I'm sorry. We're just too...beautiful for one another.
“How good it is, when you have roast meat or such like foods before you, to impress upon your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple-edged robe is simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood! And in sexual intercourse it is no more than the friction of membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected. How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is! This should be your practice throughout your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves. Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell.”
- Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, 6.14.
Do stoics get laid? Well, we assume they did since Marcus Aurelius and his cousin-wife Faustina bore fourteen children. So yes.
I am a big fan of stoicism. I have a copy of Meditations on my bedside table, in case I want to feel sorry for myself. Which is a lot.
However, sometimes, it's warranted.
At the end of 2016, I faced a turning point that had me up at nights.
I was sitting at a café with friends, one of which was despised by my girlfriend at the time. My girlfriend had all the traits of a malignant narcissist. She would abuse me, belittle me, accuse me of cheating on her while being simultaneously unworthy of anyone’s love. I implored my friend not to post that we were hanging out – and she asked why. I told her. She said that wasn’t normal. My suffering was given voice.
Not long after I ended the relationship. I felt like Atlas shrugging off the world. Grass looked greener, food was sweeter, blah blah blah. It felt like I was passing through decayed epochs and into a grand new dawn. I took about six months off any sort of dating to get my head straight – a conscious dating moratorium. No sex, no dating. Talking to women and flirting was A-OK; but I would have to “pre-reject” anything going further.
Then like a naïve little baby, I entered the world of dating.
It was like learning a whole new language. A whole new culture. What does it mean when she says she can’t make it and we’ll reschedule? Why did she want a second date so quickly just to say we weren’t compatible? How come she said she wasn’t interested and came back a week later to say she made a mistake? Why the fuck do I know all this bullshit minutiae from people I’ve only met once?
I got advice from friends and naturally, the internet. For the stoic in me, one of the greatest pieces of insight was not to be attached to outcome. That women will come and go and there’s not much I can do about that. What's next, a stern dude clad in fedora and trenchcoat appears into the light, flicks a red cigarette butt and mutters, "Them's the breaks, kid!"
Even my own hang-ups on intimacy and attachment, which therapy and support groups have explored and attempted to remedy, have undoubtably broken hearts along the way. Dating is the brief union of two imperfect beings being caught in one another’s orbit. The odds against it remaining stable are just as astronomical. You stack trauma, conditioning, belief, identity, and imperfect communication on top of one another and the whole thing falls over like a game of Chinese jenga. Yet when it happens, we're genuinely surprised.
In modern dating, where there’s more choice in people than brands of instant noodles, the common refrain from the lovelorn is this: “But I thought it was going so well.”
The thinker thinks and the prover proves, as Robert Anton Wilson would say. Barricading the emotion out of an intimate relationship is like separating the hydrogen and oxygen in water using a piece of cardboard. Our propensity for self-delusion in the realm of love is as infinite as the stars. (I fuckin love space, hey)
But what is vanity but the seducer of reason? Especially when some people out there “love-bomb” – fawn and praise and dote and make one feel like they’re on top of the world, only to disappear or allow their darker side to appear after their mask crumbles. There are so many instances of “but I thought it was going so well” in dating, I’ve lost count. Did I do something wrong? Was it something I said? I did? I didn’t do? One can tie themselves in knots thinking about it.
Though I wouldn’t say I’ve had limited success in dating over the last six years, the sting of rejection even when “I thought it was going so well” has been reduced to an irritation. It’s usually cured by a bout of mindless video gaming or blasting heavy metal at obscene volumes. Is that how I want to feel about it, though? Or is that simply the price of maintaining my sanity?
Music is my life (booooo) and there’s so many songs in praise of love and in lament of breaking up. The consensus is that it’s better to have done it, than not. Even when I put a hole through my Kevlar soul and let someone in, it probably would have hurt more to keep the shields up. No beaming allowed. Even at warp. Even though Starfleet does it all the time. Anyway.
I don’t know what this says about me, but I can only count on one hand (not even the whole hand) the women I thought would become long-term partners over this journey. This is where the notion of things going so well had overwhelming evidence to support it. When you tell someone else how it all turned to shit and they’re like, “are you fucking kidding?” No dude, that happened.
It’s left windows into my heart that have left me blown apart (apologies to Paul Simon). Time marches on and so must my feelings. Surveying a map of a once beloved country that has turned to dust is a fool’s errand. So I tap, tap, tap away, pushing that despairing voice to the side. Even then, that’s over buttering the toast a little bit.
Even so, I blindly stumble into date after date hoping for the best and expecting the worst. I want to believe that sex is more than a spurt of mucus after friction. That it gets me closer to some measure of human truth. That an equal and opposite companion is a compliment to my life. For good, for bad, and just “because.”
But even if it is just a bit of fun, I suppose I’ll have to take comfort in the words of the great philosopher Tommy Wiseau: “That’s life.”
So don't get caught up in yourself, Marky A says. That's when "it" gets you.