This post is part 2 (-ish, because I stopped to do an interview along the way) of my three part essay on the Seduction Community, misogny (it isn’t all their fault! but they’re not off the hook!) and The Sex ‘n Love problem.
_______________________
The last time I wrote about the Seduction Community, I said we needed to think about two aspects of it:
The social. The Seduction Community both reflects and reifies the misogyny of our culture. In other words, that shit comes from somewhere. The Seduction Community’s (sometimes) fucked-up attitudes about women come from our society’s fucked-up attitudes about women and then – sadly, arguably – reinforces them.
The personal. Some smart but socially awkward guys just want to find a way to connect with women, get confident in their company, and maybe even get a girlfriend. And that – well that’s pretty damn sweet.
So let’s talk about something personal.
My friend told me a story from several years ago.
It is the kind of story that you can only tell several years later because if you told it in the midst of it your soul would curl up and die of embarrassment.
She got divorced (and gawd, I’m glad she did. ‘Nuff said). She packed up her stuff, hired movers, and drove across the country to come home. To us. Her friends, and family.
She told me she felt like she was coming home with her tail between her legs. When you go off on a journey, you’re supposed to come home with that coat of many colours. A career, accolades, shiny things, a shiny marriage, and maybe even some sparkly babies on parade.
And she left all of these – the house, the job, the man, the apparently-pretty life – to come home and start over.
Freedom looked and felt and smelled like failure, to her. Liberty isn’t tender and doesn’t come wrapped with pretty bows and a spoonful of sugar.
She got a job. She got her bearings. She started playing ball, again, which was fantastic because it was a summer of social engagements: baseball, barbecues, beer.
Naturally, she met a guy. That’s what happens when you’re single and you leave the house.
He was a friend of her baseball-playing friends. He was divorced with kids, a business, a house, and an easy smile. He’d been engaged, after his divorce – recently, in fact – but it didn’t work out. Still, he didn’t seem to have any barriers to a relationship. He invited her in. Instantly, she bought into the insta-family fantasy: hung out with his kids, watched movies, made popcorn, re-arranged the living room furniture, accessorized his kitchen, picked out his new backsplash. And since his friends were her friends, too, parties and group things were easy and awesome.
It was all pretty easy and awesome.
A few months later their mutual friends were getting married in Jamaica and forty of their closest friends tagged along for seven days.
The first five days were fantastic: sun, sand, super-hot-sex.
Then, at the reception, in the midst of the speeches, he abruptly excused himself to make a call.
That call took two hours.
People were looking for him. His friends were irritated and kept asking her: what’s up? Where’d he go? He’s missing the wedding. Isn’t that why he’s here?
When he returned, hours later, she was worried. She asked him: were you talking to your kids? Is everything ok at home?
He snapped at her: I had to make a call.
Everyone else who asked got the same pissy reply: I had to make a call.
The next day was weird – he didn’t seem to want to talk to her or be near her.
She thought, okay, we’ve been together 24-7 (less disappearances for mystery phone calls) for nearly a week; we’re tired of each other. No biggie.
The last day, he said he wanted to go into town to go shopping. She wanted to lie on the beach but thought, ok, let’s do that, instead.
Two hours into their day – and two hours away from their hotel – he said, you know, I kind of wanted to spend the day by myself.
Whoakay.
And then there was the plane ride home. They were three to a row: her, him, their mutual friend J.
She’d say something and he’d look out the window. J would look at her, with a WTF eyebrow raise, and she’d shrug. Seven days together. Maybe a little space would help.
In front of the airport, the big group divided into small groups. One group was going home – they all lived in the same area – in a limo; the others were going home in their cars. He called out a general “ok, see ya everyone, great trip!” and got in the back of the limo.
Without her.
She stood on the sidewalk in front of the airport with her suitcases, her suntan, and her shock.
His best friend since childhood was shocked, too.
Did that just happen? Did he really just leave you here?
Yes. Yes he did.
~
So his friend and his friend’s wife took her home, hung out with her, and fed her Chinese food.
The next day, he unfriended her on facebook. And didn’t call again.
Days later, his former-fiancee moved in with him.
~
Stupid is stupid. Weak character is weak character. Narcissism is narcissism. This stuff follows you, because it is you.
~
So that’s the thing. This is why I’m not eviscerating the seduction community.
Seduction techniques – like money, fame, power, beauty – just amplify what and who you already are.
If you are an asshole then you will use PUA techniques to be a bit more of an asshole because that is what you are. An asshole.
This is just popeye wisdom: ‘yam what I ‘yam.
If, however, you are a basically good-hearted lusty lad who is a touch socially awkward, then you will use seduction techniques to be a basically good-hearted lusty lad who is less socially awkward – and hopefully you won’t absorb the misogyny along the way.
(Although I’m not convinced, entirely, that this is possible).
A friend of mine who might know a lil’ something about The Community told me that in his experience most guys last three weeks: they start rocking the script, have some success and end up with a girlfriend right away.
A teeny-tiny e-book of secret and wildly not-secret valentines – all contributed by the talented, gorgeous, passionate Cleavage community members. (On average, we’re way fabulous.)
I know you want it…and it is free, of course. Just click on the link below and you’ll get straight to it. No e-mail required.
(Of course, if you want to join my merry band of subscribers, I’d love to have you. There’s a sign up box in the sidebar.)
Love is the realization that another person exists even when they are not in your presence. We are this: inevitable. Parallel lines meet and merge and curve. Infinitely.
We shall bury the notion - maybe we already have – that you are a single line or that your life is a lone trajectory. One storied arc.
I am many messy storylines, all at once.
We are parallel lines. We intersect. We are points. We are communities of dots and dot coms. We are circles. We are stars. We are constellations. Shine.
Dearest darlingest most beloved Reader (yes, baby, that’s you),
In response to my piece on Valentine’s Day (Love is my religion! Valentine’s Day is my Christmas!), Bruce Nunnallywrote,
it is important to note that the adoption of paper valentines delivered by post made it possible for valentines to be delivered anonymously. This in turn led to more racy verse. So perhaps you should invite Readers to post Valentines they would LIKE to send to their true love, but dare not?
YES!
Operation Secret Valentine is in effect.
‘Cept it doesn’t have to be secret, unless you want it to be.
If you had the boldness/courage/sheer stupidity/evolutionarily problematic lack of fear, what Valentine are you aching to send?
To who?
What would it say?
You:
You, publicly: Answer on your own blog (text images, whatever). Sign up on the list or link back (here’s a badge) so I know where to look.
–OR–
You, privately: e-mail me your valentine or comment below (enter “anonymous” instead of your name and don’t include your URL).
I am a risk-taker in relationships. In addition to being a risk-taker, I’m doggedly committed and don’t give up on a teetering romance until I’m well and truly and certainly done with it. As a result, my friends, family – and, I’m sure, more than one potential suitor – sigh and shudder and worry and are not-so-secretly convinced that I put myself on the line because I’m lonely, fat, a single mom and therefore should be lacking in self-esteem due to my apparent unfuckability (oh, if only y’all knew) and desperation for the security of a relationship.
They would be wrong. I’ve always been a risk taker: fat, skinny, younger, older, before and after kids, always. I take risks because I know I can handle it. I’m resilient. I have faith in myself. Even if I get my heart broken, even if I’m stung by love’s yellow jackets and swell up and take to bed for three days to nurse my hives, cracked heart, fractured ego and assorted existential wounds, I’ll come out of it okay. I usually learn something, too. I stretch. I grow. I expand my emotional range. I go wide and deep. I love.
This, I submit, is the opposite of low self-esteem and desperation.
But, I admit, I’m breaking the rules. It is not always comfortable. It is not always easy. And so far, I don’t have the happy ending to point at, chant “see, nya, nya, I told you so”, and then legitimately launch polemics against tepid dating and soulless relationships and the patriarchy.
So I break the rules. I own myself and my feelings and act on them. I try to connect and I call when I feel the need to do that, which can be a lot. I think that is as it should be. When you like someone, you want to talk to him. I don’t wait around or corral myself into a good girl box of chocolates hoping a man will choose me. When I like a man, he knows it. When I love him, he’s lucky. That sounds like empowerment, and it is, and sometimes I say things that feel honest and powerful to me but which are interpreted vastly differently by the people who live outside my head. Things like this: I need a man. I am lonely. Arguably, being honest about those things does not makes me pathetic or weak. In fact, I think the opposite narrative, the one that says “I don’t need a man, I want one” is ridiculously boring and weak. I get it, but it is not compelling. It goes like this: you can pay your bills. You’re doing fine. You have hobbies and friends and a cat and if you died tomorrow, you’d be satisfied that you lived a good life.
Those things are sort of true for me, too, except that I don’t have a cat. I like my upholstered goods on the unshredded side. And even with the ability to take care of myself quite competently for the rest of my life without male assistance, I still need a man, and the fact that I am marginally solvent and reasonably capable in most adult matters means that I can be shameless about expressing my needs. Admitting to needs – requiring companionship and savouring love and partnership – does not diminish me. So there, nya nya, I told you so (again. Am I undermining my credibility as an adult?).
I need a romantic, significant, long-lasting relationship. I think most people do. Relationships – friendly, romantic, platonic, passionate, familial – are the juice and the juju that a growing life demands. Being one half of a passionate partnership presents challenges and struggles and magic and love and I need that. I need to give that and exchange that and grow in that. And I’ll risk the lectures about how I should be an independent woman (I am! and it is not all self-sufficient sunshine and egalitarian roses!) to say so. Because the risk is worth the reward.
So fuck risk-managing potential relationships. I’m frustrated with that and this is the core of my exasperation with dating and the our boring cultural discourses about dating: one of the axis that it turns on is a glib, therapized, risk-managing approach to relationships. And yes, my darling reader, you ARE so prescient. I do have thoughts on the matter and I would love to share them:
I highly doubt that everyone out there who is dating has gone to therapy and explored the issues and done the work. Actually, I don’t DOUBT it, I know it. Most of us speak therapy but we haven’t really been therapized.
All the risk management and red-flagging paradoxically creates risk. Every step is a mine-field of meaning. Codes are being signalled and transgressed. Everything becomes a Big Freaking Deal. Relationships halt based on a poorly timed phone call. As proof, I offer you my recent, deep, and time-consuming research on the after-sex call. This is what I did: I googled ‘after sex call‘ and the results cracked my lid and my brain made a brief, panicked, screaming run around the living room. There are more than 80 million pages advising you when to call, when not to call, what it means when he calls on Sunday (you’re girlfriend material), Monday (he’d like to sleep with you again but you’re not relationship material), or Friday (you’re a booty call). Let me repeat it: EIGHTY MILLION pages of results on this issue.
The patriarchy. Oh, the patriarchy. The sexism. The double-standards. The give-a-cookie, get-a-ring theory of dating.
The dating rules. OMG, The Rules.
#3 and #4 are in fact the same thing and my brain is now making crop-circles in the dining room. Which is tough to do because despite what you’ve heard about Vancouverites, BC and our main agricultural export, not all of us grow grass in the dining room.
Let’s talk about The Rules, which is not just a way of talking about the stupid rules of dating but an actual book that articulates them in 35 (!!!) easy-to-remember points (!!!!) by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.Or let’s not. I’m sure you know them and all their evil, anti-feminist clones like He’s Just Not That Into You, Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (which uses cookies as a metaphor for sex and advises women to dole them out sparingly, and not at all in the first three months) and, most recently, Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World by Jordan Christy. All of them essentially advise the same thing: don’t put out, don’t call, don’t require much, and maybe, if you’re lucky and you wait around quietly looking pretty, he’ll marry you. In short, don’t be you.
So that is what is supposed to guarantee me the Happy Ending. The Wedding (which incidentally, I don’t even want. Marriage: yes. Wedding: no). The Husband.
But what kind of husband would I land with those rules? What kind of relationship and marriage would that be?
The answer to this not-so-rhetorical question is this: not the kind I want.
In Canada, you can marry anyone you want, as long as you’re only marrying one adult person at a time. This, in the world according to Kelly, is as it should be. So I have no issues with marriage. If gay and lesbian and straight people and everyone who identifies themselves in between or outside of those categories can marry, then I too can marry in good conscience because I’m not accessing a privilege allowed only to those who accidentally, luckily, have sexualities deemed socially acceptable. So, yay, Canada. Yay, marriage.
If I am to marry – and I hope that I do – I would want to marry a man who thinks like that, too. And I highly motherfucking doubt that a man who thinks like that would
be ‘caught’ by The Rules;
require a woman to play by The Rules;
get off on the chase;
like it when a woman doles out sex like the forbidden cookie, to be earned with virtuous, chivalrous behaviour and a mainly no-sex diet;
think I’m an unmarriageable slut for expressing my sexuality and acting on my desires;
interpret my ability to be real and raw and vulnerable as desperate and unappealing;
be reeled in through a prescribed course of intense manipulation;
need to be manipulated to feel valued; and
insist that I contain my needs for connection and companionship with him.
Because that would mean that he’s wired like a wannabe patriarch. And this is would be a problem for me because how I feel about fucking the patriarchy (pro) is wildly different than my feelings about fucking the patriarch (con).
So, sadly, dating is still a gender-trap. And, paradoxically, even as dating is a dangerous trap, it is so gdsafe. We talk about dysfunction and reflexively screen out anyone lacking a career or a physique that will pass muster with friends and family and who doesn’t call by Wednesday. We’re risk-managing ourselves out of hypothetical heartbreak but into one-bedroom apartments and solo-Christmases.
Recently, someone said to me “…but I never enjoyed dating the way you do.” And I was stunned. I embrace the risks that relationships entail but I hate dating. I like people, I adore men, I like meeting people and connecting and getting excited about seeing the world (and even myself) through their eyes, but dating and me – well we are not in love and never will be. It is too coded. Too mined with gendered expectations and signals and social assumptions. Too uncertain. So, yes, with one side of my mouth I bemoan the rules of engagement while with the other I freely kiss and confess that I adore being wooed. It is a very, very good thing when someone showers me with attention and affection and never makes me wonder: Do I call? Do I not call? Is he just not that into me if he doesn’t call? What does it mean if I call? To me? To him?
And that’s it. That’s the dichotomous, insane space we live in. As women, we’re supposed to be empowered and beyond The Rules. As naked, vulnerable, brave and needy people, we need to connect and be adored (or at least I do). And the dating manuals that make me crazy live in precisely that crazy-making space: they directly address the need to be feel adored by prescribing formulas for discerning adoration while in the same breath and with lipstick-slicked, barbed kisses they re-inscribe a pointed, confining, prescriptive cultural narrative about gender roles and heterosexual relationships.
About women, that narrative says this: Women should wait. Women should let men take the lead. Women should not be demanding or difficult or insist on getting their needs met by their male partners. Women should contain their sexuality. Women should be tricksters. Women should not expect anything other than the social outlines of a contractual relationship. Women who do all of these things will be rewarded with a ring. Being single is a prison you can earn your way out of with good behaviour and yes, your man is your Warden.
About men, that narrative says this: Men are hunters. Men do not have emotional needs or require friendship from their partners and if they do, they should never admit it and definitely not call before three days have elapsed because that is just unattractive. Showing you like a woman will scare her off. Don’t care for her, conquer her, because, after all, men have an inherent need to conquer women and the world. Men don’t like themselves so they cannot like women who show them that they like them. A man should marry the woman who likes him the least. A man values a woman who restrains her desires with him, because that means she’ll restrain her desires with other men, too. Men don’t know themselves so have to be tricked into getting what is good for them. Men can be tricked. Men should be tricked. Men are dumb.
How is that for seductive? After you get past the pre-marital, tedious process of risk-management and encoding gendered, patriarchal assumptions, the two of you will ideally end up in a soulless, mostly sexless marriage of convenience where the man takes out the garbage and mows the lawn and the woman flutters around doing sexy domestic things like cleaning the toilet and keeps her mouth shut except when she’s yelling at the kids. Excellent. Fantastic. I’m in.
Confession: Until this year, year thirty-sex, I never really dated. Every significant relationship I have ever had evolved out of ‘hanging out’: out of spending time together, having wide-ranging, unconstrained, passionate hours-long conversations in which we solved the political and social dilemmas of the day, doing things together, with other people, and together, until we were just, organically, a couple or some sort of watershed sexual/romantic/conversational moment occurred that articulated our ecstatic commitment to couple-y-ness.
I suspect that this dynamic is a function of youth and university. I suspect that this is even what universities are for: campuses are covert, middle-class marriage markets. Mostly middle-class families offload their kids there and after four or five years and those kids emerge as qualified adults ready to earn, baby, earn and are likely, hopefully involved with now-degreed, pedigreed, marriageable partners who also have reasonable career prospects and are probably from other middle-class families. Who needs a matchmaker or an arranged marriage if you can send your kids to college?
During the university years, young adults are installed in crappy, overpopulated apartments on a campus with several thousand mostly-single people in the same age bracket, and all of them have lots of free time and (temporarily) very little money. It is a recipe for social interaction that is based on conversation and connection and ideas, and if you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by uberliberal, progressive, smart, thinking people, then the very structures of relationships get talked about, questioned and negotiated. Then, if you’re really lucky, you end up in a Relationship with a man who thinks about these things too, and is willing to go there with you and wonder about The Rules, and fuck the Rules, and just be, and figure out how to be, together. Yessssssssss.
I spent most of my twenties in University. Naturally, I ended up in a Relationship – bizarrely, with a very socially conventional (and very good) man – and spent most of my thirties having babies. Then we split. Now I have a job, kids, a rigid and unbending schedule that requires me to see the inside of 5am every weekday, a cosmic void where babysitters should be, and no classmates or (adult) house-mates with single friends with whom to hang out and eventually fall in love. So now I have to date, marshal time to date, organize an infrastructure that allows for dating, search out appropriate people to date, all of which I do, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes begrudgingly. To me, the logistics and the safe, gendered discourses of dating are the antithesis of sexy. I miss my flophouse university days. I miss organic relationships.
Relationships are conversations. Relationships are messages sent and received and returned. Relationships are primal, biological, electric, evolutionary, revolutionary. Relationships are generative. Relationships are transcendent and divine. Relationships are magic. Relationships are worth the risk.
Too bad that as a grown-ass adult you have to date to find one.
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note: I originally posted this piece in September 2009 but I was missing it, lots, so I called it back. It loves me, too.
Normally I don’t do Valentine’s Day – you know, manufactured holiday, card companies and overpriced dead plants, and oh! how loving and tender to receive gifts at a socially-prescribed time!
YOU WILL BE ROMANTIC, DAMMIT.
So, usually, I’m a skeptic and can’t be bothered.
And then my friend Heather did a little drive-by Valentine-ing.
She might have called me a two weeks ago to say “Yeah, so I think it is time for you to take down the Christmas wreath.”
She may have been right, but I didn’t take action fast enough (immediately) to suit her.
Next thing I knew, it was Sunday morning, I was making pancakes and I heard my front gate click and thump-thump-thump up the front stairs. And then nothing.
I opened the front door…and nothing. Except a shiny red heart wreath hanging on the door, and Heather waving from her car across the street.
My oldest daughter was wonderstruck. The shine, the sparkle, the heart.
And then it occurred to me: I’m all about love and romance and intimacy and sex. This is my religion and Valentine’s Day is my Christmas.
So we’ve spent some time making Valentines for all of our beloveds. Hearts and pretty frippery adorn our doors and windows. Our house is such a loving place.
And I’m not even bothered that for the first time in a million years (okay, since kindergarten) I don’t have a boyfriend to tell “don’t get me anything for Valentine’s Day because I don’t believe in it.”
That might be because I’m choosing the no man thing. I’m on a man-diet.
I’m using the word “man-diet” because I know diets, as systems of deprivation rather than as descriptions of what you eat, are temporary and doomed to failure. I’m so okay with failing at this diet. Eventually.
Anyway, this is my heads up! I’m doing Valentine’s Day but I’ve got no lover-lover-man! Which means all my real and daily loves can expect much love.
I’m all about the beauty buried in the minutiae of life. I don’t think romance is flowers and chocolates (in fact, I just think: waste of money).
Instead, I think – I know – love is when my sister picks up my girls from daycare because I’m stuck on a bridge for three hours. Love is when I’m tempted to put my need where it doesn’t belong and a friend says “call me, instead.” Love is my baby sleeping in the small of my back. Love is telling my boss that I quit and she cries (ok, we both did) because she’s sad to lose me but so damn proud of me. Love is “I’m proud of you.” Love is my friend knocking at my door and saying “give her to me” about my incessantly screaming two year old. Love is my brother-in-law changing the oil in my car. Love is making dinner together. Love is the lunches I pack every day for my children.
So: Valentine’s Day. I’m all about the love. The mundane kind.
On the flight to Las Vegas, Heather, my sassalicious/salacious friend who likes to front like she’s tough, cracked and cried and gushed about how much she loves her husband. To be fair, she’s terrified of flying and was flying (high!) under the influence of two Ativans and three vodka cranberries.
Please note: very very bad combination. Do not try this at home, or anywhere. It gets messy. Heather knocked my laptop off the seat tray and then knocked her drink into my purse and later knocked boots with her camera in the airport bathroom. To summarize: inadvisable.
I digress. This is part three of my Las Vegas trilogy. Las Vegas is all about money and sex and I’ve mused about the meaning of those things already. So now let’s talk about the place – other than Las Vegas – where money and sex unite and ignite: marriage.
Kelly: Do you get butterflies about Tyler? Or is he like an old shoe? Heather: What kind of shoe are we talking about? Be specific. Kelly: I don’t know. He’s your shoe. Heather: Yeah, I do. Last time he went away…when he came back, I got the butterflies. Kelly: Like your stomach flipped over? Heather: I had been alone with the kids for three and half days/years. I was REALLY happy to see him. Kelly: If Tyler wasn’t your husband, would he be one of your best friends? Heather: If he talked more, or at all, sure…you know, we did the long distance thing before we got together. So I guess we were friends first. Kelly: How did you talk on the phone if he doesn’t talk? Heather: He talked then. He worked hard. We talked for hours and hours on the phone. That’s why we had sex on the first date. It was all that talking. Kelly: Can I write that you had sex on the first date in my blog? Does your mother read my blog? Heather: Is it in Canadian Living? My mother only reads Canadian Living. Kelly: We should be fine.
I asked Heather this because she’s my sister from another mother except she’s a reformed tramp. (Reformed in the sense that she only slings it in one direction now because she’s happily married and them’s the rules, usually.) I ask Heather because she’s like me and she’s got what I want. But I ask other people these questions because I wonder – eternally, constantly, with every breath – if passion is a sprint, a marathon, or a long slow walk that keeps rockin’ fifty years later in twin rockers on the porch.
And because love and marriage are everywhere in Las Vegas.
The couple in the row behind us kissed all the way from Bellingham to Las Vegas. In Vegas, there were sex cards galore…and brides. I saw a bride kick a cowboy straight in the shins.
In my head, I cheered on the shin-kicking bride. (I’m a terrible pacifist.) Earlier, that same cowboy was insistently and persistently friendly with me while I tried to have a drink with my colleague and his wife. Cowboy desperately wanted me to meet his friend. He told me his friend had “mustache rights”. This meant nothing to me, but it meant something to my co-worker who got very, very upset.
After Cowboy left, I was brought up to speed on the meaning of mustache rights.
It is not a good pick up line.
Sometimes this human mating game is perplexing and other times just plain unfathomable. Thirty-sex years into it, I’m still figuring out the rules and I like them less and less the more I learn. And one thing that I have learned for sure is that love doesn’t play by the rules – hence our need to make them. We think codes and lines and boundaries and laws will keep us safe. But love is an outlaw.
And oh, how I love love.
Cowboy’s attempt to play drunken wingman for his mustachioed friend interrupted a great love story. My coworker and his wife were telling me how they met and married.
They were high school sweethearts who broke up when he went off to college. He graduated, got married and stayed married for twenty-four years. He got divorced and got married again for twenty-four months.
In the wake of his second divorce, he signed up at Classmates.com. A week later, he had a message from his former sweetheart, saying “I don’t know if you remember me…I’m married and living in Florida.”
He wrote back and told her about his life, his divorce, and his pending trip to Florida, asking “Can I take you and your husband to dinner? I’d love to catch up.”
She wrote back “Funny you should mention your divorce…I’m in the middle of a divorce, myself.”
He called her, and when she picked up the phone and it was like they had never stopped talking.
He went to Florida to see her. He started going to Florida every six weeks. Then every four. Then every two. Then he was out of airmiles and free trips and told her that it was time for them to live in the same place. She quit her job and moved to Washington, DC with him.
And then they got married – in Vegas – on January 1, 2003. Every year since then they end and start the year in Las Vegas, the place where they ended their days apart and started their life together.
My big, burly friend – who, a few days earlier at a company dinner introduced me to filet mignon and the Manhattan (steak and bourbon. I like ‘em. Who knew?) and explained to me in abrupt, gruff detail the meaning of Cowboy’s mustache rights – then leaned over to me and said, “I bet you didn ‘t know I was so sensitive, did you?
No I didn’t . But now I do. And I’m so glad I do.
This story – this long, interrupted, lost and found love story – ran honey through my veins.
It could be straight from the pages of Lost and Found Lovers. In a study of 1001 participants, Dr. Nancy Kalish found that lovers who reunite later in life end up staying together (78%) and have an astonishingly low divorce rate of 1.5% compared to the national average of 51%.
That seems to me to be good odds for a gamble, and better odds than most. When it comes to my heart, I like to know my numbers.
Months ago, I wrote that there is research correlating the length, success and happiness of marriages to length of courtship – but not in the way you might expect. The longer the courtship, the shorter the marriage. A courtship longer than thirty-one months predicts divorce within one to four years. Couples who marry in haste - nine to eighteen months after starting a relationship - make it past the seven year mark and report very high levels of marital happiness.
So – don’t trust me, trust Ted Huston, PhD. I’m just wondering about butterflies and new relationship energy and the recipe for happily ever after. So I ask around. I look around. I get around. I poke around in books and libraries and make queries with my bff, Google. And what I’ve noticed is that the happily loved-up people I know seem to have a couple of things in common: it was passion, right away and they liked each other. Like, really really like each other, like spending time together, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. They hang out. They would be friends even if they weren’t lovers. But they have to be lovers because of all that passion.
__________________________________
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For ten days, a phrase has followed me around like a hungry kitten, mewing plaintively, quietly roaring, threading itself around my ankles, feinting, shadowing me. It wants to be fed.
Two Saturdays ago Lianne Raymond talked to me about women and community and creativity and art-hunger. She said, something is dying to be born.
Something is dying to be born.
It seems such a female thing to say: the flesh poetry of experience. A secret language traded between intimates of the violence of birth and glory of delivery. The wrenching of asunder and the joy of embrace. A story beaten in the pulse of mundane responsibility and cosmic love. Goddesses and bitches and sisters and women. We know this story. It is the story of generation.
It is the story of Kali, goddess of destruction, eater of time, protectress and creatrix.
It is the story of Eve. Of Lilith. Of my feminist friend, Ronna Detrick, who walked away from a church and a marriage but knows with her body, her mind and her faith that all of her leavings have led to profound findings.
It is the story of money. Of power. Of God. He who giveth, taketh away.
It is the story of sex and passion and love, all of which can destroy lives and create them. Women throw themselves on the pyre of love and of loss and say burn me up.
It is the story of Bertha, the mad wife in Jane Eyre who burns down Thornfield, and of the haiku necessity of ember, flame, and ash:
It is the story of cold, clear winter moons and of truths washed clean by icy, white light. It is the story of Foucault and forgiveness, of brooms and brushed floors, and revolution.
Revolution: 360 degees: all the way around. Return. Circles. Cycles. Seasons.
I’ve heard it said that the moment you most feel like giving up is five seconds before you make it. Seth Godin calls it The Dip. Everyone tells you to be patient. Be still. Wait.
Patience is my struggle. It is always my struggle. I’m a passionista* and I feed on new and juju and vision and go! go! go!.
And yet I knew. This is my thick, constrained, chrysalis moment.
That winged knowledge helped me to ask, to express, to name:
I’m at a decision point career-wise and the right thing to do is just wait. I’m almost there. Persevere. Faith. patience. etc.
Yet I’m finding it tough to wait, and be patient, and trust. There are no sexy progress reports to file on that…I am an action-gal. I find patience and stillness a challenge. I crave the zoom.
waiting. and patience. the courageous thing is not always sexy.
And Randi Buckley, “bringer of hope and compassionate revolution” (in other words, “coach”) asked me:
What would make the stillness easier to bear?
What would make the stillness easier to bear?
It is not the first time I’ve been asked to contemplate and make my peace with quiet. Astarte, my goddess warrior friend, once asked me: How about being still?
Bah. Still. I run from you and all your zen-alicious zombie friends. I kick you straight in the shins and sing can’t touch this. (Hammer-style.)
Yet, everywhere I run, there you are.
And so I tried to answer Randi Buckley’s question with my body instead of language.
I did this because I needed to get out of my head. I needed to not parse and filter and sort and story-tell and make it all mean Something when Something just wasn’t ready to be meaningful yet.
Because that is the space that makes me crazy. The uncertain. My need for certainty leads me to make things certain, now. It makes me abandon projects and people and loves that ought to be sustained. I am more intimate with no than I am with maybe.
And so my mind was a trap. My body was the answer.
When our times are desperate, our minds will do us more harm than good. So first…stop beating yourself up. Recognize the pain for what it is and know that it will pass. This isn’t the truth.
During a squat session, my body is not happy. The next morning, my body is not very happy with me. But my mind is singing because I did something real. I wake up two days later and I know I am stronger. This gives a feeling of confidence and satisfaction that I have a hard time putting into words…
Our minds are busy places. How often do you really get to slow down and clear your head? In my own case, my mind is usually preocuppied with whatever shenanigans my body is getting up to on the Tourette’s front.
But just about everyone I know has a freaking fire drill going off in their head most days. They never get a chance to clear their head, they just add to the clutter. Always reacting, with little time for big picture thinking.
Training can bring clarity because it puts you in the moment. It roots you in the present reality and if your head is anywhere else you’re not working hard enough.
I knew this from my conversations with Lindsey from A Design So Vast. She finds moments of freedom from her “monkey mind” in running and yoga. I get it from sex.
And people. I needed to be with people, to listen to their out-loud words instead of my own frantic, silent chatter.
My friends came over. They brought their own martini glasses, made pretty, approving noises about my house and gave good gossip. About sex. I talked a lot.
I gave myself my friends and I gave myself three days off from writing. I gave myself lunch with women who’ve walked this road a little further than I. And I heard that I’m doing just fine.
And Friday gave me two guestposts on big bad beautiful blogs. The gods of traffic favoured me and so did the ones who make it rain, rain, rain, rain.
And the stillness passed. The moon rose. The New Year looms and shines and shakes her hips.
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passionista: AbiolaTV is a “goddess passionista”. She owns the word but I borrow/steal/appropriate it with abandon and enthusiasm.
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