Monday, December 05, 2011

The pattern

There is a pattern that has emerged with these incidents over the years.

1) I become attracted to someone, but she's not interested. Or in this case, I find women who are interested, but it's in part because I've misrepresented myself.

2) I get feedback from my friends as to what I did wrong, and criticize myself for having repeated the same mistakes. The feedback I get from my friends varies. Men and married women are generally supportive and encourage me to keep trying; unmarried women are usually, but not always, less charitable. They criticize my appearance, personality, spiritual beliefs and hobbies, but not in that order. The single most frequent feedback I get from my unarried female friends is that I'm 'boring'. More recently, I've also heard that I'm 'too old' — even from women my own age.

3) I stress and ponder and self-examine until I'm drained by it. In the end, I know nothing more than I did at the outset. No new facts are revealed or additional wisdom received.

4) Disgusted and embarrassed by my own behavior, I just put the whole thing on a shelf and forget about it for a couple of years.

Insert definition of insanity here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are not boring or too old and there is nothing wrong with your appearance, personality, spiritual beliefs, or hobbies. For reasons only you could tell us if you knew, you are unavailable. I am single and your age and I think you are a talented, intelligent, attractive man with some interesting baggage. Soartstar

Nina said...

I agree with Soartstar!

There's nothing wrong at all. It's all just dumb luck, if/when it happens at all.

mcarp said...

Thank you for your kind and supportive remarks. I fear you represent a minority viewpoint, but any good words are welcome.

patrizia said...

I think you need to rethink your own definitions of what attraction and love represent.

In point of fact, you should be sitting in the catbird seat here, given that there are so many more available women our age than there are men. (I think we're around the same age.)

Of course, I don't know you at all in real life. But my sense from knowing you online for as long as I have -- 15 years? -- is that in earliest, earliest childhood you learned to equate love with neglect, presumably because your mother neglected you. And this means that unless you take the time to retrain yourself psychologically, you're always going to equate the feeling of love with the feeling of being neglected. If there's a chance you won't be neglected, i.e. ignored, then you can't feel attachment.

You know, it IS pretty fun to be part of a team. Intimacy is really a wonderful thing. So I hope this is a conundrum you work through and I also apologize if I'm being presumptuous. You know me -- the angel who rushes in where fools fear to tread, etc.