On Life Support

My social life is in a coma. It had been struggling for some time, and finally succumbed when I decided to stop drinking. What little socializing I did was mostly in bars or at parties, and I generally avoid those now.

I haven't yet discovered new venues for meeting people and socializing.

I've contemplated putting a profile on OKCupid. I realize that there is little likelihood, given my tastes in men, of actually finding a partner on OKCupid. But I might make a friend or two. I've even considered putting up a profile on the new site for meeting transmen. (Yes, I would date a transman, if I found him sexy and interesting. It's about personality and appearance, not plumbing. Even moreso, I'd hang out with transmen who are cool – I already know a few, but they life way the fuck out in MD.)

I haven't put up any profiles yet because I'm just not ready to say no thanks.

I know that beggars can't be choosers, so I'm trying very hard not to be a beggar.

Still, it would be nice to have a social life again, with men and women who are cool, who don't creep me out with unwanted (sexual) attention, who also don't drink (0r at least let themselves get fucked up) and with whom I have enough in common for a basis in conversation.

Questioned by Life

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Reality-Based Dating

I have decided to create a profile on an online dating site. As I make my plans for doing this, I've decided on a few rules to protect myself.

1. Never make the first move. If I make the first move, I automatically become the supplicant, which puts me in a position of disadvantage. I want to be the gatekeeper, not the person begging for an opening. This is especially important as I get older. I do not want to be the typical "old gay man" trying to get others to pay attention to me.

2. Define from the outset the limits of the first date, namely that we will meet for coffee and conversation, and nothing more. Naturally, this pre-empts premature hook ups. But it also avoids awkward dinners with someone uninteresting. If I say from the outset we will not have dinner on the first day, I forestall the risk I'll be trapped buying a meal and enduring it with someone distinctly not for me.

3. Remind potential dates to keep their expectations reasonable before it begins, and I will do the same. There's a one-in-a-billion chance that I'll actually find someone dateable online (or in real life), so no one, myself or others, needs to go into a situation with their hopes too high, only to have those hopes frustrated yet again. If everyone has reasonable expectations, then no one will be too disappointed, and if by some miracle I actually do meet someone dateable, then it will be all the more awesome.

My Weekend Would Probably Bore You

I bought too many books this weekend, but I enjoyed myself just fine.

I decided since Metro would be difficult to deal with this weekend, I'd start my errands on Friday evening. I metroed out to the burbs and picked up an hard-to-find copy of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. I also got a few more craft supplies from AC Moore. Other than that, Friday evening was chill.

Saturday morning I woke up early. The weather report warned of a massive storm system coming our way, due to hit in the afternoon, so I got an early start on my errands. I bussed up to Bethesda, but got there so early, stores weren't open yet, so I had breakfast at the Tastee Diner, which I had not been to in years. It hasn't changed a bit.

In Bethesda I picked up a stringing kit for a lacrosse stick head, and some athletic drawers and five-toed socks from City Sports. Then I metroed down to Dupont Circle. At two used bookstores I got a slender volume of Descartes, a slightly heftier volume if Kierkegaard, and a huge paperback Bible (KJV with Apocrypha).

I started on my way home, but got off the bus when we encountered a downed tree across Columbia Road (the storm was still hours away; maybe a stiff breeze knocked it down). I walked the rest of the way home, trying a different route for kicks.

The storm finally hit, and it was something to watch. Manuel hid in the closet and napped. I checked on a neighbor's cat, and she too was napping in the closet. No problems, except for Manu's jealousy.

Saturday night was so boring, and I was so tired, I went to bed at 2100 hours. I slept until 0800 hours Sunday morning. I guess I needed the rest. I cleaned my bathroom, and myself, and met friends for brunch at Pho 14. Then I wandered down 14th Street. At Palace 5, one of my favorite boutique shops, I got a t-shirt. I looked around U Street, 14th Street and Dupont Circle, and only picked up a few things (including yet another book at Kramerbooks). I walked home from there, and then went to supper at The Heights.

I'm relearning how to do weekends. Since I'm avoiding alcohol these days, I'm also avoiding the places I associate with drinking, restaurants as well as bars. This means rethinking where to eat when I choose to eat out. I need to try some new places. I may need to make a mental list.

Also, I have too many books. One of my projects for the fall is to cull out some of the books I no longer need/do not want/cannot really use after all, and trade them in/give them away. I wish I had two of me for that project, since getting rid of books is something I have to talk myself into.

Finally, I picked up another cute hoodie yesterday, so I have two new hoodies to debut this fall when the weather cools down just a bit more. I'm looking forward to it.

Life Is Not Perfectible

Many people have the silly idea, gleaned from movies, adverts and glossy magazines, that life is perfectible. The idea that other people out there have achieved the perfect life. So, they feel dissatisfied with the life they have or even downright cheated out of the life they think they deserve but don't have, the life that no one has.  They yearn for a life of perfect happiness that is impossible, while failing to take control of the life they do have and make it more rewarding through decisive, realistic action. Existentialists are nihilists because they recognize that life is ultimately absurd and full of terrible, inescapable truths. They are anti-nihilists because they recognize that life does in fact have a meaning: the meaning each person chooses to give his or her own existence. They recognize that each person is free to create themselves and make something worthwhile of themselves by striving against life's difficulties. Life, or rather death, will win in the end, but what matters is the striving, the overcoming, the journey.

—Gary Cox, How to Be an Existentialist, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012, p. 15.

Love, Frankl and Midlife

I continue reading through Viktor Frankl’s fascinating The Doctor and the Soul, and I find it both enlightening and frustrating. Enlightening because I can see things from a different angle, frustrating because just when I think I’m going to get to a real insight about myself, he moves on the next point. I find I wish I could talk to him face-to-face.

Last night I finished the chapter on love, and while most of it was on point, I have a few quibbles.

Frankl distinguishes between sexual desire (i.e., lust), erotic desire (i.e., infatuation) and love. Lust is purely physical, of course. Erotic desire involves the psychological as well as the physical. In other words, erotic desire is the desire to have/be with a person for their personality as well as their looks. Love, on the other hand, is the full, non-possessive appreciation of a whole person. Love can be experienced in a monogamous relationship, or it can be for a relative, etc. Up to this point I agree fully.

What I think Frankl didn’t spell out and should have is that for monogamous, coupling relationships, lust and infatuation are stages one must go through to reach love. I don’t think many, if any, leap ahead directly to love, bypassing lust and erotic desire, to establish monogamous relationships. Love minus sexual and erotic attraction is simply a deep friendship (which is a wonderful thing, by the way), but not the basis for a monogamous coupling.

To be sure, I agree with Frankl that if a relationship gets stuck at the possessive, erotic desire stage, it isn’t love. Furthermore, a relationship stuck at that stage is fragile. If the partners cannot move it to real love, it may not be able to hold up over time and the vicissitudes of life.

Frankl also reiterates that one does not have to experience love to make life meaningful. One can also make life meaningful through action and through one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering. In fact there comes a point in some people’s lives when love is admittedly no longer possible, and they must make meaning otherwise. He maintains however that if one does not experience love and feels resentment toward life over this, he will hamper the meaning-making in his life. To be able to live without love and yet not be resentful about that is a path toward meaning-making.

And this is what I must learn to do. I freely admit I harbor resentment for not having been able to find/have/create love in my life. All my past relationships never got beyond the infatuation stage. I may have thought I was in love, but I wasn’t. Between coming out late and having warped ideals of love modeled for me while growing up, I was hampered in the pursuit of love. If I could undo my past I would certainly change how I did things.

But now I’m at a stage of life in which I believe opportunities for love are vanishingly scarce at best. Because (IMHO) sexual and erotic desire must precede love, I no longer can fall in love with someone. I do not desire men my age. They are not sexually attractive to me.  If, when I was much younger, I had truly loved someone, and had aged alongside him, that wouldn’t be an issue. We’d have our whole history together to draw upon. But without the initial stages of sexual desire and erotic desire to start off with, love of a monogamous, coupling nature is not going to happen for me. In my life, I’ve moved well beyond the time when this could have happened.

So my current task is to deal with the resentment. I must learn to live with my life (the unavoidable factors I was born into, such as a fundamentalist family, a small town milieu, etc., and the poor choices I made along the way, such as sticking with infatuation relationships when they should’ve been dropped) and move beyond the resentment. I must admit that the resentment runs deep, and is tangled up with my religious upbringing, my regressive childhood social milieu and a host of other factors. It may very well be that letting go of the resentment is a major component of my meaning-making tasks in life. To show to myself that having been born in the time and place I was does not need to make my life hopelessly angered and emotionally crippled.

This Way Now

Monday, I quietly hit the reset button. The descent my life had taken had only been getting worse. I decided I may not have all the answers I crave, but I knew I didn't want to live like that any longer. I want to be clear-headed and curious, not numb and befuddled.

I'm in midlife. Midlife is a second adolescence. All your settled verities come up for review, questioning, and often rejection. You have to relearn who you are (or remake who you are). I'd begun to think of midlife as a problem to be solved. Worse, I'd begun to think I was botching the solution big time. I was flunking midlife (or so I thought).

But like adolescence, midlife is not a problem to be solved. It is a phase of life to live through and learn from. And it cannot be rushed. It can be handled with more or less skill, but I suspect the aptitude for midlife is a learning curve of sorts. So, I'm not trying to pass a test or get through a task quickly in order to get some vague reward. If I had to guess right now, I'd say the passage is the reward. Sort of like Zen Buddhists will tell you that Nirvana is Samsara.

After I hit the pause and reset, I wanted to establish some basic ideas about my life, some values I hold to. I thought about not only what those values were, but also the best way to word them. I'd read that expressing values as commands are counterproductive, because there's always a part of oneself that resents commands. Even if one desperately wants to lose weight, for instance, it's better not to say, "You must diet every day." Also, I'd read that casting affirmative statements in the future tense is also counterproductive, in that it allows the mind to permanently postpone the affirmative action/condition stated. For instance, "I will lose weight and look good," is little more helpful than "You must diet every day."

To that end I arrived at Five Assertions. I assert these things about myself in order to make them manifest in my life right now. I could probably come up with more, but these five cover a pretty good range. Best of all, they avoid negative statements. There is no "I do not do XYZ" in the assertions, even if it is implied that I will refrain from certain harmful behaviors and attitudes.

This is the new direction I'm taking as I navigate my second adolescence.