293. circumspect

You didn’t see my valentine
I sent it via pantomime
While you were watchin’ someone else
I stared at you and cut myself
It’s all I’ll do ‘cause I’m not free
A fugitive too dull too flee
I’m amorous but out of reach
A still-life drawing of a peach

– Fiona Apple, “Valentine” from The Idler Wheel (2012)

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One of the depressing aspects of being single in your mid-30s is that virtually everyone else you know is probably in some manner of relationship by this point. You’ve become the token single friend.

And it sometimes goes like this:

You had a close group of friends. They’d make plans for Tuesday nights; go on outings to apple orchards or see a film; get together to play games or make dinner a few nights a month. You feel a sense of kinship and belonging here.

Then, gradually, everyone starts to pair off. Maybe a few people in the group start dating or find partners outside the group who then Yoko their way into the fold.

You progressively find yourself more on the outside. Activities become couples-oriented since you’re pretty much the only person who isn’t dating or married now.

They ask if you’re seeing or interested in anyone and you watch them exchange worried glances when you say “no.”

Eventually they start doing couples-only dinners and get-togethers.

You find out about plans after the fact because so-and-so forgot to include you on the group email/chat (but they “totally didn’t mean to leave you out”), but you feel increasingly out of place and othered when they do invite you to do things.

Wedding follows wedding like supernovas going off in a star cluster. You get invited to some, always RSVP’ing for one; are part of the wedding party in some and a musician in others. At receptions, you get seated with random family members or the other misfits who don’t know anyone else there.

People start having children and soon their lives have room for only other parents and families. Talk involves school, vacation plans, sickness, and other familial things. You “wouldn’t understand until you have children of your own.”

When you do get together with someone from the old group, you both feel like such different people, with little in common. It’s like being on an awkward first date.

You didn’t really know how to say anything to prevent it, but somewhere in there you fell through the cracks.

Of course, none of this was intentional. People change as life circumstances change.

Their personal life choices are shaped by the considerations of another’s. Yours are not.

Their sleep is interrupted by their bed partner snoring or a child crying. Yours is not.

They have to coordinate multiple family schedules over the holidays. You have just one family to deal with, yet even those feel lonelier as your siblings and cousins get married.

Le temps passe.

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This is the world in which I increasingly find myself. I had such a group of friends after college that gradually dissolved as people started dating and getting married. Our ties, too, dissolved.

In some ways, I feel like a human talisman who brings romantic fortune into the lives of people I’m close to. Every flatmate I’ve had started dating their current partner shortly after we moved in together.

A new friend group forms and the cycle repeats.

This matchmaking power seems to work for everyone else but me.

However, I don’t know if it’s they who change towards me or me towards them. Maybe a bit of both, with my anxiety backseat driving.

And one truth I’d rather not admit to is my inferiority complex around those who are in relationships. I feel I’m somehow not as mature or put together in their presence, like I should have achieved the same things and haven’t, and am therefore not as worthy.

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One way this manifests is with guys I’ve long held a torch for, despite all evidence to the contrary that anything would ever come of it.

My response when they inevitably start dating someone is to withdraw and tacitly cut them out of my life, or limit contact to occasionally commenting on or liking a social media post that isn’t of him and the new girlfriend (and hiding those that do).

This just happened with a guy who I’ve known for a couple years—and on whom I’ve been crushing for some time. I’ve never said anything since he’s insisted that he’s 100% heterosexual, and didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship by having that conversation, make everything totally awkward, and in all likelihood lose the friendship.

The crazy thing is I always know this will be the outcome; disappointment is inevitable. It happens over and over because it seems I have zero control over who I’m attracted to. It’s always hetero or bi guys who aren’t interested in me that way.

This is unfortunately how demisexuality works. My brain and conscious mind are in separate departments and never consult each other. So it’s a perennial hazard that, despite ourselves, we tend to fall for friends or people with whom we’re close.

He posted the relationship status last week so I’m faced again with the choice of whether to protect myself and preemptively distance myself before he, too, drifts away; or break the cycle and find an emotionally healthy, mature way to proceed?

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In light of all this, I have been asking myself two questions:

1. Why do I care so much about this?
2. What exactly do I want/expect from a relationship?

The second question is probably the more important one, but the answer to the first is, again, the intense desire and need for the permanent, secure home I lacked as a child. The emotionally violent reactions I experience to rejection or disappointment is the raw, unregulated response of that child to pain and the fear of abandonment.

We learn how to deal with stress and disappointment from watching how our parents react. As the first born, my mom especially treated scrapes and bruises as if I’d been shot. So instead of being shown how to calmly assess a situation and its actual seriousness, I learned to go into fight mode to protect myself.

In other words, I developed anxious-resistant attachment.

Thus, the need for learning to reparent myself to become more secure.

030. derivatives

Quick update.

Tonight, Aaron and I had a chat on Messenger that at first was a catastrophic blow-up and nearly ended in us never talking again. Basically, we both felt hurt and were trying to leave the other feeling more hurt.

But then we both softened a little and were able to talk rationally, and we were both able to admit that we missed each other, and that we don’t want to lose contact. So in the end it was a good conversation; he didn’t mean the things he said in the letter; and I didn’t mean any of the nasty things I replied with either.

So while we’re not lovers (eros), we are at least on the track to being friends again (philia).

And his “date” turns out to be this queeny guy who he’s using for dinner and movie tickets because he’s broke. The guy has tried putting the moves on him a couple of times, and Aaron’s just not interested in that.

027. bonding

From A Treatise on the Mustache by Brett & Kate McKay on 8 September 2009:

Unlike women, who bond primarily through face to face discussions, males bond best through shared activities, namely through those performed side by side. Two men embarking on the road to friendship do so with a mutual appreciation of one another’s machismo. Such activities include logging, hunting, war, etc. At a more primordial stage however, the process begins with the most fundamental element of human bonding: similarity.

I’ve read similar things before, such as C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, but the above excerpt is fairly concise. It describes differences between male and female friendships of the same gender. Even from my own observations, I’ve noted that female relationships tend to be based on shared emotional connection, whereas male relationships tend to be forged through shared activity. It’s not that either is superior to the other (though feminists and contemporary psychology would stress that men need to express more of their “feminine,” emotional side). In a vacuum, where each is left to their own nature, men and women will bond with the members of the same sex in fairly consistent ways—women through talking, men through doing.

But with men, the guard is eventually lowered through similarity. A powerful bond can be forged between two men who share a passion for LINUX programming, Batman comics, or, yes, facial hair. It is almost ineffable. As C.S. Lewis writes on Friendship in The Four Loves,

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had to. And to like doing what must be done is a characteristic that has survival value. We not only had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt and the battle. And when they were over as had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed or punished the cowards and bunglers, we praised the star performers. We revelled in technicalities . . . In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyed one another’s society greatly.

This pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect and understanding of men who daily see one another tested, is biologically valuable. You may, if you like, regard it as a product of the “gregarious instinct” . . . something which is going on at this moment in dozens of ward-rooms, bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and golf-clubs. I prefer to call it Companionship—or Clubableness.

This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their “friends” mean only their companions. Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believes to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision—it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

Lewis said it far better than I.

But he observes that there is now a distinct mistrust of male friendship—”that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.” And as a homosexual, I find this to be flat out absurd, as does Lewis, as it stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of homosexuality (and even sexuality in general). If platonic friendship between the sexes can exist, why shouldn’t one between two men or two women?

That’s beside the point.

These days friendships between males seem so superficial, perhaps because the males themselves are so superficial and fearful of making really deep connections. They are even trivialised by giving them labels like Bromance, where homosocial intimacy is allowed, to an extent, but it is still something that men are expected to “grow out of,” like a phase or adolescence. But it speaks to something much deeper, it seems, that men are desiring to be more physically expressive with each other—something that up untill the early twentieth century was considered socially appropriate and in no way latently homosexual. “On a broad historical view it is,” Lewis writes, “not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.”

“Hence,” he postulates later,

we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead . . . The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends . . . Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travellers.

This is fundamentally the problem that I see with men these days and their relationships—they substitute noise for substance and expect it to fill the void. They surround themselves with things or with people, but aren’t going anywhere. They have their male friends as companions at first, then trade that in for a girlfriend and/or wife (or succession of girlfriends) to satisfy their sexual desires; but they are merely in a state of existence or surviving. Companions abound, but Friends (kindred spirits, if you will) are few and far between.

Men need the friendship and company of other men; someone to share a common goal or journey with. Because men bond by doing together: fishing, shingling a house, playing football (and yes, I mean European football), poker tourneys, or hunting to name a few traditional male bonding activities. But it’s a twentieth century phenomenon where masculine spaces have been abolished and deemed chauvinistic. It was the feminists who demanded that the boy’s clubs be opened up to women. But the boys have always found ways to stake out territory, though now on the outskirts of a heterosexualised society and always within reach of women (e.g., bowling night, for which men often have to get “permission” from their wives or significant others).

So what am I saying? That men need to stop being afraid of commitment and find something that they are truly passionate about. And if they are, they will eventually come in contact with other like-minded men who have the same passions they can pursue together. That is how empires were built.

You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these “unconcerning things, matters or fact” to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth? In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts . . . At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also beat a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among our Friends . . . Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves