderbuss might have been a more apt weapon. War imagery has always been problematic in religious discussion specifically because humans are the WORST at correctly identifying an enemy. We can't do it. A religious person wielding any kind of projectile weaponry is guaranteed to injure someone they should be protecting. If I may generalize dangerously for a moment, I think that our problem is that in defense of "doctrine" we end up fighting people, and people are never the enemy, no matter what ideas they espouse, and no matter how militant we feel they are.  Some "people are enemies" confusion even c...
Read more