April Come She Will
Early on during the pandemic I did something I had sworn I would never do as long as I lived: I got back onto the dating apps and started browsing. A couple of months prior, I had gone on a date with a girl that I had encountered repeatedly in real life, but we only eventually connected for coffee, by happenstance, on one of the apps. It was clear from how that date went that the girl had been taken by how I looked, but clearly had a bunch of expectations about who I would be, which, of course, had nothing to do with who I actually am.
I came away from this experience with the recognition that dating apps are the wrong way to decide who you want to connect with, romantically speaking. A month or so later, I read a book about the founder of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, Frank Oppenheimer, who was the 8-year younger brother of the more well-known Robert who worked on the atomic bomb. (Frank was also a physicist who also worked at Los Alamos.) A piece of early advice that elder Robert gave his younger brother Frank: to try and live your life in a way that is impressive to women is like trying to design a machine where only specification is that it be noiseless. (Almost a direct quote, but not quite verbatim.) In other words, being impressive to women is a side effect of a life being well-lived and not an end to pursue in itself.
This was the exactly lesson I took away from this particular date. I promptly deleted my account and forgot all about my interest in connecting with women. My energy became refocused entirely on how I would go about living my life in a way that I would find fulfilling. I was well on the way to doing this in San Francisco when a couple of weeks in, the world shut down due to viral load.
So, being forced to remain at home, I decide to venture back out virtually, but with the strict resolve that I shouldn't lose sight of the ultimate goal: live my life the way I want to. I'm looking for a compatible companion, but passively; this is not a strict requirement.
I only connected with one particular girl about a month into the pandemic. We chatted over text for a week or so, and eventually ended up on the phone with each other early one evening. During the first two or three hours, she spent a lot of time talking about how she was estranged from her parents back in the midwest, due to some long-standing and angry disagreements with her father, and talking about a few of her negative experiences on first dates with men from the recent past.
For those of you who have been out of the dating loop for too long, or who were fortunate enough to never fall into it, I'll clarify: both of these things are massive, massive red flags. It's one thing to discuss these things in some detail when well-into an established connection with someone, but to expound on them on great length on the first date should be enough to send anyone running for the door. I spotted them instantly, and the whole time we were speaking on the phone, I was furrowing my brow.
So why didn't I make up a polite excuse and hang up right away? Simple: this girl had an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in some form of psychotherapy. She was on her way to becoming a fully licensed, practicing therapist.
So, it's an old poker question. You think about what you know. You think about what you think the other person knows. You think about what the other person thinks they think you know. And so on. You keep going down the levels and use your conclusions about each of these to assess the possible motive behind why a person is doing what they are doing. She knew I wasn't clueless about human psychology, and she would have clearly known, as a therapist, that talking about the latently hostile conflict you have with your father, right off the bat, on a first date, is a Very Bad Sign. So, why is she telling me?
I had no reason to embrace any kind of denial around the issue, but there was one possibility that occurred to me. Someone might reveal their warts on a first date because they're simply being open and honest about who they are. Here is what I'm dealing with, in other words, and I'm telling you this so that you're aware of all of me. Please be careful about how you judge me, and if I go further, I expect your support about these things.
Of course, this is only acceptable (at least to me) on two conditions. First, that the person is taking active steps to work on the issues they are bringing to light. Second, and more importantly, is that the motive for revealing these things really is about transparency and not a justification for future dysfunctional behavior. In other words, if the person ends up acting like a shitty, selfish person, I call them on it, and their response is: "Hey, that's just who I am. I'm not apologizing for who I am. I told you I have problems, you either accept all of those and me, as I am, or you're an asshole."
After the initial few hours of our first phone "date", we ended up spending the entire night on the phone talking. It didn't end until she fell asleep at seven the next morning. Staying up all night to talk on the phone with someone, whether friend or romantic interest, wasn't something I had done in almost 20 years. It seemed like there was at least a basis for friendship, so I bookmarked the red flags in my mind, making sure that I would revisit them down the line once I had more experience with this person, and figure out if they were actually red flags or just yellow ones.
It's a very fine line between not accepting someone else's faults because you're being unreasonable or too particular about what you expect from other people, and not accepting them because the other person really isn't trying to grow and get better. I really think the decision comes down to what you are willing to tolerate from someone relative to their other strong qualities. Everyone has faults, not everyone is aware of them or interested in working with them, but it's a question of how that balances out with all of the other aspects of the relationship. Is it worth your time and trouble dealing with this particular person's flaws, or do they overshadow everything else that's good about them? In this particular girl's case, I ended up deciding a few weeks in that it was the latter case.
The intent of writing on the Internet is usually ambiguous, due to the lack of tone of voice, facial expressions, and so on. To be clear, I don't actually feel any frustration or anger towards this person. I ultimately sensed we were incompatible on a fundamental level and politely ended it with a phone call one morning. I share this experience here only in the hopes that it might land on someone's computer screen who might get some benefit out of it.
One thing I won't ever forgot is our first in-person date, in late May of 2020. We ended up sitting on the lower slope of Buena Vista Park that overlooks Haight Street, on a bright and sunny day, a few blocks from the center of the Summer of Love where it meets Ashbury. This was shortly after the death of George Floyd caused an eruption of protests and riots around the country, so there was actually a curfew in San Francisco that started that evening at 8 PM. I dragged the day out as long as I could, walking most of the way back to her place even though it was out of my way. As I started home, I remember finding myself in Alamo Square, staring at the famous Painted Ladies, realizing it was 20 minutes before curfew and I was a good 45 minute walk from my place in SoMa. I booked it home, running several blocks in clothes that were never meant for running, imagining that I might end up being tear-gassed and stun-gunned by police enforcing curfew. Around 8:20, I ended up back at the Caltrain station at 4th and King St, right by where I lived, and, in the absence of any police officers thumping the heads of the few homeless who were palling around the station, I stopped to observe the early twilight and the uncharacteristically peaceful and vacant San Francisco streets for 5 minutes before I went inside.
Like any early relationship, it's easy to get caught up in how well things seem to be going, and feelings. I had an overall sense that this relationship wasn't going to work, not least of all because I concluded that the red flags were actually red flags, but what ultimately cinched it for me was something she said to me in the course of one of our phone conversations: "I know that you don't believe in God or ghosts, but one of these days I'm going to convince you that you're wrong and I'm right."
This statement is really only problematic if you have the full context, which I'm not going to give here, for the dear reader's sake, and that of brevity. I found the statement curious, because we had talked about both of these topics before, and asserting that I "didn't believe" in either of them is incorrect, or at best imprecise. Instead of correcting her, I said, with mild amusement, "I like that you think I'm wrong on these points, and that you seem to have taken it upon yourself, as a personal mission, to correct me on them." Her reply was telling: she stumbled over her words trying to backtrack what she had said, but the one thing she did not do was deny it. And right there, we have just uncovered reason number who-knows-because-I-had-lost-count-at-that-point: where I disagree with someone else, I'm not looking to be "fixed" and I'm not looking to "fix" anyone else. Sufficient to myself are my own troubles.
In the wake of my breaking it off with her, she got back in touch and insisted that she wanted to remain friends, which was something I didn't believe for a second but went along with for experimental reasons. The hypothesis: this won't end well, so make sure you don't open yourself up to be hurt. My last exchange with her was in August, over text, as I was driving out of the Bay Area and back to the midwest. She knew I was going to leave, but on hearing that I was leaving, she chastised me in an over-the-top fashion for some trivial mistake and broke off contact. It's spelled vindication: I smelled immaturity all over you and you just confirmed it.
So, a relationship that starts in April dies an uneventful death in August. The whole thing followed the lyrics to the old song perfectly.
Every woman I've ever been involved with romantically leaves things behind. I'm not talking about physical possessions, but rather changes in my behavior or habits that stick for the long term. I keep those to myself. But, in our lengthy conversations on philosophy and psychology, she left me with several interesting questions that I still ponder to this day.
Here is one: in working towards her certification as a therapist, she worked in one of San Francisco's mental health centers set up for the chronic homeless and substance abusers. She encountered her fair share of schizophrenic people in that time, as one would expect. I once asked her if the hallucinations of schizophrenics were products of the unconscious, having the same ultimate source as that of our nightly dreams.
"That's what all the literature on the subject says," she told me. "But I have another theory about it." Her sense was that the hallucinations of schizophrenics was actually reflective of real realities that were different than our own. In archaic times, people who hallucinated became apprenticies to be shamans and had the energy of their visions channeled into something that would be useful to the tribe. They became comfortable with the madness pouring out of them, made meaning out of it, and used that knowledge to help others interpret their dreams.
But, in our modern society, we write such people off as psychotics who are out of touch with reality and shun them socially. It's like many other forms of mental illness: why did they survive in our ancestors if they didn't offer some benefit to the individual, the group, or the species? It can't be that some people just have sexual fetishes for these kinds of dysfunctions. It may even be incorrect to call them the latter; the modern era's dysfunctions might simply be another's utilities. (If this idea sounds Jungian, it absolutely is, but his writings on the subject refer to it by the archaic moniker of "dementia praecox". Despite being a psychologist and interested in these sorts of things, she had an aversion to reading Jung or discussing him with me, quite possibly because the ego often refuses to hear evidence that its own ideas are not entirely new creations.)
I don't know much about schizophrenia itself, but I do wonder is it's a vestige of something that used to have genuine and positive use that we just haven't figured out how to harness, or refuse to because it's inconvenient.
I came away from this experience with the recognition that dating apps are the wrong way to decide who you want to connect with, romantically speaking. A month or so later, I read a book about the founder of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, Frank Oppenheimer, who was the 8-year younger brother of the more well-known Robert who worked on the atomic bomb. (Frank was also a physicist who also worked at Los Alamos.) A piece of early advice that elder Robert gave his younger brother Frank: to try and live your life in a way that is impressive to women is like trying to design a machine where only specification is that it be noiseless. (Almost a direct quote, but not quite verbatim.) In other words, being impressive to women is a side effect of a life being well-lived and not an end to pursue in itself.
This was the exactly lesson I took away from this particular date. I promptly deleted my account and forgot all about my interest in connecting with women. My energy became refocused entirely on how I would go about living my life in a way that I would find fulfilling. I was well on the way to doing this in San Francisco when a couple of weeks in, the world shut down due to viral load.
So, being forced to remain at home, I decide to venture back out virtually, but with the strict resolve that I shouldn't lose sight of the ultimate goal: live my life the way I want to. I'm looking for a compatible companion, but passively; this is not a strict requirement.
I only connected with one particular girl about a month into the pandemic. We chatted over text for a week or so, and eventually ended up on the phone with each other early one evening. During the first two or three hours, she spent a lot of time talking about how she was estranged from her parents back in the midwest, due to some long-standing and angry disagreements with her father, and talking about a few of her negative experiences on first dates with men from the recent past.
For those of you who have been out of the dating loop for too long, or who were fortunate enough to never fall into it, I'll clarify: both of these things are massive, massive red flags. It's one thing to discuss these things in some detail when well-into an established connection with someone, but to expound on them on great length on the first date should be enough to send anyone running for the door. I spotted them instantly, and the whole time we were speaking on the phone, I was furrowing my brow.
So why didn't I make up a polite excuse and hang up right away? Simple: this girl had an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in some form of psychotherapy. She was on her way to becoming a fully licensed, practicing therapist.
So, it's an old poker question. You think about what you know. You think about what you think the other person knows. You think about what the other person thinks they think you know. And so on. You keep going down the levels and use your conclusions about each of these to assess the possible motive behind why a person is doing what they are doing. She knew I wasn't clueless about human psychology, and she would have clearly known, as a therapist, that talking about the latently hostile conflict you have with your father, right off the bat, on a first date, is a Very Bad Sign. So, why is she telling me?
I had no reason to embrace any kind of denial around the issue, but there was one possibility that occurred to me. Someone might reveal their warts on a first date because they're simply being open and honest about who they are. Here is what I'm dealing with, in other words, and I'm telling you this so that you're aware of all of me. Please be careful about how you judge me, and if I go further, I expect your support about these things.
Of course, this is only acceptable (at least to me) on two conditions. First, that the person is taking active steps to work on the issues they are bringing to light. Second, and more importantly, is that the motive for revealing these things really is about transparency and not a justification for future dysfunctional behavior. In other words, if the person ends up acting like a shitty, selfish person, I call them on it, and their response is: "Hey, that's just who I am. I'm not apologizing for who I am. I told you I have problems, you either accept all of those and me, as I am, or you're an asshole."
After the initial few hours of our first phone "date", we ended up spending the entire night on the phone talking. It didn't end until she fell asleep at seven the next morning. Staying up all night to talk on the phone with someone, whether friend or romantic interest, wasn't something I had done in almost 20 years. It seemed like there was at least a basis for friendship, so I bookmarked the red flags in my mind, making sure that I would revisit them down the line once I had more experience with this person, and figure out if they were actually red flags or just yellow ones.
It's a very fine line between not accepting someone else's faults because you're being unreasonable or too particular about what you expect from other people, and not accepting them because the other person really isn't trying to grow and get better. I really think the decision comes down to what you are willing to tolerate from someone relative to their other strong qualities. Everyone has faults, not everyone is aware of them or interested in working with them, but it's a question of how that balances out with all of the other aspects of the relationship. Is it worth your time and trouble dealing with this particular person's flaws, or do they overshadow everything else that's good about them? In this particular girl's case, I ended up deciding a few weeks in that it was the latter case.
The intent of writing on the Internet is usually ambiguous, due to the lack of tone of voice, facial expressions, and so on. To be clear, I don't actually feel any frustration or anger towards this person. I ultimately sensed we were incompatible on a fundamental level and politely ended it with a phone call one morning. I share this experience here only in the hopes that it might land on someone's computer screen who might get some benefit out of it.
One thing I won't ever forgot is our first in-person date, in late May of 2020. We ended up sitting on the lower slope of Buena Vista Park that overlooks Haight Street, on a bright and sunny day, a few blocks from the center of the Summer of Love where it meets Ashbury. This was shortly after the death of George Floyd caused an eruption of protests and riots around the country, so there was actually a curfew in San Francisco that started that evening at 8 PM. I dragged the day out as long as I could, walking most of the way back to her place even though it was out of my way. As I started home, I remember finding myself in Alamo Square, staring at the famous Painted Ladies, realizing it was 20 minutes before curfew and I was a good 45 minute walk from my place in SoMa. I booked it home, running several blocks in clothes that were never meant for running, imagining that I might end up being tear-gassed and stun-gunned by police enforcing curfew. Around 8:20, I ended up back at the Caltrain station at 4th and King St, right by where I lived, and, in the absence of any police officers thumping the heads of the few homeless who were palling around the station, I stopped to observe the early twilight and the uncharacteristically peaceful and vacant San Francisco streets for 5 minutes before I went inside.
Like any early relationship, it's easy to get caught up in how well things seem to be going, and feelings. I had an overall sense that this relationship wasn't going to work, not least of all because I concluded that the red flags were actually red flags, but what ultimately cinched it for me was something she said to me in the course of one of our phone conversations: "I know that you don't believe in God or ghosts, but one of these days I'm going to convince you that you're wrong and I'm right."
This statement is really only problematic if you have the full context, which I'm not going to give here, for the dear reader's sake, and that of brevity. I found the statement curious, because we had talked about both of these topics before, and asserting that I "didn't believe" in either of them is incorrect, or at best imprecise. Instead of correcting her, I said, with mild amusement, "I like that you think I'm wrong on these points, and that you seem to have taken it upon yourself, as a personal mission, to correct me on them." Her reply was telling: she stumbled over her words trying to backtrack what she had said, but the one thing she did not do was deny it. And right there, we have just uncovered reason number who-knows-because-I-had-lost-count-at-that-point: where I disagree with someone else, I'm not looking to be "fixed" and I'm not looking to "fix" anyone else. Sufficient to myself are my own troubles.
In the wake of my breaking it off with her, she got back in touch and insisted that she wanted to remain friends, which was something I didn't believe for a second but went along with for experimental reasons. The hypothesis: this won't end well, so make sure you don't open yourself up to be hurt. My last exchange with her was in August, over text, as I was driving out of the Bay Area and back to the midwest. She knew I was going to leave, but on hearing that I was leaving, she chastised me in an over-the-top fashion for some trivial mistake and broke off contact. It's spelled vindication: I smelled immaturity all over you and you just confirmed it.
So, a relationship that starts in April dies an uneventful death in August. The whole thing followed the lyrics to the old song perfectly.
Every woman I've ever been involved with romantically leaves things behind. I'm not talking about physical possessions, but rather changes in my behavior or habits that stick for the long term. I keep those to myself. But, in our lengthy conversations on philosophy and psychology, she left me with several interesting questions that I still ponder to this day.
Here is one: in working towards her certification as a therapist, she worked in one of San Francisco's mental health centers set up for the chronic homeless and substance abusers. She encountered her fair share of schizophrenic people in that time, as one would expect. I once asked her if the hallucinations of schizophrenics were products of the unconscious, having the same ultimate source as that of our nightly dreams.
"That's what all the literature on the subject says," she told me. "But I have another theory about it." Her sense was that the hallucinations of schizophrenics was actually reflective of real realities that were different than our own. In archaic times, people who hallucinated became apprenticies to be shamans and had the energy of their visions channeled into something that would be useful to the tribe. They became comfortable with the madness pouring out of them, made meaning out of it, and used that knowledge to help others interpret their dreams.
But, in our modern society, we write such people off as psychotics who are out of touch with reality and shun them socially. It's like many other forms of mental illness: why did they survive in our ancestors if they didn't offer some benefit to the individual, the group, or the species? It can't be that some people just have sexual fetishes for these kinds of dysfunctions. It may even be incorrect to call them the latter; the modern era's dysfunctions might simply be another's utilities. (If this idea sounds Jungian, it absolutely is, but his writings on the subject refer to it by the archaic moniker of "dementia praecox". Despite being a psychologist and interested in these sorts of things, she had an aversion to reading Jung or discussing him with me, quite possibly because the ego often refuses to hear evidence that its own ideas are not entirely new creations.)
I don't know much about schizophrenia itself, but I do wonder is it's a vestige of something that used to have genuine and positive use that we just haven't figured out how to harness, or refuse to because it's inconvenient.