Winning by not playing

Blogblah! has a post here that you should read, if you haven't already, before continuing with this one.

The details are different in some particulars, but generally speaking, his story is my story. I've haven't questioned a lot of other men about this, but I've talked about it to enough others to know that he and I are far from alone.

One thought in his post suggests a response. It's a point on which he and I differ:

"I know several people who don’t date at all and don’t want to. They have their imaginary self, imagined love and their memories. That’s it. They never have the rush of a new relationship and a new sex partner nor the high of feeling confident and fulfilled, but they never suffer the fiery hell of a relationship in flux and shambles, leading to a pit of burning lost love excrement up to one’s nose. They “win” by not playing.

"In my opinion, they have put life on hold and in my opinion this is a fate worse than death. It’s also the option I believe I am most likely to choose."

That describes how I live pretty accurately, but not my attitude about it. When John says we "'win' by not playing," he makes the assumption that there is a 'win' and a 'lose' to these choices. I had that same belief at one point. In fact, it was that belief as much as anything else that kept driving me to bang my head against the brick wall of trying to get a whole series of 'Miss Wonderfuls' into my life.

Because of the kind of woman to which I was attracted (cute but not beautiful, extremely intelligent, borderline personality), these 'relationships' inevitably ended with her yanking the rug out from under me and standing there laughing or offering mock sympathy -- as often as not, arm in arm with the ne'er-do-well 'bad boy' heir to the Fahrquahr Humate Company fortune -- while I again sat on my bruised ass on the floor trying to figure out why repeating the same actions had once more led to the same results.

But I kept doing it, and for a long time I assumed I kept doing it only because I was lonely and/or horny.

My view was also tainted by the 'if at first you don't succeed, try, try again' maxim, whose point of diminishing returns I had passed by about 1980.

After getting into therapy about ten years ago, I had a couple of relationships that were not based on the need to 'rescue' a cute, bright psychotic. Those relationships were all brief and in every case I was the one who ended it.

I was bored by them, and I was faced with the discovery that having a crazy person wreck my life by exploiting my gullibility and naiveté at least offered some emotional payoff, while being nagged about my clothes or my car or my pets was just a drag. It was at that point I pretty much gave up the relationship hunt.

Eventually, I came to face and accept another unpleasant fact: I had viewed the pursuit of all those cute, bright, crazy women as a win/lose situation, and also to a certain degree a competitive situation in which I was losing by not 'getting' the same women other guys were 'getting'.

I considered myself a socially enlightened guy and not someone who 'objectified' women. But that's what I was doing –– not in the same way that Larry Flynt does it, but objectifying them nonetheless.

Nowadays, I don't think of it so much as win/lose anymore. Sometimes I slip back into that mode out of habit or depression, but it happens rarely.

Instead, I follow the zen and taoist belief in viewing things as they are and only as they are, and not viewing them in comparison to other events or other things, or through the distorting filters of prejudices, preferences and memories.

I am alone, and that is neither good nor bad. It is neither the right way to be nor the wrong way to be. It is simply a way of being.

This is actually at variance with the Buddha's own teaching, which was that romantic love was a grasping, controlling, attaching emotion that was as bad as jealousy or anger or anything else.

We glorify that kind of love in our culture, in my opinion, for the same reason we glorify driving around in big circles at high speeds, invading other countries or watching guys line up and then suddenly jump up and run into each while someone tries to sneak a ball past them. We just love crazy, pointless, adrenaline-producing stimuli.

My life is far from being 'on hold.' It's true that I'm more-or-less drifting with no goals, but I'm aware of that and fine with it. My life is actually busier now than it's ever been. I have more friends today –– including John Long –– than I had cumulatively from 1980 to 2003. So for me, at least, this is not a fate worse than death.